Sir Henry Wellcome's museum for the science of history.

The collection of artefacts amassed by Sir Henry Solomon Wellcome (1853-1936) known, since 1913, as his Historical Medical Museum and, since its transfer to the Science Museum in 1977, as the Wellcome Museum of the History of Medicine, has frequently aroused amazement because of its enormous size and range. By the early 1930s, Wellcome's collection was five times larger than that of the Louvre and, during the 1920s, its annual expenditure on acquisitions exceeded that of the British Museum.2 Despite being known as a historical medical collection, in range it was almost indefinably wide. At the time of Wellcome's death, it included large quantities of, for example, weapons, model ships, bales of fabric, furniture, porcelain, statuary, coins and medals, oriental and western antiquities, objets d'art, potsherds, human remains and "ethnographical" items, in all approximately one million objects.3 This paper is an attempt to place Wellcome's activities in context. His collection becomes more comprehensible when considered in the light of the prominence museums were given in archaeology and anthropology from about 1870, and the