The American
Henry Wellcome, 1890
PHOTO COURTESY WELLCOME LIBRARY, LONDON PHOTO BELOW COURTESY GARY POWELL
Americans in Britain:
Henry Solomon Wellcome
Founder in 1936 of the eponymous charitable foundation, Gary Powell tells us more
A
s a guide at St Paul’s Cathedral I often direct American visitors to the Henry Wellcome memorial, positioned on the crypt wall in the Medical Corner. This normally engenders a blank, unknowing gaze, turning to surprise and scepticism when qualified with a tale of a man who travelled a path from America’s Wild West, across the Atlantic, and died a wealthy British citizen and a Knight of the British Realm.
cise dosage. Wellcome and Burroughs, who were blessed with remarkable marketing skills, promoted their new medicines by supplying portable medicine chests (a fore-runner to the first aid kit) to important members of Victorian society including missionaries and explorers, politicians and royalty, thus ensuring their products travelled the world. Much of the business profits were ploughed back into medical research and a medical collection that would Wisconsin-born Henry Solomon Wellcome graduated from Philadelphia’s exceed a million artefacts. Wellcome’s first research laboratories were estabCollege of Pharmacy. As a travelling lished in 1894 a year before Burroughs’ salesman he touted his medicines death. In 1901 Wellcome married Syrie, through America’s most hostile territories. In 1880, aged twenty-seven, he trav- the daughter of child welfare reformer elled to England and with fellow Ameri- Dr Barnardo, and became a British citizen in 1910. The marriage suffered can, Silas Burroughs (1846-1895), set because of Wellcome’s obsessive focus up a business that would develop into the world’s biggest pharmaceutical and on his work – they were divorced fifteen years later. All aspects of the medical research organisation. Within business including the library and four years, the company, Burroughs, the medical museum were consoliWellcome & Co., promoted a product, the compressed pill, that revolutionised dated into the Wellcome Foundation in 1924. The family home had been the way the world’s population would No.6 Gloucester Gate, NW1 on the carry and ingest medicines far into the edge of London’s Regents Park, which future. Wellcome and Burroughs protected the product and its name tabloid Wellcome called home until his death in 1936. He was knighted for his contri(later shortened to tablet) by patent. bution to medical science in 1932. An The tabloid ensured quality and a pre-
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English Heritage blue plaque, affixed to the address in 1989, commemorates his life and achievements The foundation moved into its permanent home at 183 Euston Road, London, in 1932. Following his death in his early eighties Wellcome bequeathed his fortune to ‘the advancement of medical and scientific research to improve mankind’s wellbeing’. The foundation became the Wellcome Trust in the 1950s. In 2007 the building was transformed into a facility fit for the 21st century, including upgrades to the magnificent museum and a research library. The Wellcome Collection of curious artefacts is open most days and free, and well worth a visit. Today it is estimated that the Wellcome Trust funds in excess of £600 million of biochemical research, every year, throughout the world. Gary Powell is a retired London detective; he is the author of Square London, a social history of the London square. His latest book Death in Disguise is published in October 2014 (History Press). He also conducts several walks around the darker side of London. garypowellauthor.co.uk