This is the History of Medicine

Abstract

Abstract Wellcome insisted that his Museum was for research, but very little research went on there. He spoke of his aim to create a museum ‘as an institution for post-graduate study’, with workrooms and laboratories and lecture halls, but he never opened its doors to the researchers that could bring such a place to life. The Historical Medical Museum was nominally part of the Wellcome Bureau of Scientific Research, which had been established in 1914 as an umbrella organization for the Wellcome Research Laboratories and the Museum of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. The latter was a specialized teaching collection established in London that year in the wake of Wellcome’s successful research programme in Sudan. The Museum of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene was part of the Bureau, both physically and administratively, and was used by army officers, missionaries, and educationalists preparing to work abroad. But the Wigmore Street museum remained independent and selfcontained, and no formal teaching programme was developed there. Moreover, publishing was discouraged, staff were not allowed to discuss Wellcome’s historical collections with anyone outside the institution, and only a few papers were given at conferences. Thompson had drafted one or two booklets each year between 1905 and 1914, but they were designed primarily as promotional literature for the firm and were published anonymously under the Burroughs Wellcome name. After the First World War, these dried up.