The New York Times-20080129-One Man-s Jigsaw Puzzle- Capturing an Odd World- -Review-

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One Man's Jigsaw Puzzle, Capturing an Odd World; [Review]

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The classical facade of the Wellcome Collection here makes it seem as if this museum, which opened last June, were going to treat medical history the way the nearby British Museum treats Greek and Near Eastern civilizations, with an ordered, carefully annotated display of marvels and antiquities. But it doesn't take long before that notion is thoroughly overturned.

Perhaps it happens when you watch the famous 1929 Surrealist film (Un Chien Andalou ) made by Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, in which an eyeball is slit by a razor. Or perhaps it is when you come upon a fragment of skin from the dissected body of the 19th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Or an 18th-century tubular bellows used to resuscitate the unconscious by blowing tobacco smoke into their rectums.

Certainly by the time you see more contemporary objects -- a world map whose borders are made out of mosquitoes or a sculpture of superhuman-size globules of bulbous fat and cellulite perched on tiny legs -- it is clear that something very different is going on here. Chinese porcelain fruits open to reveal lovers coupling. Florence Nightingale's moccasins and Napoleon's toothbrush share company with a van Gogh etching. A lock of King George III's hair (found to have traces of arsenic) is here, along with a chilling array of amputation saws.

The question is: Just what is going on at the Wellcome Collection? Answering that isn't made any simpler by the fact that this museum manages simultaneously to present one of the most successful science-oriented shows I have seen anywhere (a temporary exhibition, Sleeping and Dreaming, mounted in collaboration with the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in Dresden, Germany), along with one of the most banal and uninformative (a permanent exhibition called Medicine Now, which mixes unimpressive contemporary artworks with cursory discussions of genetics, obesity and malaria).

Most of the older items here were acquired during the early 20th century by Henry Wellcome, an American-born pharmaceutical entrepreneur. Wellcome used his fortune (which came partly from his introduction of an alternative to powders and liquids, the medicinal pill, which he called a tabloid) to send buyers around the world purchasing objects as varied as antique prosthetics and Sumatran amulets. During the 1920s he was spending more annually on acquisitions than the British Museum. By the early 1930s he owned five times as many objects as the Louvre. More than a million objects crowded his storerooms.

My plans exist in my mind like a jigsaw puzzle, he told one of his deputies, and gradually I shall be able to piece it together.

But that never happened. At Wellcome's death in 1936, the puzzle was left unfinished. Wellcome envisioned a definitive Museum of Man, but photographs from a 1913 incarnation of that museum show rooms stacked with medical jars, statuary, weapons, flasks, bundles of herbs and curios. In his will Wellcome left the collection, along with an immense endowment, to the Wellcome Trust, with the mandate to foster medical research. The trust is now the largest charity in Britain and the second-largest medical research charity in the world, spending more than $1 billion every year.

As for the collection, after Wellcome's death it seemed so miscellaneous that hundreds of thousands of objects were dispersed. (Many pieces of medical equipment are now on permanent loan to the Science Museum here.) Interest was partly revived by Medicine Man, a 2003 exhibition of some 700 of Wellcome's objects at the British Museum (with an accompanying catalog). It has now been reincarnated as a permanent show at the Wellcome museum.

The new museum, which cost $60 million to carve out of Wellcome's 1932 headquarters, is partly meant to give a home to the still immense remaining collection. The building's 15,000 square feet of exhibition space also allow for visiting exhibitions and public events. Its library contains more than two million items, including 70,000 rare books and 250,000 paintings, prints and photographs. With new acquisitions, pieces of this elaborate jigsaw keep being added.

But what sort of picture is taking shape? If a great institution is the lengthened shadow of a single man, a collection provides a reflection of that man and an image of how he understood the world. We honor the collections of a Mellon or a Rockefeller because their taste and wealth reshaped the way we see and interpret the world.

