London: Oct 29: Wellcome Collection

On Friday, October 29, 2010, I disappeared from work to visit the Wellcome Collection. I'd never heard of this museum before: it's not mentioned in any of my guide books, and I wouldn't have known about it without Di Yin mentioning it. (Perhaps I hadn't heard of it because it's new--it was established in 2007.) Its web page intrigued me so I decided to go.

The Wellcome Collection turns out to be a museum that looks at medicine, science, and health, their history, and art inspired by those things. Knowing this connection to medicine and health, I chuckle as the museum's motto: "a free destination for the incurably curious."

I first explored the exhibit Medicine Now. As you can guess from my description of the museum, the displays cover a rather eclectic range, including:

• an interactive exhibit that takes a picture of one's face and compares the features to that of an average face. It was interesting to see the ways in which I differ from most.
• a model of the body and a set of buttons for each organ. When you press a button, that organ lights up. I and another museum visitor thought the pancreas light was broken at first because we couldn't see it. It wasn't broken--it turns out the pancreas is only visible from the back.
• an interactive exhibit showing videos of fourteen-year-olds side-by-side with videos of the same people ten years later. It was interesting to see how the people changed both physically and personality-wise. (Their personalities came through in these videos despite them not saying anything, just sitting there in the video box doing whatever they wanted.)
• (art) a print combining echocardiogram measurements and topographic maps of mountains.
• (art) pills cut into the shapes of organs they're supposed to heal.
• (art) fMRI patterns put into three-dimensional crystal form.

The feature of this exhibit that I enjoyed the most was the audio recordings. I particularly remember a comedian talking about the changes his body underwent as a result of multiple sclerosis, a humanities professor watching medical students dissect a heart for their first time, and a journalist who got malaria. As you've no doubt guessed, these recordings, which are scattered around the exhibit, range as widely as the displays they accompany.

The exhibit also has sections on obesity, malaria, and genomes.

The other exhibit, Medicine Man, is more historic in focus. It has many objects and curios used historically in the practice of healing (effective or not). These objects range from masks (medical and shaman), glassware, chairs (birthing, etc.), artificial limbs, and old instruments (useful and not) to amulets, figurines, chastity belts, anti-masturbation devices, glass eyes, and memento moris. The curios (as if some of those objects aren't curios...) include a naturally preserved mummy (disturbing) and Darwin's walking stick. There's also an intriguing collection of 18th century (and earlier) medical prints (from around the world) that doctors used for reference. Some have astrological charts (e.g., showing good days for bloodletting).

In contrast to the modern art about medicine in the Medicine Now exhibit, this exhibit has a series of medicine-related paintings (most from the 18th and 19th centuries): physicians and surgeons at work, people giving birth, people being injured, bodies being dissected, etc.

One section of the exhibit presents the history of Henry Wellcome. He built a pharmaceutical empire and started the charitable trust that's responsible for the museum (and also responsible for ongoing grants for medicine). During his lifetime, he collected most of the objects shown in the Medicine Man exhibit.

It took me about an hour and a half to thoroughly explore the regular part of the collection. No special exhibit was open at the time.

On the way back to work, I almost hurt myself multiple times. The down escalator in the Warren Street tube station wasn't working so everyone had to walk down a long series of steps. Along the wall, London Transit had put up an interesting series of signs discussing escalators in the tube system: when the first one was installed, how many there are now, what and where the longest one is, etc. These signs attracted my attention so I didn't look where I was walking; this would've been fine if the steps were regularly spaced all the way down, but they weren't. Every dozen or two steps there was a landing, and when I stepped onto one unexpectedly (because I wasn't looking) I always stumbled.

Incidentally, I took a few photos during the excursion.