Wellcome Collection and Its Exhibitions

The Wellcome Trust opened Wellcome Collection to the public in 2007, housing it in the Wellcome Building at 183 Euston Road in London, a nine story building Henry Wellcome himself had commissioned in 1932 as the headquarters for his pharmaceutical and research interests. The museum was conceived from the outset as a venue exploring the connections between medicine, life and art rather than a conventional museum of medical history, mounting temporary exhibitions that deliberately juxtapose historical medical artifacts, contemporary art, and material from Wellcome's original collection addressing folk healing, magic and belief alongside orthodox scientific medicine. Its permanent displays and library give researchers and the public access to a collection that includes material directly relevant to the history of astrology, alchemy, amulets and magical healing practice, presented within a deliberately interdisciplinary frame that treats esoteric and orthodox medical history as parts of a single continuous human story rather than opposed traditions.

Wellcome Collection remains active today as a free public museum and library, continuing to mount temporary exhibitions and maintain research access to its historical collections, and it stands as one of the more unusual major cultural institutions to trace its origin directly to a single collector's decades of acquiring both mainstream and esoteric medical material side by side.