Medical London walk

The Wellcome Collection at 183 Euston Road is a unique public venue dedicated to the understanding of medicine and biomedical research. It brings to life Sir Henry Wellcome’s vision of a place where people could learn more about the development of medicine through the ages and across cultures.

Wellcome was born in 1853 in Winsconsin and trained as a pharmacist. He came to London in 1879 and established a pharmaceutical company with his friend Silas Burroughs. Burroughs and Wellcome became very successful, not through the manufacture of any particular drug but because they came up with a new process for manufacturing tablets – ‘tabloids’ as they called them – and took a small royalty for each pill that was produced.

When Burroughs died in 1895, Wellcome became the sole proprietor and rich beyond the dreams of avarice. He used the profits from the company to establish research laboratories and to fund his own passionate collecting habit. He believed that the best way to tell the story of mankind was through changing attitudes to life, death, health and medicine and collected a truly stupendous quantity of material relating to the history of medicine across the ages and across the world.

Sir Henry Wellcome died in 1936 and in his will established the Wellcome Trust. The Trust is now a major global player in health and medicine. It funds projects in many different fields, not only scientific research but also medical history and a diverse programme of education.