Wellcome Foundation Archive

10 March 2004

Significant progress is being made on the cataloguing of the Wellcome Foundation Ltd archive, helping to illuminate not only the early development of the Wellcome pharmaceutical company but also the wider history of the pharmaceutical industry in the UK.

The records of the Wellcome Foundation Ltd, and of its predecessors, were transferred to the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine from GlaxoSmithKline in 2001. One strand of the cataloguing project is focusing on documents relating to particular people - some from the top echelons of academia, such as Nobel Prize winners Gertrude Elion and George Hitchings, others the humble secretaries, sales reps and maintenance staff, many of whom worked in the organisation for many decades.

A second focus is loose marketing material produced in the 1950s-1990s. In the 1880s, Burroughs Wellcome & Co. was the first company to use product information inserted into the packaging of products, and this innovative spirit is apparent in later materials. This leaflet show how products were targeted at different markets. Calpol was marketed to the 'Loving Mother', for example, while Actidit, an antihistamine for children, was packaged accordingly. Actifed, a product for colds and flu, was the official product on Apollo and the space shuttle, a fact exploited in its marketing materials, which showed images of a spaceman walking on the moon.

External links

• Wellcome Foundation Ltd Archive: Cataloguing project details and updates