Widespread cancer in a 63-year old woman with swelling and dyspnoea: thyroid gland and section digested by yellow carcinoma tumour. Watercolour by Barbara E. Nicholson, 1952.

Ashford, Middlesex, 1952.

1 painting : watercolour, with gouache ; sheet 15 x 10.3 cm

Barbara Evelyn Nicholson (1906 – 1978) trained at the Royal College of Art, graduating in 1923. She began her artistic career as a medical illustrator and was a founder member of the Medical Artists Association, where she is recorded as serving on an exhibition committee in October 1949. By 1951, she had illustrated G.F. Gibberd, A short textbook of midwifery (2nd ed., London: J. & A. Churchill, 1941) and Philip Wiles, Essentials of orthopaedics (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1949). The Medical Artists Association records last list her, in 1951. In the 1950s her focus moved to botanical subjects and from the late 1950s – 1970s she was a prolific botanical illustrator.

Typed accompanying note with patient history includes radiograph observation of mass at hilum of left lung. Following the thyroidectomy, necessary to relieve tracheal compression, neurological signs and severe headaches developed. Post-mortem finds showed there was a carcinoma of the bronchus with metastases in brain, thyroid and adrenal glands Bears number: 282/1952

The watercolours and pen and ink drawings held by Wellcome Collection were painted by Barbara Nicholson at Ashford Hospital, Ashford, Middlesex, between 1946 and 1951, at the request of the surgeon Norman Matheson.

Wellcome Collection 34499i

Presented to the Wellcome Institute Library in 1987 by Ashford Postgraduate Medical Centre, as part of a collection of medical illustrations by Barbara E. Nicholson.