It’s now almost a month since the Wellcome Trust opened its new free museum, the Wellcome Collection, so there’s been plenty of time for it to get through any initial teething difficulties and grow into a venue well worth visiting. The Wellcome Collection is dedicated to medicine, history, and art, and it encourages its visitors to “consider what it means to be human”. More importantly, it has three exhibitions, a library, a cafe, a bookshop, and Napoleon’s toothbrush.
(Picture by audreym outside the Wellcome Trust.)
The Wellcome Collection has three main exhibitions. One of them, “Medicine Man”, displays objects from the collection of Sir Henry Wellcome, the founder of the Trust (who died in 1936). This is where you can find Napoleon’s toothbrush, along with George III’s hair, and even an infant identification kit from the 1920s (it’s a set of beads with letters on them that would have been threaded onto a necklace for the baby, so that there was no chance of confusing it with a different baby, a 1920s equivalent of the tiny wrist-bracelets often provided now). Another exhibition, “Medicine Now”, covers the changes in medicine since Wellcome’s death, taking a few specific developments — genomes, the development of new malaria treatments — and looks at them in more depth, as well as providing responses to the theme by artists.
The last Wellcome Collection exhibition, “The Heart”, is the only exhibition of the three to have a closing date: it runs until the 16th of September. There’s human skin, some da Vinci drawings, a whale heart, and even, startlingly, a human heart, donated by a transplant patient. The exhibition as a whole looks at the the way the heart has been portrayed, and the gradual growth in our understanding of what it actually does, from the Ancient Egyptians onward.
If a new £30 million building housing three completely new exhibitions isn’t enough for you (and why would they be? This is London, the oversupply of brilliant museums is bound to make us greedy), then you can sign up for more. On the first Friday of every month there’s a behind-the-scenes tour, taking visitors into usually restricted areas. There’s also a series of Perspectives Tours of “The Heart”, where different guides (novelists, curators, artists) take you around the exhibition and share their viewpoint. These tours are unbooked; there’s also a series of talks, however, which require booking, and which get filled up very quickly. If you’re really keen on hearing about heart transplants or Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, you can put yourself on the waiting list and hope — or you can register for updates by email, so that you hear about the next events in time to get a place.
The Wellcome Collection: 183 Euston Road, NW1 2BE. Galleries open Tuesday to Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., or to 10 p.m. on Thursdays.
