The Wellcome Library in London: Medicine, Alchemy and Magic

Henry Solomon Wellcome was born in 1853 in Wisconsin, in the United States, and made his fortune in London in the pharmaceutical industry, founding Burroughs Wellcome & Co. with Silas Burroughs in 1880. With the proceeds he built one of the largest collections ever devoted to the history of medicine, which now forms the core of the Wellcome Collection on Euston Road. Among its books and manuscripts lies an extraordinary heritage for the history of magic.

A Collector without Limits

Wellcome began buying systematically at the start of the twentieth century, using agents who toured auctions, bookshops and markets all over the world. His project was to document the history of caring for the body in every culture and every age, from prehistory to modern pharmacology. He thus gathered books, manuscripts, surgical instruments, amulets, paintings and ritual objects in enormous quantities.

In 1913 he opened the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, initially intended for specialists. On his death in 1936 the collection passed to a charity, the Wellcome Trust, which saw to its conservation and reorganisation. Much of the object collection was later placed on permanent loan with the Science Museum in London, while the books and manuscripts remained in the library. The museum accumulated material far beyond the space available to display it, so that many objects remained in storage for a long time.

Alchemy, Astrology and Magic

For Wellcome the history of medicine also included what we would now call magical practices: healing charms, medical astrology, alchemy, protective amulets. The library therefore holds a rich collection of European alchemical manuscripts, astrological texts, books of secrets and recipe books from the Middle Ages to the modern age, as well as numerous incunabula and sixteenth-century editions. Many of these volumes come from private collections auctioned in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which Wellcome often bought en bloc.

Alongside the European texts are important Eastern collections: Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Tibetan manuscripts and those of many other traditions, documenting different medical and cosmological systems. For the student of grimoires, the Wellcome offers the rare opportunity to compare in one place the magical traditions of distant cultures and to observe their similarities and differences.

From Library to Wellcome Collection

Since 2007 the library has been part of the Wellcome Collection, a public institution combining reading rooms, exhibitions and cultural activities in the Euston Road building. Access is free upon registration, and a growing share of the holdings has been digitised and made available online, including many alchemical and magical manuscripts.

This openness has changed the way the history of magic is studied. Texts once accessible only to a few specialists are now available to researchers worldwide, who can compare different copies of the same treatise and reconstruct its circulation. It is an outcome that Wellcome himself, convinced of the documentary value of every object, perhaps did not foresee in this form.

The story of Henry Wellcome is a reminder that many great libraries are born of a single collector's obstinacy. What he regarded as material for a universal history of medicine has become one of the most important resources for anyone studying the relationship between body, healing and magical belief in human history, from ancient Egypt to modern Europe.