W4 - Henry Wellcome

Sir Henry Wellcome (1853-1936) was born in the American frontier, initially selling lemon juice as invisible ink, but died a wealthy knight of the British Realm. Wellcome co-founded a multinational pharmaceutical company that mastered modern techniques of advertising such as promotion, image and branding. He also funded pioneering medical research and his will provided for the creation of the Wellcome Trust now the largest charity in the UK, spending over £600 million a year on research to improve human and animal health (the Wellcome Trust, 2007). Brian Deer's work (1993) suggests that the drugs Wellcome's company pioneered, including AZT, are truly a triumph of marketing over function.

In additon, Wellcome collected over a million objects in his lifetime with no particular focus - just whatever curious and exotic things his international group of buyers took a fancy to - the majority of which remained in boxes uncatalogued and undisplayed. Much of the collection has been dispersed, but there is substantial library and collection of medical texts and objects in the 'Wellcome Building' in London as well as a collection in 'The Science Museum' whose oddness and diversity is highlighted by a short film installed with the collection called The Phantom Museum (Brooke, 2003) referring to the fact that Wellcome's dream of a museum of man was never realised.

The point of Wellcome's amateur archeology and collecting was that he '...really believed that you could read history, and you could read people's cultures, position on an evolutionary scale, from the kind of technologies they used' (Lisa O'Sullivan on Rear Vision, 2009). In other words, he believed in the Enlightenment notion of Progress and that, inevitably, Western civilisations were higher on the evolutionary scale than Other cultures. One might say, that with my cube, I'm showing just one consequence of Western civilisation's technology and therefore its true position on the evolutionary scale.



References:

Brooke Michael, 'Phantom Museum, The (2003)', BFI ScreenOnline, viewed at http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/1201323/, on 19 August 2009.


Deer Brian 1993, Sir Henry Wellcome: thy will be done, viewed at http://briandeer.com/septrin/henry-wellcome.htm, on 19 August 2009.


Phillips Keri 2009, 'Regarding human remains', Rear Vision, Radio National, 12 August, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/rearvision/stories/2009/2646908.htm#transcript, downloaded 16 August 2009.


the Wellcome Trust 2007, History of Henry Wellcome, viewed at http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/About-us/History/index.htm, on 19 August 2009.