london medicine exhibit

The Wellcome Collection; A Destination for the Incurably Curious

"Henry Wellcome had an early interest in medicine and marketing. The first product he advertised was 'invisible ink' (just lemon juice in fact). In 1880, he joined his college friend Silas Burroughs in setting up a pharmaceutical company, Burroughs Wellcome & Co. They were one of the first to introduce medicine in tablet form under the 1884 trademark 'Tabloid'; previously medicines had been sold as powders or liquids."

"When Burroughs died in 1895, the company flourished under Sir Henry's leadership. He went on to establish world-class medical research laboratories and amassed the world's most impressive collections relating to medicine and health through the ages."

One of the Wellcome Collection exhibits is Madness and Modernity:

Vienna at the turn of the 20th century was one of Europe's leading centres for modernism. This was a tumultuous period of transition in which the arts, literature, architecture and philosophy blossomed. A time when Sigmund Freud, among others, pioneered new ideas about the self and psychiatry.

Vienna in 1900 was a city obsessed with the mind. Political unrest had left the Viennese with an overwhelming sense that they were living in 'nervous times'. Anxieties about mental health were allied to fears about the modern city; this context helped to foster progress in psychiatric care and innovation.

This multidisciplinary exhibition presented the range of ways madness and art interacted in Vienna, from designs for utopian psychiatric spaces to the drawings of patients confined in them. It explored the influence of psychiatry on early modernism and encouraged us to reflect on how we deal with mental illness 100 years on.

One section of that exhibit is the Tower of Fools - The exhibition begins with a Viennese 'madhouse' and an eccentric sculptor from the 18th century. It then moves on to the architecture and patients of Steinhof, a state-of-the-art psychiatric institution built on the edge of Vienna in the early 20th century and partly designed by Otto Wagner, the leader of the modern architecture movement.

The Therapeutic Spectrum - This section focuses on the places where nervous ailments were treated in Vienna 1900. Freud's cluttered and personal consulting room is contrasted with the sleek modern design of the Purkersdorf Sanatorium, a clinic for nervous disorders designed by leading modern architect Josef Hoffmann.

Pathological Portraits - Two sections of the exhibition are devoted to portraits of Vienna's artists and intellectuals, interpreted by critics at the time as images of the mentally ill. Egon Schiele was profoundly concerned with his image as a 'pathological' artist. We show photographs of psychiatric patients in circulation at this time to show the possible influences on his distinctive representation of his 'diseased' body.

Another fascinating section of the Wellcome Collection is Sleeping and Dreaming:

I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way

— 'Lights Out', Edward Thomas (1878-1917)

Sleeping is one of mankind's most fundamental needs; our physical survival and mental wellbeing depends upon regular periods of rest. This mysterious state of unconsciousness and its accompaniment - dreaming - has exercised fascination for scientists, philosophers, artists and writers alike for millennia. Sleeping and dreaming have historically been perceived as a dark, often disturbing, even supernatural sphere of human experience. The Wellcome Library contains rich materials devoted to this shadowy and haunting realm.

The interpretation of dreams is most commonly associated with 20th-century psychoanalysis and its most eminent early practitioners, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. They regarded dreams as the intermediary between the unconscious and conscious mind, a tool to unlock the secrets of the human psyche. However, some 1800 years before psychoanalysis, dreams were interpreted as supernatural or divine communication with oracular potency. Among the Wellcome Library's holdings is a late-16th-century Latin manuscript of the earliest major work about dreams, 'Oneirocritica' or 'The Interpretation of Dreams', written by the Greek diviner Artemidorus in the 2nd century CE. The association of dreams with divine revelation and other occult phenomena such as spiritual and visionary apparitions continued to be widespread for centuries. The early-17th-century 'Traité de la Physionomie, de la Chyromancie, de la Métoposcopie, et de l'Onirodytique, attributed to the physician Maurice Froger, deals with several types of divination, including dream interpretation, chiromancy (palm-reading) and metoscopy (divination by reading the lines of the forehead).

The Wellcome Collection; A Destination for the Incurably Curious

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