The papers cover some aspects of Head's life in detail, but there are few records of his major achievements in medicine. The records of his work (Section B) are mainly the texts of lectures and papers, but there are some case notes: B2/1 is a volume of reports on the examination of pilgrims to Lourdes which Head undertook in 1895 with the help of George Bull, an English Roman Catholic doctor from Paris; and B3 is a volume of post mortem reports on cases of shingles, which affects the same areas as visceral disease, representing, as Head discovered, the distribution of either a single nerve root or of a single segment of the spinal cord, now known as 'Head's areas'.
The photographs of Head's arm (B9) probably date from his 1905 work on the effects of severing the nerves in his own arm, and several of the papers and cuttings in Sections A4 and B18 comment upon the experiment.
In Section A is the text of an autobiography which Head dictated at some time during his last years, but apparently never completed. It covers only his childhood, schooldays at Charterhouse, his residence in Halle in 1880, his undergraduate days at Trinity College, Cambridge, and his work on the physiology of respiration with Ewald Hering at the German University in Prague from 1884 to 1886. Head's letters to his mother [Hester] (D2) give many more details of the same period, the letters from Halle including diary entries.
Head's and his wife's shared interest in art, architecture, music, literature and drama is recorded in their diaries and scrap books (Section E), and much of their correspondence (D4). Lady Head wrote novels and it is probable that the prose works in Section F are hers.
The restricted life which he and Lady Head lived after his retirement is vividly illustrated in the correspondence between Lady Head and Hester Marsden-Smedley (D6).
