Page 88 - The Secret Museum

BLYTHE HOUSE IS A LISTED building, on Blythe Road, in Kensington. It began life in

1903 as the headquarters of the Post Office Savings Bank. The post office building
was the first in London to have electricity and was split in half, with men and women
working on different sides, each with their own entrance. Today, the Science
Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum use it as a store
and archive. The Science Museum keeps its small objects here (its large objects are
kept in a series of aircraft hangars, in an ex-RAF airbase in Wiltshire).

The Science Museum’s treasure trove in Blythe House includes over 100,000
objects collected in the early nineteenth century by a pharmaceutical entrepreneur

with a Midas touch, the devoted collector Sir Henry Wellcome (1853–1936).

Wellcome owned a pharmaceutical company. He made a fortune thanks to his
invention of medicine in tablet form. He called them tabloids – as in a mixture of
tablets and alkaloids in a small packet; this is where we get the word we use to
describe small newspapers. He used his wealth to set up the Wellcome Trust, which
today is one of the biggest medical charities in the world. He loved to collect
medical curios and books, and had agents dotted around the globe buying up things
they thought would interest him. They collected so much stuff he didn’t get around to

unpacking it all before he died. All of his books are stored in the Wellcome Library,
on Euston Road, London. His objects were divided up between different museums
around the world; some were put on display at the Wellcome Collection, on Euston
Road, London (where the library is) and a tenth of his objects was brought over to
Blythe House.

A team of archivists cataloguing the collection I came to see has been working for
five years and has sorted over 230,000 items. It’s likely to take them another seven
years to go through the lot. No one curator has ever seen it all. I spent three hours

walking in and out of rooms, pulling open drawers and looking through shelves of
artefacts with Selina Hurley, assistant curator of medicine at the Science Museum.

The medical treasures are sorted into rooms by theme. Each room has its own
smell: the oriental room smells like incense; and the dentistry room like the bright
liquid you gargle when you sit up, at the dentist’s. All of the rooms made me feel
quite uneasy as they are filled with objects created to help people who were unwell.

We opened a door that led into a room filled with Roman votive offerings –
models of injured parts of the body that were offered to a god to give thanks, or to
ask for a cure; all over the walls are little clay feet, arms, legs, ears and even

penises. Another room contains folk charms. Selina told me, ‘Every time I come in
here I stumble across something different.’ Opening a drawer, she discovers a
wizened object; ‘I think that’s a dried mole. Ah, here is a frog – he doesn’t smell too
bad – he was used to cure cramp and kept in a little bag. A lot of things like this work
through transference. You hold something and transfer your pain into it.’ Beside it is
another example of this: a dog’s tooth used as a teething charm for babies (the pain
would be transferred from the baby’s tooth to the dog’s). Lots of objects are labelled