Cavanagh, Professor John Barr

Documents on 'Minamata disease', 1958-1977.

This collection was given to the Library of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in 1977 by Professor J B Cavanagh, then Director of the Medical Research Council Group in Applied Neurophysiology. In October 1980 the collection was transferred from Western Manuscripts to the Contemporary Medical Archives Centre.

Collection catalogued by Lesley Hall

It consists of various papers deliberately assembled by Professor Cavanagh on the subject of Minamata Disease, a neurological disorder caused by methyl mercury poisoning of which there was an epidemic at Minamata Bay in Japan in the 1950s due to industrial pollution of the water. It includes a number of original papers accumulated by Dr Douglas McAlpine who conducted the 1958 investigation at Minamata with Dr S Araki of Kumamto, and also later correspondence of Cavanagh with McAlpine himself and others who help to elucidate the nature and causation of the disease in order to discover the various contributions.