I am writing Dictionary of National Biography articles about a First World War poet, who suffered shell-shock, and the pioneering psychiatrist, D R Langbill, who treated him. The poet, Alfred Bowen, was a casualty in the battle of Loos and was treated at Craiglockhart Hospital and then the Royal Edinburgh Asylum. In the 1930s he was treated for another complaint at a private sanatorium in Kirriemuir run by Langbill. Firstly, where are the records of Craiglockhart and the REA?

Ms Vyst's reply: Craiglockhart and other military hospitals were run by the War Office and only a representative sample of World War One medical records were preserved (mainly for statistical purposes) and passed to The National Archives (TNA) in Kew. Luckily for you the only Scottish military hospital whose records were kept was Craiglockhart, and the admission and discharge records in TNA can be found under the reference MH106/Craiglockhart Hospital. More information on the contents of MH106 can be found in Norman Holding's More Sources of World War I Army Ancestry (Federation of Family History Societies, 1991) and on the TNA website www.nationalarchives.gov.uk. Napier University has a collection relating to the Craiglockhart War Poets (see http://nulis.napier.ac.uk/SpecialCollections/CraigCon/warpoets/introduction.htm). It includes volumes of poetry by Siegfried Sassoon and other contemporary poets, biographies and published letters, information regarding individuals who had connections with Craiglockhart, anthologies of poetry and prose and copies of The Hydra magazine produced by and for the patients, which includes verse, stories and cartoons by patients along with reports of lectures, meetings, etc. After the War some patients continued to need treatment and were transferred to local psychiatric hospitals such as the Royal Edinburgh Asylum. A good starting point when checking whether patient records survive for the institution and time period in which you are interested is the Finding the Right Clinical Notes database on the Lothian Health Services website (at www.clinicalnotes.ac.uk/index.html). This can also be used to see whether the patient records of a particular clinician, such as Langbill, survive. The database is not complete, so it is worth trying local authority archives, other NHS archives, the National Library of Scotland and so on, or indeed the hospital itself, if you draw a blank with the database. Many hospitals have some personnel records relating to doctors and nurses but they tend not to contain much detail.

Won't the patient records be closed as confidential?
Reply. At present the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act has an exemption (section 38), whereby the health records of deceased individuals are exempt (i.e. closed) for 100 years from the year after the date of the last recorded entry in the respective record. In practice, whilst there is no obligation on an archive or institution to allow access to patient records within this period, most operate under the circular - Guidance for the Retention and Destruction of Health Records - issued in 1993 as a National Health Service in Scotland Management Executive letter, NHS MEL(1993)152, which lays down a 75 year closure for patient records, except in the case of minors which have a 100 year closure. For records held within the closure period you will have to apply for permission to see them and your application will be considered. Requests to NHS archives will be judged on their merits and on the nature of the records concerned and access is not guaranteed.

What about the private clinic in Kirriemuir? Will records survive for that, or for other private clinics run by Langbill, or for private nursing homes that Bowen sought care in?
Reply. These were effectively private businesses and in the survival of records is dependent on several factors. The records of those few nursing homes which flourished long enough to be acquired by local authorities or taken into the NHS may now be found in the relevant local authority or health service archive. If any remained private businesses, the records may or may not have found there way to an archive (again try Lothian Health Services Archive’s Finding the Right Clinical Notes database and local authority and university archives in the areas concerned). If the clinic or nursing home is still in business you could, of course try it direct. Otherwise you might contact the Business Archive Council for Scotland, which surveys business records in private hands (the BACS website is at www.archives.gla.ac.uk/bacs/default.html.

I've got lots of published information on Langbill, but where should I look for more definitive information about his qualifications and career?
Reply. For the bare bones of his professional record consult the Medical Register and the Medical Directory (both published annually). The Register resulted from the 1858 Medical Act, which required all doctors practising in Great Britain to be properly qualified and registered, and empowered the Registrar to write to them and, if no reply was received within 6 months, to remove them from the Register. The Act doesn't say how frequently he was to write but it seems reasonable to assume that he was sending out regular letters, possibly even annually. The Register gives details of the doctor’s basic qualification and address. The Directory has additional details, such as postgraduate qualifications, posts held and articles published, but was based on voluntary returns, so do not rely on it to prove the date of a move from one area to another, as several years could pass before a doctor updated the information in his entry. In case he was a licentiate of one of Scotland's Royal Colleges, contact the archivist of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, and the Librarian of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

R K Vyst is, in reality, the amalgam of several Scottish archivists and researchers, and cannot enter into specific correspondence. Contributions, in the form of queries and suggested answers are warmly welcomed. In writing the above article, Ms Vyst received invaluable help from Alison Gardiner (Lothian Health Services Archive), Fiona Watson (Northern Health Services Archives) and Carol Parry (Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow).