Medicine Man: The Forgotten Museum of Henry Wellcome

'Medicine Man: The Forgotten Museum of Henry Wellcome' is a Wellcome Trust Exhibition at the British Museum until 16 November 2003.

One of the most familiar scenes in horror movies is set in a large, creaky mansion: a character pushes open the heavy door into a darkened room; as his eyes become accustomed to the light he sees skeletons, mummified remains, body parts pickled in jars, terrifying pieces of equipment and hundreds of strange and mysterious objects covered in cobwebs.

Sir Henry Wellcome's collection could easily have provided the inspiration for every such horror movie. A photograph taken inside the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum in Wigmore Street, in the 1920s shows the collection at its vast, eclectic height.

Nelson's razor, Napoleon's toothbrush, George III's hair, an inhaler owned by Hiram Maxim (the inventor of the machine gun), shrunken heads, chastity belts, an antimasturbation device, erotic ceramics, Chinese foot binding shoes and the world's largest assortment of obstetric forceps… are just some of the more exotic highlights. A bewildering variety of oddities make up the collection - although Wellcome was at pains to insist that it was intended to be of use to science and medical research, not to be simply gawked at for the sake of prurient curiosity.

Wellcome was a vastly wealthy, imaginative and compulsive collector interested in all things human. At the start of the last century, Wellcome was spending more on acquisitions than the British Museum and owned more objects than the Louvre - his collection contained over a million items. Unfortunately, he did not take as much care with the disposition of his objects after he died as he did in their assembly. On his death, in 1936, the items were spread among over 100 institutions throughout the world - hence 'the forgotten museum' - and this is the first attempt to reassemble a representative exhibition, in time for the 150th anniversary of Wellcome's birth and the 250th anniversary of the British Museum.

But Wellcome was not just an obsessive collector. He was a great innovator in the field of medicine - starting with the purification of the bark of the Chincona tree to produce quinine, the first cure for malaria, then (and still) the world's most common fatal infectious disease. He founded Burroughs Wellcome, which became a mammoth pharmaceutical company (now part of the Glaxo empire) and when he died, left a huge fortune to the Wellcome Foundation - one of the world's largest charitable trusts. Amongst other things the Wellcome Foundation provided almost all the funds for Britain's part in the Human Genome Project (HGP), which accounted for about half of the total work. (When, at a joint, transatlantic, press conference, Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bill Clinton proudly announced the completion of the first stage of the HGP, Blair did not remind the audience that the British government had refused to finance the project).

Though born into poverty (in the United States) his energy and genius were manifest early: as a boy he invented and marketed 'Wellcome's Magic (invisible) Ink'. He went on to train as a pharmacist, to develop new medicines and amass a huge fortune - as well as coining and patenting the word 'tabloid' (from 'tablet' and 'alkaloid' - or, variously, 'ovoid') originally to describe a new shape of pill, but which has taken on a completely different meaning in the field of 'journalism'. Ironically, Wellcome's private life became tabloid fodder. He married Doctor Barnardo's socialite daughter Syrie, but she tired of continual travelling and the privations of exploration. She embarked on a scandalous affair with, and eventually abandoned Wellcome for, Somerset Maugham.

As well as uncovering objects himself, Wellcome had a host of people who collected items, sending them back to London for him. Wellcome was one of the last great collectors whose expansive, voracious interests were not restrained by finances; he lived at a time when anything seemed possible, new cultures were being discovered, scientific disciplines were in a state of flux, and he started collecting at a time when it was still - almost - possible for a single person to comprehend all that was known about human life and history. But despite the rate at which he gathered specimens, the 'Forgotten Museum' shows how the rapid advances of the 20th century began to outstrip the capacity of any individual to own 'one of everything'.

After tracking down most of the sites to which the collection had been dispersed, the curators faced the challenge of selecting and exhibiting the incredible variety of items owned by Wellcome. The challenge has been met in the most wonderful way. The 700 items are packed - seemingly haphazardly - into the display cases in an attempt to reproduce the appearance of the original collection and give us a glimpse into the voracious mind of Henry Wellcome.

Dr Robert Johnston