Henry Wellcome (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Henry Wellcome David Cantor Robert Rhodes James. Henry Wellcome. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1994. xix + 422 pp. Ill. £25.00. Henry Wellcome (1853–1936) was born in a log cabin in Almond, Wisconsin. In 1874 he graduated from Philadelphia’s College of Pharmacy with a thesis on urethral suppositories, and he then worked as a salesman for several pharmaceutical houses. He moved to England in 1880 and into partnership with Silas Burroughs, importing American pharmaceutical preparations, salesmanship, and production techniques into Britain. The company opened its first factory in 1883 at Wandsworth in London, producing a variety of compressed tablets, and expanded into new premises at Dartford in 1889. However, personal relations between Wellcome and Burroughs deteriorated, and the partnership almost dissolved before the latter’s death in 1895. After a bitter legal battle with Burroughs’s widow, Wellcome obtained complete control of the company. Financially secure, he increasingly distanced himself from the day-to-day running of the business, and amassed an enormous collection of medical artifacts from around the world. However, all this was at the cost of his marriage to Sylvie Barnardo: she detested the travel and his “curios,” as she called his collection, and they separated when he accused her of infidelity. A divorce followed in 1916, and she married the playwright Somerset Maugham. Both Wellcome’s partnership and marriage had failed. He became noticeably embittered and reclusive, retreating more and more into his collecting. Robert Rhodes James’s biography traces Wellcome’s life from log cabin to lonely death. Aimed at the general reader, it is crammed with Wellcome’s adventures—from the Indian Wars of his childhood in 1860s Minnesota, to his travels in Ecuador as a young man, and his archaeological excavations in the Sudan as a successful businessman. This is the man who in 1884 invented the word “Tabloid” as a trademark for Burroughs-Wellcome products; who created a vast biomedical research enterprise, beginning in 1894 with a small laboratory for the production [End Page 325] of antitoxins; and whose mania for collecting led him to accumulate 80,000 models of patents registered in the U.S. Patent Office (which were never uncrated in his lifetime), 17,000 amulets, fifty-two cases of flints weighing more than two tons, and a rose allegedly from the garden of General Gordon in Khartoum. But James touches only lightly on broader issues concerning the histories of collecting, pharmaceutical research, medical anthropology, archaeology, and medicine in Britain, and provides virtually no references to primary material. Occasionally, the author lapses into a complacent, condescending tone, but for the most part this book is written in a lively, engaging style. It is a book that will travel (if somewhat uneasily) between the coffee table and the academic library. David Cantor Sheffield Hallam University Copyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press