Just after the turn of the last century, a strange phenomenon occurred in London’s art and book dealing world. Anonymous adverts for historical books and artefacts began to appear in newspapers and magazines such as ‘Bazaar’ and ‘Exchange and Mart’, and nondescript-looking men started to visit sales rooms, where they spent large sums of money on behalf of various mysterious and untraceable buyers. One of these, a company called Epworth and Co, cited an office address in Newman Street. However, a dealer who tracked down the address was mystified to discover, on peering through the letterbox, that he was looking at an empty room.

A clue as to what was going on turned up when an unwanted item was returned wrapped in paper bearing the name of the pharmaceutical company, Burroughs Wellcome and Co. Henry Wellcome, sole owner of the company since the recent death of his partner, Silas Burroughs, was starting to amass one of the world’s largest museum collections.

Wellcome’s original intention was to hold a ‘Historical Medical Exhibition’ in London in 1904 to celebrate his firm’s first quarter-century. However, the collecting rapidly gathered a momentum of its own, and he abandoned the idea of an exhibition to focus on building up a ‘Historical Medical Museum’ instead.

It was another nine years before the fruits – or some of the fruits – of this frenetic collecting would be exhibited to an external audience. In a circular sent round before his museum’s opening exhibition in 1913, Wellcome explained that he wanted to “bring together a collection of historical objects illustrating the development of the art and science of healing throughout the ages.” Yet the collection he actually amassed went far beyond this remit. As well as artefacts specific to medicine and healing, it included large quantities of weapons, bales of fabric, furniture, ancient cooking implements, porcelain, glassware, statues, coins, medals, ‘objets d’art’, even torture instruments. He also acquired a sample of the hair of various historical figures including George Washington, George III, Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington - all undeniably noteworthy characters, but their relevance to medicine is not immediately apparent.

As a result, the collection – which totalled over one million books and objects on his death in 1936 – was bewildering in its scope and scale, and has sometimes been criticised for lacking purpose or coherence. The shroud of secrecy under which the collecting was conducted, probably to avoid exploitation by dealers, and statements he himself made, such as “Never tell anyone what you are going to do until you’ve done it”, only served to obfuscate further.

A holistic view

To understand it, Wellcome’s collection needs to be considered in the light of his particular view of medicine – a view that was prevalent among academics at the time. He summed it up when he said, “The distinctive attribute of all living creatures is the preservation of life, and the great majority of the activities of all living creatures are concerned unwittingly with this process.” Seen from this perspective, medicine is simply one of the essential things we do to ensure the survival of our species, and is therefore hard to disentangle from the provision of food, a mate, protection from the elements – even defence against other people. Hence the arms and armour section of the collection, which, incidentally, acquired a practical role in World War II, when its old service rifles were offered to the Home Guard.

To Wellcome, therefore, the history of medicine was a smaller branch of the great new nineteenth-century discipline of anthropology. His passion for anthropology helps explain another idiosyncrasy in his collection aside from its diversity: the amount of duplicates it contained. There were sometimes hundreds of versions of one particular object, yet of the 1500 microscopes in the collection, for example, only 50 had any real historic interest.

The discipline of anthropology at the time was strongly influenced by the evolutionist belief that man progressed through various stages, from savagery to civilisation, and Wellcome applied this thinking to humankind’s material culture. To him, objects represented ideas, and each subtle change in the progression of an object reflected human progress. By collecting enough objects, it was therefore possible to reconstruct the entire history of mankind – to“illustrate in our collection the whole story of life… demonstrating by means of objects… every notable step in the evolution and progress from the first germ of life up to the fully developed man of today.”

Wellcome intended this ‘Museum of Man’ to be strictly a place of research, not the education or edification of members of the general public. Objects were classified into species and genera, just like the plants and animals in the Natural History Museum, then sequenced chronologically to show “the passing on from one stage of progress to another of particular objects”. To complete displays of surgical instrument sequences, for instance, hundreds of single items were removed from their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century boxed sets and grouped together to form timelines. The first exhibition in 1913 featured displays depicting the development of the toothbrush, forceps and gas mask, from their origins to the latest models.

His ‘scientific’ approach underlies another unusual feature of Wellcome’s collecting: the sacrifice of aesthetic quality in favour of subject matter. The famous van Gogh etching of his doctor, Dr Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, is one such example. It was bought purely for the ‘scientific’ purpose in the piecing together of history: its beauty and value as a work of art by one of the great impressionists were merely incidental.

Man out of time

The ideas and methods that informed Wellcome’s collecting – highly contemporary when he began – soon became out of date. By the late 1920s, anthropologists were venturing into the field, rather than sitting in museums piecing history together from vast amounts of data. Indeed, interest in material culture was waning even before Wellcome began to collect. Wellcome stuck to his original methodology and he and his museum failed to move forward with the times.

This stasis in academic terms can probably be explained by the fact that Wellcome was not himself an academic. The man who set up the first research laboratories linked to a pharmaceutical company in the UK, provided a floating laboratory to carry research teams to inaccessible regions along the Nile, and invented aerial photography by flying a camera on a kite in Sudan in 1913, was first and foremost a pioneer – a doer, rather than a thinker.

And today history has come full circle to show that even in his ‘scientific’ pursuits Wellcome was, in some respects, a man ahead of his time. His ‘en masse’ collecting methods echo in the vaults of the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew, in the millions of insects yet to be identified at the Natural History Museum, and in the Internet databases listing every base pair in the human genome.

His holistic approach to his museum can also be seen in modern museums and art galleries. The Tate has galleries devoted to themes of ‘Body’ and ‘Space’, for example, rather than grouping items by artist or period. And Re:source, the Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries, is actively encouraging collaborations that highlight the manifold links between different types of object – artefacts, books, pictures, manuscripts, and papers, until recently kept apart in separate institutions.

Wellcome failed to make any provision for his collection in his will, presenting his Trustees with a major headache. Much to the sadness of his museum staff, his vast collection was gradually dismantled. Objects deemed tangential to the history of medicine were dispersed across the globe as far as Australia and Zimbabwe – a diaspora that culminated in its move to the Science Museum on permanent loan in the 1970s.

‘Medicine Man: The forgotten museum of Henry Wellcome’, an exhibition that opened at the British Museum in June 2003, reunites 700 of these scattered objects to offer a renewed glimpse of Wellcome’s epic endeavour. Mass displays of glass eyes, surgical amputation knives and forceps recall the scale of the Wellcome’s collecting and his evolutionary purpose of reconstructing every stage in humankind’s development by means of objects. In its celebration of the corporeal nature of the human condition – the irresistible cycle of birth, maturity, and death, and the myriad ways that different people at different times have sought to combat disease, stifle pain and outwit death – ‘Medicine Man’ recaptures the essential spirit of the original collection.

The Wellcome Building at 183 Euston Road will become the new home to a permanent showcase of the ‘Medicine Man’ exhibition in April 2007.

Related links

• Details of the fully illustrated book of the ‘Medicine Man’ exhibition
• History of Henry Wellcome’s collections