The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 279 No 7459 p21-22
7 July 2007

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A Wellcome place to visit in London

With a list of treasures that any freak show promoter would give his right arm for, the Wellcome Collection opened last month. Lin-Nam Wang (on the staff of The Journal) reports

The legacy of pharmaceutical entrepreneur Henry Solomon Wellcome was revealed at the end of June when a £30m cultural venue was opened at the former headquarters of the Wellcome Trust in Euston Road, London.

Billed as “Medicine, life and art”, it contains two permanent galleries (“Medicine man” and “Medicine now”) and a temporary gallery, in addition to housing the Wellcome Library, Europe’s largest resource for the study of the history of medicine.

“The Wellcome Trust understands the power of using the arts to engage audiences around issues of human health. The Wellcome Collection combines our experiences with the vision and legacy of Sir Henry Wellcome to provide a contemporary space that enables people to explore the connections between art and medicine in dramatic and challenging ways,” says Clare Matterson, director of medicine, society and history at the Wellcome Trust.

Visitors to the neoclassical-style building are greeted by what appears to be a Renaissance marble figure but this is, in fact, Marc Quinn’s thought-provoking sculpture of Silvia Petretti, who is HIV positive. The figure is made of wax and efavirenz, the non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor Petretti takes. It is an impressive start.

In terms of art, the collection boasts big names, from Leonardo da Vinci to Andy Warhol but, perhaps, what is most remarkable is the bizarre array of objects, connected to health, medicine and well-being, which gives an insight into the life and ambitions of Henry Wellcome.

As a child, Wellcome worked in his uncle’s drugstore and by the age of 16 years, he was selling his own homemade invisible ink. Born to a farmer and adventist minister, he graduated from the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy then worked as drug company representative. In 1880, Wellcome came to the UK and co-founded Burroughs Wellcome & Co, which eventually became Glaxo-Wellcome. The huge fortune he made allowed him, among other things, to collect medical, cultural and anthropological objects from around the world, his vision being to create a “museum of man”.

Grotesques and curiosities

To say that Wellcome had a passion for collecting is an understatement. From what can be seen, it was an obsession and in the last four decades of his life, he gathered more than a million objects. “Medicine man” houses just a fraction of this extraordinary collection.

It is a freakish assortment of objects, from bullet extractors to anti-masturbation devices. I was amused to see a pair of Claxton earcaps “for correcting and preventing the disfigurement of outstanding ears”.

For those who appreciate the gruesome (the Wellcome Collection considers its gallery contents to be most suitable for visitors aged over 13 years), there is a Peruvian mummy (naturally preserved), tattooed human skin and a shrunken head. There are also collections of amputation saws, obstetric forceps and prosthetics.

And those who are star-struck by historical figures might enjoy seeing Darwins’ walking stick, Nelson’s razor, Napoleon’s toothbrush or Florence Nightingale’s moccasins. The collection even owns a lock of King George III’s hair, containing traces of arsenic.

Despite the austerity of its heavy walnut walls, the gallery has been designed to be interactive and visitors are encouraged to open drawers (look for an etching by Francisco Goya) and panels to find out more. A wall of paintings includes two set in pharmacies as well as a portrait of Daniel Lambert (1770–1809) who, at over 30 stone, was then the fattest man in England.

It is clear, however, that Wellcome was not an art collector — some of these paintings are not great and, I suspect, they were acquired for what they depict rather than their beauty. Likewise, it has been suggested that the print of the only etching by Vincent Van Gogh (of his doctor Paul Gachet) on display was probably bought because it sheds light on a doctor-patient relationship.

Wellcome died in 1936 and that is where “Medicine man” ends. There is a stark contrast between the darkness of this gallery and the brightness of the next, “Medicine now”, which combines pieces of contemporary art with interactive devices, such as “sit down to hear” chairs (sitting allows the visitor to hear the views of different doctors, scientists and patients).

According to curator Steve Cross, “Medicine now” attempts to look at how changes in science and medicine affect the world and how changes in culture affect science and medicine. It looks at what it is like to live with medicine in the 21st century from different views.

Genetics research is at the cutting edge of medicine and in one section of the gallery the first attempt to print out the human genome (118 volumes), as well as fleece and droppings from Dolly the sheep, can be found. There are also sections focusing on obesity and malaria. This pairing is apt because they contrast old and new, rich and poor, and different parts of the world, Mr Cross says. These are also areas in which the Wellcome Trust funds research. (Five in 10 of the most cited researchers in malaria are Wellcome Trust funded. It was also researchers from the trust who identified the FTO [fat mass and obesity associated] gene variant; the clearest link yet to obesity risk in the general population.)

Since 2002, the trust has awarded £5.5m to “original and imaginative arts projects inspired by biomedical science”. Some of the contemporary art works in the gallery are dull (eg, Mauro Peruchetti’s four-foot urethane “jelly baby”, which is meant to be a metaphor for cloned humans) but others have a likeable quirkiness (eg, “Mosquito coast”, by Alistair Mackie, is an atlas of the world which, on closer inspection, is drawn out of dead mosquitos).

Others still have obviously been created with careful research. For example, “Veil of tears” by Susie Freeman and Liz Lee, tries to portray the burden of malaria in the first five years of life for a child in Kenya. The installation is made of mosquito nets, tiny numbered mosquitos (representing the number of infective mosquito bites a child will have had by the age of five years), blood films, chloroquine and an animatronic (breathing!) baby. A downside of the gallery, however, is that much of the detail is left unexplained.

Temporary exhibition

The first temporary exhibition of the Wellcome Collection, “The heart”, mixes the historical and contemporary. It takes a fascinating look at the heart in medicine and its symbolism in different cultures, bringing such items as a perfusion machine and the Egyptian book of the dead together in one gallery. The show includes da Vinci drawings, which illustrate how the artist used dissection to try to understand how the heart works. Dissection was a taboo subject in da Vinci’s time and his drawings are surrounded by notes disguised in the mirror writing he used to keep his work secret.

Other highlights include anatomical tables from mid-17th century Padua, on to which a whole human venous system and a whole human arterial system have been mounted and varnished. “One of the things that strikes me about them … is just how strong the aesthetics of these objects are. It is difficult not to see them, partly through the eyes of Damien Hirst — the sense in which there is some surreal art in these objects as well as the teaching tools that they were created as,” says Ken Arnold, Wellcome Trust head of public programmes.

It is clear that the Wellcome Collection is aiming to offer visitors a radical insight into the human condition. For example, the exhibition will shortly include a heart donated by a 22-year-old patient, following transplant surgery, who will visit it when it is put on display alongside that of a sperm whale. In addition, events supporting the exhibition are to include the first interactive broadcast of heart valve reconstruction surgery from a UK hospital.

The Wellcome Collection holds too much to talk about — “Medicine man” alone contains over 500 objects and there are several satellite exhibits in the building — but it offers something that every pharmacist will find interesting. Well worth a visit.