![]() Hopefully, this new interface will entice interested researchers to visit the site in person. Although the online resource does not yet capture the entire collection, this new digital catalogue nevertheless represents an impressive sampling of the repository’s holdings: including company reports, photographs, letters, advertisements and staff magazines. This digital cataloguing is combined with a systemic in-house conservation programme, preserving the collection-estimated to be over half a million items in total-for future generations. 3 At the point of writing, 15,000 records have been added to the online catalogue, with a further 10,000 records expected in 2018. While the archive has been in existence at the Boots main Nottingham site since the 1990s, the recent launch, in May 2017, of phase one of the Wellcome-funded WBA online catalogue provides an opportune moment to introduce this exciting resource to social medical historians. The Walgreens Boots Alliance Archive (WBA) 2 challenges these preconceptions and provides a unique window into the social and cultural history of medicine and pharmacy, as well as unusual insights into the commercial development of medicine and pharmacy over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 1 Still, company archives risk being easily overlooked by social medical historians, as these resources can become pigeonholed as too self-serving of the businesses they represent, difficult to access, or thought to be too dry in terms of their holdings, hosting boxes of lacklustre accounting minutiae and turgid annual reports, rather than rich social and cultural detail. Recent work by Jane Hand, for example, utilising the Unilever archive, or work by pharmaceutical historians such as Stuart Anderson, Viviane Quirke and others, informing research on nineteenth- and twentieth-century pharmaceutical developments, international competition and overseas production. It is fair to say that company archives have not been particularly popular in most social medical historians’ archival explorations, although there have been some excellent exceptions to this general trend. Traditionally the sub-discipline relies on a combination of clinical records, doctor and patient diaries, biographies, official documentation and oral testimony. The social history of medicine is a fruitful means of investigating the lives of people in relation to their bodies and wider societal structures.
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