Wellcome medical history collection

A long article in tomorrow's Telegraph on an extraordinary collection, part of which is soon going on view at the British Museum:

Pharmacist, entrepreneur and philanthropist, Wellcome built up the world's largest collection of objects related to medical history - more than a million by the time he died in 1936. He had agents all over the world trying to satisfy his lust for new items or subtle variations on things he already had. His acquisitions were so fast, so abundant, that some of them were never unpacked.

The collection was unmanageable in his lifetime and it is equally unmanageable today. No one museum could ever hope to house it. In terms of providing a single educative facility, as he had hoped, it was a glorious failure.

After his death, the items were parcelled out to museums all over the world in awesomely casual fashion; thousands were lost in the process. Small wonder that the administrators of the Wellcome Trust felt they had not only a treasure but also a huge albatross. The 700 or so weird and wonderful objects that are about to go on display at the British Museum will reunite a fraction of the collection in one place but they can only hint at the heroic scale of his endeavour.

Posted by David on June 20, 2003 8:26 PM