Medicine Man

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 @ (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