In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Medicine Man: The Forgotten Museum of Henry Wellcome
  • James M. Edmonson
Ken Arnold and Danielle Olsen , eds. Medicine Man: The Forgotten Museum of Henry Wellcome. London: British Museum Press, 2003. 397 pp. Ill. £19.99 (paperbound, 0-7141-2794-9).

In this beautiful book, scholars assess the legacy of Henry Wellcome's vast collection of artifacts of medicine and medical belief. The sheer magnitude and range of Wellcome's collection are daunting, while his intent was never entirely clear. In one sense, it is a story of colossal failure, for his "Museum of Man" remained an unrealized project. In 1977 the Wellcome Trustees placed the collection on permanent loan to the Science Museum, and to others thus fell the task of sorting through a million or so objects. However, it is perhaps unfair to dismiss Wellcome's venture as a grand folly, for his compulsive collecting brought together a wonderful panoply of objects and images pertaining to health and medicine. This book, prepared as a companion to the British Museum exhibition Medicine Man, shows us how this collection came to be, what it was intended to achieve, and what its fate has been. It presents an important medical museological tale that until now has been understudied and poorly appreciated.

The editors, exhibition curators Ken Arnold and Danielle Olsen, have brought together six authors, each with a different perspective upon Wellcome's "forgotten museum." Interspersed between chapters one finds visual essays featuring marvelous color photographs of objects and images in the collections. So much here is new and visually intriguing, a fresh and welcome departure from the clichéd iconography that usually adorns medical history works. Ghislaine Lawrence, medical curator of the Science Museum, offers an updated version of a piece she wrote on the history and purpose of Wellcome's museum, while Frances Knight looks at the ephemera, manuscripts, and rare books that today comprise the holdings of the unmatched Wellcome Library. Chris Gosden of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford provides an account of Henry Wellcome's archaeological [End Page 342] ventures in the Sudan, and a perceptive look at how "we all build our social lives through objects" (p. 182). John Mack, keeper of ethnography at the British Museum, shows that Wellcome embraced a progressivistic Darwinian view of anthropology, an approach that was already dated and soon to be repudiated. John Pickstone, professor of history (Manchester) with a keen interest in medical technology, looks at the Wellcome collections anew, to reveal how they can illustrate four "ways of knowing": natural history, analysis, experimentation, and human meanings. The final and perhaps most engaging chapter is by Ruth Richardson, a historian and associate at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine. Richardson takes us on a stroll through the Wellcome "stores" (British for collection storage) and evokes the sense of wonder raised by the myriad items housed there.

Today, one cannot visit Wellcome's "Museum of Man." One can, however, see portions of his collection by visiting the British Museum and the Science Museum. In the latter, a significant selection of objects is featured in The Science and Art of Medicine. I first saw this installation in 1984 and was struck by the beauty and aptness of the objects on display. The curators had their pick of the vast catch netted by Wellcome's compulsive drive to collect; having revisited those galleries just last year, I was again struck by the truly superb choices made by (and available to) the exhibition curators. A similar sentiment surfaced as I experienced the Medicine Man exhibition at the British Museum last fall, and I encourage readers to take note of the all-too-brief description of that intriguing exhibition on p. 373. It opened with "focus objects," ranging from a shrunken head to a lock of George III's hair. Audio headsets offered a discussion, analysis, and interpretation of each object from three perspectives. It was brilliant and captivating, and revealed that there is no single "reading" of an object. This revelation might have eluded some visitors, but it made an impression upon this curator. I came away with a sense of discovery and amazement. And the book Medicine...

pdf

Share