The story
The Wellcome Collection grew from the obsession of one man, Henry Wellcome, an American-born pharmaceutical magnate in London who set out to collect everything connected to the human effort to stay alive and well. By his death in 1936 he had amassed more objects than the Louvre, medical instruments, amulets, artificial limbs, even Napoleon's toothbrush.
It is a museum of medicine and the body rather than a picture gallery, and it wears the motto that it is for the incurably curious. Displays mix surgical tools and votive offerings with contemporary art commissioned to think about illness, the mind and death. Alongside sits one of the world's great libraries on the history of medicine.
The building on the Euston Road is free, and its shows are as likely to hold a Peruvian mummy bundle or a nineteenth-century prosthetic limb as a painting.
