Recently, the name “Marie Stopes” came up on the popular television show, Downton Abbey. On episode 2 of season 5, which aired on PBS on 11 January 2015, Lady Mary is shown holding a book by Marie Stopes and mentions the author as she instructs Anna Bates to run an errand on her behalf. Lady Mary sends her lady’s maid  because the errand apparently would be too indecent for a woman of Lady Mary’s social stature to do herself—the implication is that Mary needs something pertaining to contraception.  This is the second time the television program referenced Stopes, the first time being in the previous season.

Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes (1880 – 1958) was a British author, scientist, and renowned activist for women’s rights and birth control. Her first book, Married Love, first published in 1918, broached the topic of sex and family planning for married couples and was both controversial and influential. Stopes went on to write many additional titles on this topic. She also opened the first family planning clinic in Britain, which both promoted the use of and provided patrons with access to contraception.

Due to the wide success of her first book, Married Love, and because it prompted fans to write to her with questions on the subject, Stopes published Wise Parenthood as a follow-up in November 1918.

Wise Parenthood, with a dark cover and slender appearance, most likely was the book referenced on the January episode of Downton Abbey. The book not only resembles the one Mary held in her hand but its content matches the theme of the episode. Wise Parenthood provides information about different options for birth control, including condoms, withdrawal, and the rhythm method. The book especially  recommends a rubber cervical cap with a quinine pessary, which was a smaller form of the modern diaphragm. In that episode of Downton Abbey, Mary wanted to obtain birth control to use during her liaisons with Tony Foyle, the Viscount Gillingham. While it was never explicitly shown on Downton Abbey, the rubber cervical cap was what likely was in the brown bag Anna brought Lady Mary from the pharmacy, as this was the method of birth control that Stopes most highly recommended in her book.

Last week, Stopes came up yet again.  This time, Anna’s husband, Mr. Bates, confronted his wife with a small cardboard box and the book opened to the title page, clearly showing Married Love. He accused her of trying to avoid bearing a child with him.  We think the producers of Downton Abbey showed the wrong book, because Married Love focused on fertility and planning a family with children, whereas Wise Parenthood explained how to use contraceptive methods as part of family planning.

History & Special Collections for the Sciences, the unit of UCLA Library Special Collections at the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library, holds an extensive collection of works by Marie Stopes, which were purchased from bookseller C.C. Kohler in 1997. The collection contains many different editions of her works as well as titles by Stopes that have been published in a variety of languages. Stopes was a prolific writer on the topic of contraception, but she also wrote on other subjects and published several plays and books of poetry. Volumes from the Marie Stopes collection are available for use in our reading room.

The two-case exhibit about Marie Stopes and Downton Abbey is the second in a series of Winter quarter projects by LSC graduate student intern Hilary McCreery. It will be on view throughout February.

Hilary McCreery
Intern

Russell Johnson
Curator/Librarian
History & Special Collections for the Sciences
UCLA Library Special Collections
speccoll-medsci@library.ucla.edu

There are three alterations to the biosketch:

• The allowed length has been increased to five pages instead of the previous four
• Up to five of the applicant’s most significant contributions to science are to be included in section C. Description can include the impact of each, its context and the role of the applicant. The importance of each contribution can be underscored by up to four peer-reviewed publications, videos, patents, databases or other products.
• A URL to the applicant’s publicly available bibliography may be provided

There are tools to make the formatting easier. At this time, every researcher with a MyNCBI account has access to the MyBibliography and SciENcv tools. If you maintain MyBibliography as you publish and edit the settings to make it “Public,” you will be provided with a URL that you can share on your biosketch.

SciENcv is connected to MyBibliography, and you can directly import the citations you want into section C. To create the new biosketch in SciENcv, click on “Create New Profile.” You will be given three options—to create a profile from scratch, from an external source or from another profile. To minimize the amount of changes you need to make, if you have used SciENcv before, select “from another profile.” If you have an eRA commons account, you can use it as the external source. Both options auto-populate sections of your biosketch. In all cases the type of document that you should create is “New NIH Biosketch.”

As noted above, the main difference in the structure between the NIH biosketch and the new NIH biosketch is section C. In SciENcv, you can add contributions and select citations to support them from your Bibliography. It also allows you to include a link to your complete Bibliography.

For an NIH announcement about the new biosketch use, please, refer to http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-15-032.html#sthash.M2hm6qGM.dpuf

You can find more information on SciENcv in this site: http://rbm.nih.gov/profile_project.htm/home.shtml

For step-by-step guide on how to start using SciENcv sections A, B and D see http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/so13/so13_sciencv.html. For more information on starting a new profile and section C, go here.

<submitted by Vessela Ensberg>

In 2013, the Department of Pediatrics of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA transferred to Library Special Collections (LSC) a scrapbook containing materials related to the silent film actress Marion Davies’ original children’s medical clinic in the 1920s as well as the gift that made the Marion Davies Children’s Center at UCLA possible. Several items from this scrapbook are on display at History & Special Collections for the Sciences, the LSC unit located on the 4^th floor of the Biomedical Library.

The Marion Davies Foundation Children’s Clinic was founded in the Sawtelle area of Los Angeles (now a West Los Angeles neighborhood) in 1926. It was intended to provide services to underprivileged children in the area.

