Wellcome Museum of Medical Science (WMMS)

Wellcome Museum of Medical Science

=======

description: formerly Wellcome Museum of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene

Wellcome Museum of Medical Science (WMMS)

Established 1914 as Wellcome Museum of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene, and part of the Wellcome Bureau of Scientific Research [WBSR].

The initiative for establishing the Museum lay with Balfour. The Wellcome Tropical Research Laboratories in Khartoum [WTRL] included a museum formed of material which he had collected as a by-product of its work and he had also undertaken medical exhibitions as Dresden and Ghent dealing with selected tropical diseases. In 1913 when Balfour returned to London to direct the Wellcome Bureau of Scientific Research [WBSR], he proposed the establishment of a graphic Museum of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. In 1914 a Museum was established at 10 Henrietta Street, London reporting to the WBSR for the purposes of administration and finance.

The nucleus of the exhibits came from the Dresden and Ghent exhibitions, supplemented by a variety of material relating to tropical medicine collected by Balfour and his staff during their overseas travels, largely zoological material. In 1919 the Museum moved to 8 Vere Street, opposite the building which housed the WBSR and in January that year, Dr G. Buchanan, who had served in the laboratories in Khartoum was appointed first full-time Curator. He was succeeded in June by Dr S.H. Daukes who had organised the visual teaching at the Leeds School of Army Hygiene. The Museum was chiefly concerned with the prophylactics of tropical diseases, with special reference to their cause, transmission and methods of prevention.

In 1920 the Museum and Bureau moved to premises on the corner of Euston Road and Gordon Street and an active period of expansion, re-arrangement and labelling took place. In 1922 classes of students, consisting chiefly of missionaries and educationalists, were given formal demonstrations on tropical medicine and hygiene. However, in 1923 the establishment of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which had a museum of its own meant a change of direction and the Wellcome museum began to embrace general medicine as well and in [1924 or] 1926 it was re-named the Wellcome Museum of Medical Science. In 1926 it transferred to 28 Endsleigh Gardens (later Endsleigh Court, 33 Gordon Street), moving again in 1932 to the ground floor of the Wellcome Building at 183 Euston Road.

In the 1930s the WMMS became a centre for postgraduate study of tropical diseases and for undergraduate teaching of medicine in general. It was closed from 1939-1946, with specimens being put into storage in North London to escape the Blitz. When it re-opened after the war the museum was reduced in size and specialised in the teaching of tropical medicine, becoming a centre for postgraduate study under a new Director, Dr C.J. Hackett. It activities dovetailed with the Wellcome Laboratories of Tropical Medicine which were established at this time as the successors to the former Bureau of Scientific Research. In the 1950s its new emphasis was not on tropical medicine but on the practice of medicine in the tropics.

In 1983 the Museum was transferred from the Company to the Wellcome Trust, which had already taken over the Wellcome Institute.

In 1985 the functions were taken over by the Wellcome Tropical Institute [WTI], which in turn was succeeded by the Wellcome Tropical Resource c.1988. The museum was closed in 1989.

Curators/Directors

See Adrian Steel and Lesley A. Hall, “Sir Henry Wellcome’s Archival Legacy and the Contemporary Historian,” Contemporary British History 17, no. 3 (2003): 95–111, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13619460308565453.