Medicine Man is one of the permanent exhibition galleries in The Wellcome Building in London. It is dedicated to the figure of Henry Wellcome as a collector and creator of “one of the world’s great museums: a vast stockpile of evidence about our universal interest in health and the body. More than 150 years after his birth in 1853, this exhibition reunites a cross-section of extarordinary objects form his collection, ranging from diagnostic dolls to Japanese sex aids, and from Napoleon’s toothbrush to George III’s hair. It also provides a very different perspective on some of our own obsessions with medicine and health”1.
Some objects are gathered by type and other by broad cross-cultural themes, such as:
METAL INSTRUMENTS (knives, saws, hooks and forceps)
PAINTINGS (about alchemists, doctors, pharmacists, patients, saints…)
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS (prosthetic hands, arms and legs)
- Photos by ti.supmacinu|ihgrob.l#ihgroB acuL (July 2011), courtesy of the Wellcome Library and the Wellcome Collection.
- Locate the item on this Google Map
Related items:
- Anatomical model of a pregnant woman
- “Anatomy lessons at St.Dunstan’s” by Hodgson Lobley (1919)
- Chinese diagnostic dolls
- Henry Wellcome’s life mask
- Henry Wellcome’s spectacles and card case
- Japanese acupuncture figure
- Obstetrical forceps (c. 1726)
Bibliography
– Ken Arnold and Danielle Olsen (eds.), Medicine Man. The Forgotten Museum of Henry Wellcome, The British Museum Press, London 2003 (reprinted 2011), pp. 397