Would you like to buy a unicorn?

A symbol of healing

Merz was looking to sell the head to a pharmaceutical chemist – preferably a wealthy American one. It was really just a matter of time before his letter landed on Henry Wellcome’s desk.

Henry was, to put it delicately, a very driven collector. I have known this since I started working for the Wellcome Library, but the sheer scope of his collection was only brought home to me recently, when I helped to digitise correspondence surrounding acquisitions for the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum. Those letters and index cards document the purchase of syringes and swords, books of prophecy and books of surgery, bronze busts and shrunken heads. They describe an attempt to gather the whole cultural history of human sickness and health in one place.

By all accounts, it made perfect sense for Wellcome to add a unicorn to his collection. The creature had been the symbol of his company since 1908, after all, and as Merz said – and as Henry well knew – unicorns have been associated with healing for centuries. Mary, Queen of Scots was said to have owned a precious fragment of unicorn horn inherited from her father, and Nicholas Culpeper praised the horn’s effectiveness as both a powerful antidote to poisons and a diuretic.

In terms of its rarity and pharmaceutical value, a true, unbroken unicorn horn – never mind the rest of the head – would be priceless.

Survivor for centuries

So, was it a real unicorn? Of course it wasn’t: unicorns don’t exist. However, in his letter, Merz seems almost apologetic about this. When describing the head’s construction, he accepted that the horn was from a narwhal but still optimistically described this as a “sea-unicorn”.

He never refers to the entire head as anything other than “a unicorn” – never as a model, certainly not as an ornament. There seems to be a desire not to admit that unicorns aren’t real, though it’s impossible to say whether Merz was doing this to appeal to his own sense of whimsy or that of potential buyers.

And real or not, the head was handsome: carved out of wood and allegedly life-sized, with a metre-and-a-half long horn and a century-and-a-half long history. Made in the 1700s, the unicorn had endured the secularisation of the German monasteries, World War I and the short life and bloody collapse of the Bavarian Soviet Republic. According to Merz, it was only being sold now because his family, like so many others, was struggling to make ends meet in Weimar Germany. I hope he found a buyer.

That Henry didn’t purchase this unicorn is a shame. It’s possible that he felt the asking price of $1,200 (a little over $17,000 by 2018 standards) was too high. It’s equally possible that, like the knights of Castle Aaargh, he already had one: Wellcome Collection currently holds both a narwhal horn and a (less impressive) unicorn head, as well as unicorns captured in the works of 16th-century naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi, Edward Topsell, author of a 17th-century book about real and mythical creatures, and a 15th-century Italian bestiary. And that’s just for starters.

The power of unicorns

But what is it about unicorns that holds our attention? We’ve kept them around for far longer than we’ve believed in them. French barber–surgeon Ambrose Paré doubted the efficacy of their horns in the 16th century; Topsell doubted their existence in the 17th century. In the 18th century, zoologist Linnaeus described them as “a figment of painters” and classified them as Animalia paradoxa, along with such improbable creatures as the dragon and the pelican.

By the time Merz came to sell the head, no buyer could have claimed, hand on heart, that they thought unicorns were real. Yet, such is their power that they’ve persisted: they’re imaginary, certainly, but they’ve survived the Scientific Revolution, outlived monasteries and republics; they’ve certainly outlived sceptical old Paré and Mary, Queen of Scots. (Merz’s unicorn, or at least a beast from the same herd, is still with us: it’s recently been sighted in America, on loan from the Germanisches National Museum.) And they remained the logo of the Wellcome Trust until 1995 – again, how come? Why is it that, in a field as rational as modern medicine, we preserve this sliver of medieval romance?

My best guess is this: that, as both a romantic and as a salesman, Henry Wellcome understood the importance and the power of myth. Not for nothing does the library hold a signed autobiography of P T Barnum or a collection of Sequah memorabilia. At the front of Wellcome Collection, you’ll find both an Eye of Horus and echoes of Hermes’ Caduceus, further mythological emblems of healing and medicine.

Knowledge and intuition

Wellcome knew as well as anyone how unpredictable medicine could be. In the early 20th century, modern pharmaceutical chemistry was barely a hundred years old and, despite all good intentions, a tremendous amount was still unknown. Even today we encounter gaps in our knowledge: diseases with no clear cause or cure; drugs discovered by serendipity; strange interrelations between mind, body and microbiome. These can defy the efforts of patients and scientists alike to interpret them.

Sometimes, whether you’re looking at the confounding results of a medical trial or you’re trying to come to terms with a diagnosis, rationalise why it’s happened to you and determine what on earth you’ll do next, you need something intuitive to fall back on. Something that provides comfort and meaning, just for a little while, even if you know you can’t really believe it.

I can’t speak for you, but what do I do when I’m confronted with moments like that? When my powers of understanding fail, when I’m faced with the sheer ineffability of life? I buy the damn unicorn, that’s what I do. Although maybe not for $17,000.