The London Broadcasting Company (LBC) and Independent Radio News (IRN) Archive

UK commercial radio was formally launched in October 1973 whenLBC went on air. Its sister station, IRN, began providing anews service at the same time for the growing number of ‘IndependentLocal Radio’ stations. During the period 1973–1996these two organisations assembled an archive of over 7,000 reel-to-reeltapes which now represent the largest commercial radio archivein Britain. For historians of the media, and of the twentiethcentury more generally, the collection is a rich and variedsource of social, cultural and political evidence. Media historians,including historians of journalism, can hear examples of a morepopulist and innovative style of reporting (or ‘reportage’)than was to be heard on the BBC. For the first time the phone-inwas an integral part of the schedule and a more opinionatedstyle of presentation was pioneered by Brian Hayes and others.The archive, soon to be digitised and made available online,contains a radio history of the period which started slightlybefore Margaret Thatcher's election as Leader of the ConservativeParty and finished a few years after the end of premiership.New clips, current affairs series like Decision Makers, parliamentarydebates (made by the LBC parliamentary unit) and phone-ins allcovered the major news stories of the time. There are, to takea notable example, 62 tapes on the Falklands War including 778individual news items. The archive is an important and hithertolargely neglected source for future historians of the period.     

Applying forensic techniques to interpret cranial fracture patterns in an archaeological specimen

This paper presents some of the basic principles of bone fracture physics and outlines characteristics used by forensic anthropologists to distinguish gunshot trauma from blunt trauma. The fracture pattern of a cranium from a historic cemetery in Memphis, Tennessee provides an example of how the mechanism of trauma could be misinterpreted. The pattern of the perimortem fractures is indicative of gunshot trauma with a bullet entering one side of the vault and impacting the opposite side. Identification of radiating fractures, concentric heaving fractures, and observation of the direction of bevel on the fractured surfaces are essential for interpretation of the mechanism that produced the injury.     

Walter Moxon, MD, FCRP (1836-1886): the cerebro-vascular system and the syndrome of "congestion of the brain": an analysis of his 1881 Croonian Lectures

Walter Moxon, MD, FRCP lived, practiced medicine, taught and wrote in the mid- to late- nineteenth-century Victorian England, mostly at Guy's Hospital, London. He was widely informed in the "Art of Physic," writing on a range of issues from cerebral lateralization of articulate speech to angina pectoris. The present paper will trace briefly his contributions to the newly discovered asymmetry of articulate speech in the left frontal lobe (1866) and will in more detail trace and analyze his 1881 Croonian Lectures at the Royal College of Physicians on a medical shibboleth referred to as "congestion of the brain." In a series of ingenious and rhetorically creative arguments with imaginative tropes, demonstrations, evolutionary accounts of cognition and blood metabolism for human/biped cognition, and cogent citations from the medical literature of the day, Moxon skillfully instructs his medical audience against the misleading notion of cerebral "congestion" as an underlying pathology for cognitive, motor, and sensory deficits seen in the clinic. In so doing, he provides the medical community with an in-depth glimpse at the circulatory system, its flow dynamics, and how they serve to meet the cognitive, motor, and sensory demands of upright bipedal man.