Wellcome's collection, with its anthropological oddities and relics of celebrity, is almost too easy to dismiss as grotesque -- as a highbrow version of Ripley's Believe It or Not. That impression is strengthened because detailed descriptions of the objects are placed far from the displays, as if ensuring that the objects remain mysterious as long as possible.

But in an essay in the Medicine Man catalog, Ghislaine Lawrence, a curator at the Science Museum, explains that Wellcome developed his collection around a 19th-century notion of progress and evolution. Every type of object, whether lancet or toothbrush or obstetrical clamp, is represented from as many periods and places as possible, creating what Wellcome once described as links in the chain of human experience which stretch back from the present time into the prehistoric period of the early ages.

In its unviewable whole, the collection would have displayed these objects as if they were part of an evolutionary chain leading to superior contemporary models. Wellcome paid attention to African and Asian ritual objects, for example, not because of their beauty or cultural distinctiveness, but because they were way stations in the evolution of modern medical understanding. The early version of this museum, which was never open to the general public, also reflected racialist ideas about evolution, flawed peoples giving way to what Wellcome called the fully developed man of today.

But this dated perspective does not constrain how these objects can be experienced; as displayed here, Wellcome's evolutionary preoccupations are irrelevant. Instead the display cases provide an almost visceral impression of the variety of human preoccupations with the body, its ailments, its pleasures and its trials. It is too bad that the museum could not display thousands of these pieces, because quantity really is as important as selectivity, and repetition as crucial as variation. A vast yearning can be sensed in them, an attempt to comprehend birth, master death and confront human frailty. It is not the history of medicine that is on display; it is the enterprise of medicine in its largest sense. The art of healing merges with the art of living and dying. Science and religion are intertwined.

This is not really a distortion of Wellcome's original ambitions; it is a revelation about them. Despite his evolutionary preoccupations, his collection is not a paean to the powers of the Enlightenment and the triumphs of modern medicine. Instead, it is an appreciation of the primal and universal impulse that inspired them. That is one reason that it is so jarring to emerge from Medicine Man and enter the sterile, surgically lighted, Tate Modern sensibility of the Medicine Now exhibition, which looks at medicine as a socially progressive enterprise, full of earnest sensitivity toward those who suffer, whether from obesity or malaria.

The Dreaming exhibition, on the other hand, manages to combine the uncanny with sophisticated analysis in displays on snoring, Freud, alarm clocks and thalidomide. It mixes pop appeal and historical example, demonstrating inventions and artwork related to sleep, creations inspired by dreams, and continuing experiments. It surpasses the Wellcome collection because it surveys, explains and teaches, but it also seems an extension of it because of its respect for the mysterious aspects of our physical lives.

Wellcome wanted his collection to be as complete as possible. What, though, would a complete Wellcome collection look like? This museum is, on balance, so effective that you begin to understand. A complete Wellcome collection would be nothing less than the world itself, in all its immense variety, its residents probing their physical frailties, creating instruments and rituals, struggling through time and space against the limits of illness and death and displaying, in their possessions, all the perversities of our biological natures.

The Wellcome Collection is open Tuesday through Sunday at 183 Euston Road, London; www.wellcomecollection.org.

[Illustration]PHOTOS: The Wellcome Collection: in London now offers Sleeping and Dreaming, a temporary exhibition that includes Headthinker V, left, by Laura Ford.(PHOTOGRAPH BY MARCUS ROSE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)(pg. E1); A 1902 portrait of Henry Wellcome, who died in 1936.(PHOTOGRAPH BY WELLCOME LIBRARY, LONDON); Amputation saws from the Wellcome Collection, compiled by Henry Wellcome, who had made his fortune in pharmaceuticals.(PHOTOGRAPH BY MARCUS ROSE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES); Chinese porcelain fruit with erotic figures inside.(PHOTOGRAPH BY WELLCOME LIBRARY, LONDON)(pg. E5)