Feature: Living and Dying - a Wellcome Trust-funded exhibition at the British Museum
10 February 2009. By Penny Bailey
In 2003, 'Medicine Man', an exhibition of around 700 objects from Sir Henry Wellcome's original collection - now on permanent display in Wellcome Collection - opened at the British Museum, where it was shown from 26 June until 16 November 2003.
During the same year, the British Museum - with around 30 000 objects from Wellcome's collection - approached the Wellcome Trust with the idea of opening a new, permanent gallery.
The idea was to create a new exhibition that would bring together cultural items from all over the globe. The exhibition would focus on the diverse ways in which different cultures have sought to maintain health and wellbeing through the ages.
This cross-cultural approach was an innovative step for the British Museum, which has tended to divide the world spatially into galleries devoted to Egypt, Roman Britain, Greece, Ancient Turkey, India and so on.
The result was 'Living and Dying', funded by a £5.4m grant from the Wellcome Trust, which opened as a permanent exhibition in The Wellcome Trust Gallery at the British Museum, on 3 November 2003, just a few days before 'Medicine Man' came to an end.
Drawing on the British Museum's outstanding ethnography collections (including items from Wellcome's collection), 'Living and Dying' illustrates how people throughout the world deal with the tough realities of life, including drought, flood, pollution, earthquakes, terror, disease, grief, hunger and loss. It also investigates people's reliance on relationships with each other, animals, spirits and the earth on which they live.
These themes are illustrated using items as diverse as shields, festival masks, wooden statues to protect crops, carved fertility gods and animal spirit helpers, offering vessels, a wedding dress and a shawl to promote fertility and decorated textiles to protect children.
Alongside these ancient items is a statue by modern sculptor Geer Steyn, in the centre of the gallery, and a specially-commissioned art installation, 'Cradle to Grave' by Pharmacopoeia. 'Cradle to Grave' looks at the life-cycle of a pill-consuming person, juxtaposing the pills he or she is likely to take at any point in their life (antibiotics as a child, statins as an older person) with photographs of ordinary people and families of that age.
As such, the exhibition reflects Sir Henry Wellcome's original aim to “bring together a collection of historical objects illustrating the development of the art and science of healing throughout the ages”, and gives it a contemporary slant.