Nigel Allan An Appreciation

The retirement of Dr Nigel Allan from the Wellcome Library after twenty-six years as Curator of the Oriental Collections marks the end of an era. In 2004, a very successful exhibition of Asian treasures from the Wellcome Library’s collections, entitled ‘Asia: Body, Mind, Spirit’, was curated by Nigel Allan and a small team of assistants from other major London institutions including Asia House and London University. It was complemented by Pearls of the Orient: Asian Treasures from the Wellcome Library, a volume edited by Allan. These are but two in a succession of professional achievements through which he has brought the Wellcome Library’s Asian collections from a position of obscurity to one of international recognition. Allan’s family roots lie in the west of Scotland. He studied for his first degree at Trinity College Dublin under the distinguished Hebraist, Professor Jacob Weingreen. He was awarded the Jack Morrison B’nai Brith in 1966, elected a Foundation Scholar of the College in 1967 (with a first class degree the following year), and awarded the Moderatorship Prize as the most outstanding undergraduate in the School of Hebrew and Semitic Languages. Following these awards, Allan moved to Glasgow where he took up an advanced study scholarship in the Faculty of Divinity at Glasgow University. This led to the award of the Hincks Memorial Prize in 1972 for his research on the Levitical priesthood in ancient Israel, the subject of his thesis for which he was awarded his doctorate in 1973. Other distinctions included the Lord Fraser of Allandar Bursary (1974) and the Diploma of Library and Information from University College London (1975). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1981. Extensive research work in libraries meant, for Allan, that librarianship was a natural choice of career. He worked initially in the library of Trinity College Dublin, after which he moved to the School of Oriental & African Studies in London. In 1975 he was appointed Assistant Librarian at Wye College, the agricultural faculty of London University. He describes his years at Wye as years sent out to grass, but they gave him useful experience in a science library that stood him in good stead for his next appointment. In 1978 Allan took up the post of Curator of the Oriental Collections at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, on the retirement of Marianne Winder. Over the next twenty-six years, under Allan’s care the Wellcome Library’s Oriental Collections became recognized worldwide as one of the major collections in the West. A series of learned publications, including catalogues, unequalled by any other library during the period, resulted from Allan’s encouragement of the eminent scholars who prepared them. He enthusiastically embraced new technologies and the challenge of representing Oriental scripts in electronic formats, although he stoutly maintained the primacy for scholarship of the hard-copy catalogue. A keen advocate of exhibitions, Allan curated two major exhibitions in the Wellcome Institute, ‘Islamic Science: Crossroad of Cultures’ in 1986 and ‘Ever the Twain Shall Meet’ in 1993. The latter charted the exchange of scientific knowledge between West and East, and had such impact that it was subsequently mounted again at London’s Science Museum. As noted above, he masterminded the ‘Asia: Body, Mind, Spirit’ exhibition, persuading the Wellcome Trust to fund it, the School of Oriental & African Studies to provide its Brunei Gallery