Donating materials to the Wellcome Library

The Wellcome Library is always interested to consider offers of donations of relevant materials for its collections.

The Library contains published materials (books pamphlets, periodicals), archives (letters, diaries, correspondence, organisational records), photographs, paintings, prints, posters, drawings, medical ephemera, film, audio and digital images.

In recent years we have received a number of very interesting donations to the Library.

We accept materials that do not duplicate items we already have, and which fit our collecting priorities. And if the material you wish to donate isn't suitable for this Library, we are often able to advise on a suitable repository elsewhere.

If you have materials which you think would complement our collections, please contact us by email or letter, giving us details of the items you wish to donate. Offers of donated items will be reviewed and assessed quickly. If we do accept items, they will be integrated into the Library's collections, and records will be added to our catalogues.

Contact details:

Wellcome Library
183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE, UK
T +44 (0)20 7611 8722
F +44 (0)20 7611 8369
E library@wellcome.ac.uk

Wellcome Images
T +44 (0)20 7611 8348
F +44 (0)20 7611 8577
E images@wellcome.ac.uk

Recent donations to the Library include:

• Direct mail and advertising leaflets designed to be framed for the waiting room of a GP surgery. They were sent out to GPs in the 1950s and 1960s by pharmaceutical companies, and give a unique view of drug advertising in the UK in that period.
• Press cuttings, leaflets, magazines and assorted ephemera that had been compiled to produce 'AIDS newsletter' between 1985 and 1996. The newsletter shows public, media and professional reaction to AIDS, ranging from tabloid headlines to the efforts of charities and health services to understand a new disease.
• A collection of film, video and sound items originating from Queen Mary's Hospital in Roehampton dating from the late 1940s to 1980s. It features many aspects of their rehabilitation work with limb amputees at the hospital, including prostheses design and manufacture, and material relating to thalidomide-affected children in the 1960s and 1970s.
• Papers of Sir James Cantlie (1851-1926), surgeon.
• Assorted typescript memoirs of scientists involved in the development of Interferon between 1955-2001.
• A drawing of a 16 year old Palestinian boy who had been shot in the brain, in a Jerusalem hospital in 1989
• A selection of the nursing and midwifery certificates of an Edwardian nurse.
• A collection of 18th and 19th century medical text books.
• A recipe book of the chemist, H Wilcox, dated 1860.