The Role of Scientific Societies
Telling the story of science through the lives of scientists is a well-trodden path. The role that scientific societies and institutions play is not so well recognised in the general imagination, though a moment’s reflection tells us that these organisations play a crucial part in every scientist’s life. They support, nurture and stimulate us, disseminate our research findings to a wider audience and can shape the research itself.
This brief introduction to the British Microcirculation Society Web Archive is not a work of historical scholarship, but aims to provide a summary of the main features of the Society in its almost 50 years of existence.
Beginnings of the British Microcirculation Society
The UK had lagged behind others in seeing the value of a specialist society for microcirculation (the Americans had already established the Microcirculatory Society in 1954 and the First European Conference on Microcirculation had been held in Hamburg in 1960). There were, however, a number of scientists in the UK interested in the microcirculation, among whom was PAG (Xander) Monro, a Cambridge anatomist who was an excellent microscopist and developed a technique for measuring the velocity of red blood cells in the microcirculation. Xander was on the Committee of the European Society for Microcirculation and was asked to organise a meeting to be held in Cambridge in 1966. He required a supporting structure to organise the Conference and conceived the idea of establishing a sister Society in Britain.
Following a letter he wrote to those he knew were interested in the subject, he organised the first meeting of the nascent British Microcirculation Society in 1963. He was elected its Secretary and subsequently held this responsibility for almost 20 years. The Society’s first 21 years are described in the book he wrote for distribution to delegates attending the World Congress on Microcirculation held in Oxford in 1984 (Monro,1984) which is available as a pdf
This archive documents a number of aspects of this history and brings it up to date and anyone interested in deeper study will find the full Archive of the Society in the Modern Medical Archives of the Wellcome Library.
Go to https://library.wellcome.ac.uk/node49.html, then search the catalogue under SA/BMS).