A brief history of the Wellcome Library

The Wellcome Library is founded on the collections formed by Henry Solomon Wellcome (1853-1936), whose personal wealth, founded on the pharmaceutical company that he developed and owned, allowed him to spend the last four decades of his life indulging one of the most ambitious collecting visions of the 20th century. Born in Garden City, Minnesota, he became a pharmaceutical salesman and moved to London in 1878 at the encouragement of Silas Burroughs, with whom he entered into partnership to create the firm of Burroughs Wellcome. The business flourished, despite personal differences between the two partners, and Wellcome became sole owner after Burroughs's death in 1895. He continued to play a major part in overseeing the firm's ongoing commercial success for the rest of his life, but much of his energy from then on was directed towards developing his collections of books and artefacts.

Wellcome's primary collecting interest was focused on the history of medicine in a broadly interpreted sense, which included not only ancillary subjects like alchemy or witchcraft but also anthropology and ethnography. He sought to create both a Library and a Museum, which he always appears to have envisaged as public resources rather than personal collections, although neither was made properly openly accessible during his lifetime. He began collecting books seriously in the late 1890s, and artefacts shortly thereafter, using a succession of agents to amass materials through the auction rooms, through dealers, and by travelling around the world to gather whatever could be found. Wellcome's first major entry into the market took place at the auction of William Morris's library in 1898, where he was the biggest single purchaser, taking away about a third of the lots. His interests were truly international and the broad coverage of languages and traditions is one of the Library's strengths. He was also obsessive about secrecy in the dealings of his agents, and insisted on a series of pseudonyms and subterfuges to conceal the true identity of the buyer from the trade.

As the Library grew, staff were needed, and a succession of professional librarians was appointed during the 1920s and 30s. It was not open to the public, although individual scholars were able to gain access on request, and it was housed in a succession of locations around London. Significant collections acquired during this early period included the library of J. F. Payne, medical historian and Librarian of the Royal College of Physicians, purchased in 1911; over 100 items from the Kurt Wolff collection of incunabula, sold at auction in 1926; and the major part of the library of the Munich historian Ernst Darmstaedter, bought in 1930.

Wellcome died in 1936. He bequeathed the bulk of his estate, including sole ownership of his pharmaceutical company and his collections, to a body of trustees, who formed the Wellcome Trust. Their primary duty was to use the income generated by the company to support ongoing biomedical research, but they were also charged with fostering the study of medical history through the care and maintenance of the collections. A programme of sorting and rationalising was therefore begun, which lasted throughout the 1940s and beyond, to improve the subject focus and dispose of material that could not reasonably be classified as belonging to the history of medicine. Many thousands of books were sold, and on the museum side great quantities of archaeological, anthropological and ethnographic materials were found good homes in other museums around the world. In 1945 the Library was moved physically into the Wellcome Building on Euston Road, Wellcome's headquarters building erected in 1932, where it took over one of the rooms originally designed as a museum space. Readers began to be admitted by arrangement but in December 1949 it was formally opened to the public, as the Wellcome Historical Medical Library.

The Library had only a handful of staff and money for new acquisitions was very limited – the pharmaceutical company (the Wellcome Foundation) was not doing very well at this time – but a period of steady progress ensued as the Library's services were developed and it became increasingly known as a public resource. Noel Poynter, who became Librarian in 1954, began a series of published catalogues of the Library's collections, and the quarterly bibliography Current Work in the History of Medicine was begun (continues as the Wellcome bibliography for the history of medicine). Originally attached to the company under the terms of Wellcome's will, the ownership of all the historical collections was formally transferred to the Wellcome Trust in 1960, bringing an improvement in financial support. The Library was extensively refurbished in 1962, and the main galleried Reading Room took the shape it retains today. An increasing drive to develop the history of medicine as an academic discipline saw the creation of a small Trust-funded department for the subject based in University College, London, and the Academic Unit (as it became) formed one part of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine (disbanded in 1999 when the Unit was transferred, administratively, to University College, London). The Institute title, adopted in 1968, also embraced the Library and the Museum, both now housed in the Wellcome Building. However, growing unease about the appropriateness of maintaining the artefactual collections under the Trust's wing led to a decision to transfer these to the Science Museum, a process that began in the 1970s and concluded in 1982.

The Library's story during the later decades of the 20th century has been one of continuing growth and development, with an ongoing acquisitions programme and increasing staff to cope with expanding use. A significant addition during the 1980s was the purchase of the manuscripts, and about 10 000 printed books, from the Medical Society of London Library. By the 1990s the bookstock had grown to over half a million volumes, complemented by the manuscript collections (c.8000 western manuscripts, c.11,000 oriental manuscripts, covering 43 languages) and an iconographic collection of about 100 000 paintings, drawings, prints and photographs. A Contemporary Medical Archives Centre was formed in 1979 to collect records of important 20th-century medical organisations and individuals. Subject strengths, beyond medicine proper, include alchemy, cookery, ethnography, travel and the occult. During the 1980s the Trust began the process of selling the Wellcome Foundation (the drug company) in three major share sales, concluding in 1994. This left the Trust in a vastly improved financial situation, with an asset base valued in billions of pounds, and although the new income went largely towards increased funding of biomedical research, the Library also benefited from the climate of opportunity that was thus generated.

The Wellcome Trust's activities around the history of medicine, and on the public understanding of science, were brought together in 1998 to create a new Medicine, Society and History Division. The Library, a constituent part, was expanded to take in a separate Information Service (originally created in 1991, partly to serve the Trust's internal needs and partly as a resource in the growing field of public understanding). The administratively separate Medical Photographic Library, and Medical Film and Video Library, also became part of the Library as a whole at that time. Recognising a wider remit than history of medicine only, the Library was rechristened in 1999 as the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine. It aims to provide collections and services relating to history, ethics and policy of medicine, to serve its core academic audience but also to help foster wider public engagement with the important range of issues that its collections can open up for us all.

Further reading

• James, Robert Rhodes, Henry Wellcome, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1994.
• Poynter, FNL, 'The Wellcome Historical Medical Library', The Book Collector 4 (1955), p.285-291.
• Symons, HJM, 'The Wellcome Institute: a short history', London: The Wellcome Trust, 1993.
• Symons, HJM, 'These crafty dealers: Sir Henry Wellcome as a book collector', in 'Medicine, mortality and the book trade', edited by Robin Myers and Michael Harris, Folkestone: St Paul' Bibliographies, 1998, p.109-130 .