Renal cancer in 68-year old woman with prominent abdominal lymph node invasion: anterior and posterior sections showing hanging tumours consuming and digesting kidneys. Watercolour by Barbara E. Nicholson, 1949.

Ashford, Middlesex, 1949.

1 painting : watercolour, with pencil, black ink and highlighted with gouache ; sheet 27.2 x 36.9 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.

<...> p<ost>-m<ortem>, 57/49, anterior view, posterior view Lettering inscribed in pencil as key, typed accompanying note details patient history with reference to metastases and carcinoma Bears number: 143/1949

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 33027i

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.