Insatiable curiosity
Mark Irving
Medicine Man: The Forgotten Museum of Henry Wellcome British Museum until 16 November
There is a glass cabinet on the quiet staircase leading up to the 4th floor of the Science Museum, away from the ubiquitous shiny interactive displays and tactile rubber matting, that tells of a very curious mind. It contains, among other things, several shrunken heads; the aluminium medicine chest used by Captain Scott, complete with phials and labels; the skeleton of a foetus, all four inches of it; several porcelain fancy figures; Japanese lacquer dishes; some anatomical drawings by the great antiseptic pioneer Lister. The cabinet serves to prepare visitors for the chaotic character of the galleries ahead.
Housing several thousand objects that once belonged to the pharmaceutical entrepreneur Henry Wellcome, these rooms are an exercise in taxonomical incontinence. Egyptian votary offerings elbow Javanese sculptures, quaint reconstructions of dental surgeries, complete with startled mannequins in bad frocks, plead for your attention alongside dried human remains and sinister medical instruments. It is nothing like the rest of the museum and absolutely wonderful. For all the terrible Seventies-era dark brown hessian walls, the bad floor tiling and the strange inconsistencies in the labelling — several of these include a short, often despairing condition report on the state of the object categorised, as if the whole project of collecting was a way of measuring decay and thus time itself — the place reminds you of a period when being curi
ous about everything was not suspect but something to be positively encouraged.
These are the kind of galleries children happily lose themselves in, since they actively feed the imagination while confusing it at the same time. It's as if someone has put the Encyclopaedia Britannica through a giant blender. If you are a modern curator, this is not good news, since verified taxonomies and clear juxtapositions are more correct. On my recent visit, I watched as a small section of the galleries was being closed off in preparation for what was described to me by one of the curators as a 'rethink' of the galleries by the current regime. This will doubtless require the expunging of items that sit awkwardly between the strict definitions of medical history, anthropology, ethnography, zoology, art — objects of dubious status and age that will find themselves relegated to a backroom shelf.
Born in 1853 of American pioneer farming stock. Wellcome rose from being an assistant in his uncle's small Midwest pharmacy to being captain of the world's leading pharmaceutical company within a few decades. It was his insatiable curiosity about the sources of drugs — his accounts of his travels to Ecuador in search of the Cinchona tree, the bark of which provides pure quinine, brought him early fame — that formed a loose but significant chain of consequences. He wanted to know about the places these chemicals came from, the people who understood them and the artefacts they created to voice their belief in their magic powers. This fed what soon became a collecting mania, one that linked non-Western knowledge about the body and its ailments to the known discoveries of seemingly more sober science. Physical health was his Holy Grail: while he fiddled with glass test tubes and peered at malarial microbes on his floating custom-built laboratory on the River Nile, scores of workers would be scraping the soil at his favourite Sudanese archaeological sites nearby. It was as if Wellcome sought to construct a formula for the sum of human knowledge from the whispers emanating from the objects under his scrutiny.
Some of Wellcome's most spectacular and unusual possessions have been gathered together for Medicine Man at the British Museum. Most of these items have come from the Science Museum's gal leries, supplemented by holdings from the Wellcome Trust's own vaults and the Fowler Museum of Cultural History in Los Angeles. Bearing in mind the extent of Wellcome's mania for collecting, it is no surprise to hear of the anger of his wife, Sync Barnado, the philanthropist's daughter, who loathed accompanying her husband to yet another worthless dig. More than 20 years younger than him, it seems she was not encouraged to assist in the shaping of the collection itself and was directed instead to care for their only son, Mounteney. Nine years into the unhappy marriage, she started a scandalous affair with Somerset Maugham that ultimately led to her divorce from Wellcome. The two men could not have been more different in temperament: Wellcome valued the additive picture of human suffering and genius provided by his glamorously diverse collection, while Maugham was able to communicate in exquisite, often painful detail the relationships between people, things and the exotic itself.
Put bluntly, Wellcome never made the connections tight enough. This is why it's more accurate to speak of Wellcome's hoard of objects rather than a collection per se. Collections are supposed to have a shape, even if it slips here and there. This was an avalanche of old bones, chastity belts, stethoscopes, prosthetic limbs and dusty notebooks. Now dispersed throughout the world in various institutions, these objects have become quaint curiosities. For all its corporate incoherence, Wellcome's assortment of curios underlines the appeal of remaining a generalist in a world where blinkered specialists rule.
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