Each year, the Annenberg Community Beach House (at 415 Pacific Coast Highway), which William Randolph Hearst built for Davies the same year she opened her clinic, hosts tours and programs in honor of Marion Davies’ (1897-1961) birthday. This year, the event will be at the Beach House in Santa Monica on Sunday, January 11. For further information about the event and to RSVP, please visit: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/happy-birthday-marion-2015-registration-14737655725

The two-case exhibit is the first in a series of Winter quarter projects by LSC graduate student intern Hilary McCreery Holly. It will be on view throughout January.

Russell Johnson 
Curator/Librarian
History & Special Collections for the Sciences
UCLA Library Special Collections
speccoll-medsci@library.ucla.edu

• Start@Biomed handout for PUBLIC HEALTH
• Finding Articles in the Health Sciences Using PubMed@UCLA
• Finding Science and Social Science Articles Using Web of Science:
  • Searching by Topic and/or Author
  • Cited Reference Searching

Important links:

• Biomedical Library homepage
• Request a Consultation with a Biomedical Librarian
• Off Campus Access to Electronic Resources
• Need help? Contact the Biomedical Library!

<submitted by Bethany Myers>

• Start@Biomed handout for DENTISTRY
• Finding Articles in the Health Sciences Using PubMed@UCLA
• Obtaining Articles from Your Database Search Using UC eLinks

Important links:

• Biomedical Library homepage
• Request a Consultation with a Biomedical Librarian
• Off Campus Access to Electronic Resources
• Need help? Contact the Biomedical Library!

<submitted by Rikke Ogawa>

• Start@Biomed handout for MEDICINE
• Finding Articles in the Health Sciences Using PubMed@UCLA
• Obtaining Articles from Your Database Search Using UC-eLinks

Important links:

• Biomedical Library homepage
• Request a Consultation with a Biomedical Librarian
• Off Campus Access to Electronic Resources
• Need help? Contact the Biomedical Library!

<submitted by Rikke Ogawa>

On September 1^st, 1914, Martha, the last surviving Passenger Pigeon, died at the Cincinnati Zoo. Her remains were put on ice and sent to the Smithsonian Institution, where she resides and is displayed as perhaps the most famous individual member of an extinct species.

“The passenger pigeons or wild pigeon belongs to the order Columbiformes. Its scientific name is Ectopistes migratorius. Ectopistes means ‘moving about or wandering,’ and migratorius means ‘migrating.’ The scientific name carries the connotation of a bird that not only migrates in the spring and fall, but one that also moves about from season to season to select the most favorable environment for nesting and feeding.”

Encyclopedia Smithsonian
http://www.si.edu/encyclopedia_Si/nmnh/passpig.htm

Because the UCLA Library licenses The Birds of North America Online by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the American Ornithologists’ Union, researchers may read David Blockstein’s species-specific monograph, which begins:

“Legendary among ornithologists and laypeople alike as a symbol of staggering abundance on the one hand and of human greed and indifference on the other, the Passenger Pigeon is arguably North America’s best known extinct species.” (Blockstein, David E. 2002. Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius), The Birds of North America Online (A. Poole, Ed.). Ithaca: Cornell Lab of Ornithology; Retrieved from the Birds of North America Online: http://bna.birds.cornell.edu/bna/species/611).

In recent days, numerous news media have recounted the story of Martha (Smithsonian Magazine) and why the once-ubiquitous species (NPR blog, 1 September 2014) went extinct (Audubon magazine, May-June 2014), as well as hopes to resurrect some traits of the species (National Geographic, 31 August 2014). The Wikipedia entry for the term (Passenger pigeon) blossomed with citation-supported details in time for the extinction centenary.

Project Passenger Pigeon, from the Chicago Academy of Sciences’ Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum,  includes news about its film documentary project (From Billions to None) as well as K-12 lesson plans and printable panels for an exhibit (A Shadow Over the Earth: The Life and Death of the Passenger Pigeon) by the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History.

An exhibit at the UCLA Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library for September 2014 starts with early-19^th century depictions by Alexander Wilson and James Audubon, and traces the story of the passenger pigeon’s overwhelming presence to its demise, through books selected from the UCLA Library’s Donald R. Dickey Library of Vertebrate Zoology and Reese and Rosemary Benson Bird Books.

“Open the (Exhibit) Cases” opportunities to view the Wilson and octavo edition Audubon volumes close-up—along with Mark Catesby’s The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1729-1747) and the reprint edition of Audubon’s double elephant folio-sized  Birds of America—will be held in the Biomedical Library lobby at 1:00p.m. on Fridays, September 19 and 26.

This exhibit is part of an occasional series, In the News, which draws on items from the historical collections to inform current events.

Russell Johnson
Curator/Librarian
History & Special Collections for the Sciences
UCLA Library Special Collections
speccoll-medsci@library.ucla.edu

• EndNote and EndNote Basic LibGuide
• PubMed@UCLA EndNote Guide
• CINAHL Plus EndNote Guide
• PsycINFO EndNote Guide
• ISI (Biosis, Web of Science, Global Health, Zoological Record) EndNote Guide

Important links:

• Biomedical Library homepage
• Request a Consultation with a Biomedical Librarian
• Off Campus Access to Electronic Resources
• Need help? Contact the Biomedical Library!

<submitted by Adele Dobry>