Sir Henry Solomon Wellcome, an American born pharmaceutical entrepreneur who cofounded the Burroughs Wellcome & Company drug firm in London in 1880, began assembling an enormous personal collection of medical and health related artifacts from the 1890s onward, employing agents and buyers who acquired material at auctions and directly in the field across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas on his behalf. Wellcome's collecting ambition was encyclopedic rather than narrowly medical in the modern clinical sense: alongside surgical instruments, anatomical models and pharmaceutical artifacts, he acquired amulets, charms, ritual healing objects, divinatory instruments and other material connected to folk medicine, magic and religious healing traditions from around the world, reflecting his belief that the history of medicine could not be separated from the wider history of human belief about health, the body and the supernatural.
By his death in 1936 Wellcome had assembled more than a million objects, a collection so vast that only a fraction could ever be catalogued or displayed during his lifetime, and he left instructions establishing the Wellcome Trust, a charitable foundation, to manage his pharmaceutical business's profits and his collection after his death. The scale and idiosyncratic breadth of the collection meant it took decades for the Trust to determine how best to present it to the public, with large portions distributed to other museums, including the Science Museum in London, while a substantial core collection remained under the Trust's own control.