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- Sir Henry Wellcome
- Also known as
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Sir Henry Wellcome
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primary name: Wellcome, Henry Solomon
- Details
- individual; collector; scientist/engineer; American (USA); British; Male
- Life dates
- 1853-1936
- Biography
- Pharmacist and collector; born in Wisconsin, brought up in Minnesota. In 1880 with Silas Burroughs, both pharmaceutical salesmen, he set up a new company in London called Burroughs, Wellcome & Co. They used mass production and proactive marketing to sell remedies and medicines (using the newly-invented tabloid pill) throughout the UK and in British territories overseas, thus succeeding in building the company’s reputation and their personal fortunes. Silas Burroughs died in 1895, and Wellcome became a British Citizen in 1910. On his death Wellcome in 1936 left the entire company to a newly-created Wellcome Trust, a charity which continues to fund medical research and related charitable activities.
Wellcome was an omnivorous collector from his earliest days (see the standard book by Frances Larson). Employed Dr C J S Thompson as his agent/curator in 1896 who remained his principal agent until his retirement in 1925. Wellcome himself remained the prime mover in the collecting, sending back crates of material from his numerous trips abroad. Between 1912 and 1916 he personally directed excavations in Socota, Jebel Moya, Sudan (see AOA Ethdoc 344 - list of objects from his excavations at Jebel Moya, Sudan, presented to the BM), but this was exceptional. In London he always worked through agents to build up huge and very wide-ranging collections of books, prints and objects of all kinds based in theory around the history of medicine for what he called the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum and Library. He opened the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum in Wigmore Street to the public in 1913; it closed in 1932. He concentrated the rest of the collection at a store in Willesden, which opened in 1927, where objects were processed and cataloguing took place (Larson chapter 16). Collecting ceased on his death (so no object is later than 1936).
On his death, the collections became the property of the Wellcome Institute (qv) which was faced with a vast uncatalogued backlog, mostly still in the cases in which it had been delivered in numerous warehouses. After WWII the Wellcome Trust decided to close the Institute's medical history museum. It auctioned a large quantity of minor material, and gave the non-medical parts of his collection to other institutions over a long period of time (see Larson chapter 18). The medical collection itself was eventually given to the Science Museum in the later 1970s. The BM received in 1954 a large group of ethnographical objects (catalogued with 1954,23 numbers); a second group came after 1977 (catalogued with 1954,+23 numbers) from the residue that had been passed to the Science Museum. The Trust retains and manages Wellcome's magnificent library and iconographical collection, since 2007 housed in its premises on the Euston Road.
BM holds some 15,000 Wellcome objects in total, and these comprise the largest single element in the BM’s ethnographical collection today. Other gifts were made by the Wellcome Trust to the Fowler Museum at UCLA, and to other US and UK museums from the 1950s onwards. See for a summary of the register numbers of what is now in the BM, sv the Wellcome Institute.
Almost all the objects must have been collected by him between 1895 and 1936; only a small residue that had been ordered beforehand arrived after his death.
- Bibliography
- Robert Rhodes James, ‘Henry Wellcome’, 1994 (biography)
Helen Turner, 'Henry Wellcome, the man, his collection, the legacy', 1980
J Symons, ‘The development of the Wellcome collection’, Museum Ethnographers Group Newsletter, no..20 1987 pp.1-20 (the entire issue of the Newsletter covers aspects of the Wellcome collection, with three essays on its development, its dispersal and its numbering systems).
Ken Arnold & Danielle Olsen, eds, 'Medicine Man: The Forgotten Museum of Henry Wellcome', London: British Museum Press, 2003
Frances Larson, ‘An Infinity of Things: how Sir Henry Wellcome collected the world’, Oxford 2009
