organizationsWellcome Collection
organizationBritain and IrelandEverywhereThe MaghrebUnited Kingdomconfidence mediumneeds checking
London museum and library at 183 Euston Road, opened to the public in June 2007 and part of the Wellcome Trust. It rests on what Sir Henry Wellcome, 1853–1936, bought: books, paintings and objects on the history of medicine worldwide, gathered on a scale no individual has matched since. Its holdings are described as including 17,500 magic-medical amulets, talismans and charms that Wellcome picked up in Islamic North Africa and elsewhere.
citedWhen
opened June 2007; the collection behind it built from the late nineteenth century still carried cited
| Period | 2007 to now; the collection from the 1890s |
|---|---|
| How the date is known | textual — a dated text describes it |
Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.
The story
Wellcome's museum came first — the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum at 54a Wigmore Street. Edward Lovett curated an exhibition there in 1916, 'Folklore of London'; the two men corresponded for years. Wellcome bought at auction on an industrial scale, and Walter Leo Hildburgh's amulets were bequeathed into the same collection.
The institution has published its own account of how that buying worked. In 2021 the Collection acknowledged that Wellcome's collecting was shaped by colonialism: many objects bought at auction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century carried no documentation of how they had been acquired, and may have been "unjustly taken" from communities across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. It has committed to working with communities on provenance, and in 2025 returned a group of Jain manuscripts to India after researchers found they had been acquired without the consent of the communities they belonged to.
The display has moved too. Medicine Man, the permanent show of part of Wellcome's own collection, closed permanently on 27 November 2022 after fifteen years; the closure was perceived to follow concerns over racist, sexist and ableist theories and language.
The amulets themselves have been on the move for longer. Hildburgh's amulet material was transferred out of Wellcome to the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1985. The figure of 17,500 magic-medical amulets is published as a description of the Wellcome holdings; this record prints the two statements side by side and does not reconcile them, because it has not read a catalogue that says what stayed and what left.
Now
Wellcome is digitising and openly licensing its collection: as of January 2020 over 40 million images from 325,000 items were available on wellcomecollection.org and through third-party services. The licensing is mixed, per item — in the Collection's own words, digitised materials "can be accessed and downloaded for use under a variety of Creative Commons non-commercial, attribution and Public Domain licences, depending on the material". Inference — attribution and public-domain items clear Wikimedia Commons; non-commercial ones do not, so the licence has to be read on the item and never assumed from the institution. Its exhibition 'Charmed Life: The solace of objects', 6 October 2011 to 26 February 2012, showed Lovett's amulets beside new work by Felicity Powell.
What is on record about it
- Publishes open images — mixed: Creative Commons non-commercial, attribution and Public Domain licences, applied per item cited
- Repatriation under way — 2021 acknowledgement that the collecting was shaped by colonialism; Jain manuscripts returned to India in 2025 cited
What this is near
What names this one
Each in its own words, from its own page.
Where this came from
- Wellcome Collection — Wikipedia read 2026-09-16
- Accessing our collections — Wellcome Collection read 2026-09-16
- Walter Leo Hildburgh — Wikipedia read 2026-09-16
- Edward Lovett — Wikipedia read 2026-09-16
Elsewhere
Record updated 2026-09-16. This record as JSON. Every field carries its own provenance; the tier chips above say which.