The Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine.

  • Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine.
Date:
[1983]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: The Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    public at the end of 1949, although at first the accommodation left much to be desired. In 1960, the anomalous situation whereby the Museum and Library had been the property of the Wellcome Foundation Limited was rectified and ownership passed to the Wellcome Trust. For a time the Museum and Library were administered separately but in 1964 they were reunited and in 1968 re- named the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. The Library was redesigned and modernized in 1962 and the Museum between 1968 and 1970. Since then a reappraisal of the Institute's functions has led to the decision that the Museum's interests would best be served by transfer to a national museum, and accordingly in 1976 arrangements were made for its deposit on indefinite loan at the Science Museum, South Kensington. Two permanent exhibition galleries are now open there. The remainder of the Institute continues to be under the direct control of the Wellcome Trust and since 1976 has been developed as an academic research centre closely linked with University College London (below, page 10). THE LIBRARY The heart of the Institute is its Library; the nucleus of which consists of the private library of Sir Henry Wellcome. Since his death, it has continued to grow by the acquisition of both primary and secondary sources, so that today it is the largest and most comprehensive European collection in the history of medicine. On an international scale it ranks in size and quality among the finest two or three libraries serving the history of medicine and its allied sciences. It contains about 400,000 printed books dating from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. This large holding comprises much more than medical literature in the narrow sense. In addition to extensive holdings of material on clinical medicine and therapeutics, the Library possesses large collections relating to the history of the biological sciences in general, and in particular to physiology, botany, and chemistry — all subjects whose histories are closely intertwined with that of the healing arts. Additionally, substantial loan deposits have been made in recent years of materials from other institutions. Outstanding examples are some 45 per cent of the original library of the Medical Society of London and a large collection (c. 24,000 volumes) of most- ly eighteenth- and nineteenth-century books belonging to the Royal Society of Medicine. One of Henry Wellcome's aims was to acquire a copy of every significant printed text from the history of Western medical science. Achievement of