พิพิธภัณฑ์และโครงการเวลคัมคอลเลกชันWellcome Collection

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.

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.