Illustrated AIDS Awareness cards (1993)
The Archives Service is coming to the end of the project to catalogue, preserve and make accessible the HIV/AIDS collections held at the School. This project is funded by the Wellcome Trust through their Research Resources in Medical History programme. The original project was to catalogue six collections which have been deposited with the Archives since 2004, however we received another collection in early 2014 and received some additional funding to include this in the project.
To mark World AIDS Day, we are profiling some of these collections which are available for the research community to access.
The AIDS Social History Programme collection was created as a documentary archive for the project that ran at the School from 1988 to 1994. The project was run by Professor Virginia Berridge and Dr Philip Strong and financed by the Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust, its chief purpose was to research and write the social history of AIDS in the UK as it happened, concentrating on policy making and the voluntary and medical sectors. The programme published two publications in this period including the seminal ‘AIDS in the UK: The making of policy, 1981-1994′ by Virginia Berridge, Oxford University Press, 1996.
A few examples of sexual health public education publications from the UK Higher Education Authority (HEA) (c.1988-1989)
The structure of the archives has been largely retained within its original order that was composed by the programme’s archivist, Janet Foster. Some of the original archives were not retained but the papers include large sections on the UK Voluntary sectors, Medical Research Council, UK Department of Health and Higher Education Authority (HEA) and papers ordered by subject such as ‘Drugs’ and ‘UK blood transfusion services’.
The papers contain an exciting mixture of documentation including: AIDS awareness leaflets, adverts, booklets and annual reports from voluntary sector; Department of Health press releases, minutes and reports; medical and sociological reports on AIDS in the United Kingdom and Europe; United Kingdom parliamentary sessions on HIV/AIDS related questions and also illustrated AIDS Awareness information cards produced in the United States.
To access this collection, please contact the Archives at archives@lshtm.ac.uk
