Page 89 - The Secret Museum

‘curious object, use unknown’.

Another room is filled with piles of forceps to assist in birth; another with large

glass storage bottles from pharmacies (one was for leeches). There was a cupboard
with intricate Japanese memento moris (reminders that we all will die and to seize
life with both hands), and a little ivory skeleton leaning on an alarm clock. I looked
at a shelf lined with tiny ivory seventeenth-century anatomical figures. They were all
lying flat, and I lifted their tummies off to reveal their insides. Particularly unsettling
was a shelf crammed with prosthetic limbs, including a hand with a Bible on the end,
and another with a scrubbing-brush attachment.

We came across the archives of Joseph Lister, the pioneer of antiseptic, and

artefacts that belonged to Louis Pasteur, the French chemist and father of germ theory.
There were items used by Pasteur in his study of anthrax, and some of his earliest
preparations for quinine, dating back to 1820. Pretty much anything you could think of
related to the history of medicine is in one of the rooms inside the Wellcome
labyrinth. If you can’t find it, maybe it is still waiting to be unpacked.

Of all the objects I saw, I liked a rattle made of cane and puffin beaks the most. It
is unlike anything else in the collection, and stood out, even from its nest inside a
drawer. It seemed to be filled with life and spirit. At first I had no idea what it was,

so I asked Selina, and she told me it was a rattle made by the Haida people, and
would have belonged to a shaman.

The Haida are the indigenous people of Haida Gwaii (‘Islands of the People’), a
group of islands off the coast of Canada, which, until 2010, were known as the Queen
Charlotte Islands. Their name for a shaman is ‘sGaaga’. The sGaaga is both a
medical doctor and a faith healer. The Haida describe the sGaaga as people with a
direct line to God. They turn to them in times of sickness and uncertainty or when
they want to know the future or explain the past.

The sGaaga would have made this rattle (some time between 1890 and 1935) after
collecting puffin beaks from the shore. Puffins shed their bright orange bills in winter

and re-grow them come spring. Without its bill, a puffin looks funny, it has a little
pointed beak instead of the rainbow splendour we’re used to seeing. Usually, they
hide out at sea at this time of year, so humans rarely see them in this state.

Puffins were symbolic for the sGaaga, because the birds dive into the water and
disappear into another realm; shaking a rattle made from their beaks symbolized
moving to another level of existence. The beaks were tied to circles of wood
representing a cosmic doorway. The rattle would have been one of a pair and used
only by a shaman.

Selina told me that, in 2009, 12 Haida people came to the Wellcome Collection to

look at the puffin bill rattle, as well as two other items made by their people: a pipe
and a comb for brushing cloth. Both are made of a rock called argillite, found only on
Graham Island in Haida Gwaii. If you see something made of argillite, it was made