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Gallery: Henry Wellcome鈥檚 vast collection

AGAINST doctors鈥� advice, Charles Darwin personally to his wife during her eighth childbirth in 1850. Kept unconscious throughout, she was duly grateful. Richard Tennant Cooper鈥檚 painting of 1912 showing demons wielding surgical instruments and attacking a chloroformed man suggests that others saw early anaesthesia in a less positive light.

Cooper鈥檚 painting was part of a series commissioned by the pharmaceutical entrepreneur for his museum of medical history, which opened in 1913. Like other objects there, it was a mixture of the real and the fake. 鈥淧art science, part obsession, part research, part entertainment, part benefaction, part self-promotion: Wellcome鈥檚 great Historical Medical Museum was always more of a fantasy than a reality,鈥� writes Frances Larson in An Infinity of Things.

Wellcome was born in a Wisconsin log cabin in 1853. By the time he died in 1936, grudgingly admired but unloved, he was a millionaire, knight, and the owner of a grotesquely overwhelming collection of objects from around the globe. Largely uncatalogued in various warehouses in London, virtually none of it was exhibited, despite his dream of building a 鈥渃omplete鈥� museum on the history of illness and health. Today, it is mostly dispersed through the UK鈥檚 museums, with a selection on elegant display at the in London.

Accurately billed not as a biography but as 鈥渢he biography of a collection鈥�, the book is penetratingly honest. In places it reads as a gripping story of a bit of a monster, but Larson is too much the fastidious scholar 鈥� and too little the imaginative writer 鈥� to sensationalise the material. So the story is muted, along with the iniquity. She notes Wellcome鈥檚 鈥渂oundless curiosity鈥�, which is evident in his collection, but what she documents is his boundless and ruthless acquisitiveness. One chapter is titled 鈥淭he whole of India should be ransacked鈥� 鈥� a quote from Wellcome鈥檚 instructions to his collector in India. By the end, one feels rather sickened at the futility of his avarice.

Gallery: Henry Wellcome鈥檚 vast collection