The Rich American, the Travelling Captain and a Phallic Quest By L.J. Trafford

It hangs in a glass case in dimmed lighting: a small phallus carved in white with wings

made from bronze.
The label informs me it comes from Pompeii and that such items were symbols of fertility and strength. I could easily churn out 2,000 words on the subject of phallic imagery and objects in ancient Rome. There’s a lot of them. But that’s not what I’m writing about this month. For my second thought after, “Wow that’s beautiful." Was “I wonder how it got here?”


I found I couldn’t shake that thought. Just how did a tiny phallic amulet from the lost city of Pompeii end up in a gallery on London’s Euston Road? I suspected there might be a story there.
I was right. It is quite a story. One involving an eccentric American millionaire, a dashing ex naval captain with a love of fast cars & hobnobbing with grandees, and a quite extraordinary collection.



The American

Henry Wellcome courtesy of  Wellcome Collection.

If there is a better example of the self made man than Henry Wellcome I've yet to find it. He began life in a wood cabin in the slowly forming United States of America, the son of a travelling preacher.
This was proper frontier country. Aged eight Henry's home town was attacked by the Sioux. The young boy assisted his uncle in caring for the wounded.

Aged 15 he created and marketed his own version of Invisible Ink. Aged 19 we find him at the Chicago School of Pharmacy. A promising and developing career as a salesman for a drug company was interrupted when his friend Silas Burroughs suggested Wellcome follow him to London. Burroughs had in mind a British pharmaceutical company, but run with American panache, drive and most importantly American style marketing.
Henry took the leap to London and in 1880 Burroughs, Wellcome and Co was founded.

To say Burroughs, Wellcome and Co was successful is a gross understatement.
Burrough’s sudden and untimely death in 1895 left Wellcome as sole proprietor and enormously wealthy. What to do with all this money piling up?

Well there was partying for a start.

Henry Wellcome in fancy dress.
Courtesy of  Wellcome Collection

 


There was travel. 

Wellcome in Sudan.
Courtesy of  Wellcome Collection

And then there was collecting.

Wellcome had a dream, a grand ambition with his collecting. It was to;

“Trace the history of the human body in sickness and in health throughout the whole broad sweep of history.”

He intended to create a museum called the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum (and succeeded, the WHMM opened in 1913) and set about acquiring the objects that would articulate this aim.

Gentleman collectors in the Victorian era were ten a half penny but the way Wellcome went about collecting was something entirely different: it was industrial.
Partly this was born of his innate curiosity. Partly his American drive that had taken him from a wood cabin in frontier country to a multi-millionaire living within the fashionable London set. But mostly it was driven by the huge resources he had at his disposal.

Reading about Wellcome’s collection is jaw dropping and ultimately a little dispiriting. How was I to find a record of my little phallus in this lot? To give you some idea of just how much Wellcome collected you need only know that they measured it by the ton.

There was 3 and a half tons of swords, five tons of photograph albums, 2 and half tons of guns and cannons and shields.
There were 110 cases of Graeco-Roman objects.
In all a million plus objects made up Wellcome’s collection. Somewhere in this million was my little phallus.

Though Henry Wellcome travelled extensively seeking objects for his museum (Much to the disgust of his wife Syrie “Ever since our marriage, the greater part of our time has been spent in places I detested collecting curios” - they later divorced) he did not take sole responsibility for acquiring objects for his museum. He did have a company to run after all, but also because he recognised that his presence at auctions was likely to push the price up of his desired object. To overcome this he was known to effect disguises, as he told a friend:

 “I usually put on very plain clothes. A top hat usually excites the cupidity of the dealer and the higher the hat the higher the price."

Alongside his own undercover missions he also employed a team of agents to travel the globe to find suitable objects for his museum. A bit of internet research brought me to one Captain Johnston Saint, one of Wellcome’s agents who undertook a tour of Europe on behalf of Wellcome. I wondered if he might be the man who purchased my little white phallus. I wondered how I might find out whether he was.


The Captain

Peter Johnston Saint.
Courtesy of Wellcome Collection

Peter Johnston Saint was born in 1886. He had served in both the Royal Flying Corp and the Indian Army. Well connected, (one of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters was a childhood friend), he adored socialising, travel and fast cars.
He joined the, now named, Wellcome Institute in 1921 and had soon impressed Henry Wellcome. Within a very short time he was given the title of Foreign Secretary. The sole purpose of this role was to travel and buy up objects suitable for the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum. It was a job Johnston Saint was well suited to involving, as it did, much hobnobbing with Ambassadors, Cardinals, Directors of key museums and other such notables.
A friendly member of staff at the Wellcome Collection (thank you Ross!) pointed me towards the papers they hold on Peter Johnston Saint. There were letters to Henry Wellcome, reports on his activities as Foreign Secretary and (joy!) his travels diaries.
Somewhere in these diaries I might find my little white phallus. Hoping he had decent handwriting I began to read about his trip to Italy.


Johnston Saint began his Italian quest on Saturday 19th January 1929:

“Arrived in Rome 8pm. Found thick snow here also, which I am told, is almost unheard of"

His diary is an interesting insight into how objects were sourced and brought for the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum. Some of the work involves making contact with the right people. Such as on Monday 21st January when Johnston Saint meets with Cardinale Gasquet, the Prefect of the Vatican archives. The Cardinal is presented with a gift:

“The Cardinal was very interested in the research studies and medical history which we sent them through the foreign office and he says he has placed these at the Vatican library on behalf of the Duce (Mussolini).”

Johnston Saint also meets with the Ambassador and secures a letter of introduction to the Heads of Italian Museums. But alongside hobnobbing with Directors, Ambassadors and Cardinals, Johnston Saint spends a great deal of time browsing through the small shops of Rome:

“In a shop near Forum Romano I found some very interesting objects. Several very interesting Roman large surgical instruments…. A Greek pornographic vase in terra cotta in perfect condition…. A small bronze amphora and a Roman votive foot in bronze. Also a very curious object which may be an amulet or perhaps a form of pomander.

I purchased all the objects above for £21. The pornographic vase being worth half this sum.

I then visited the shop where I saw this collection of 99 phallic objects.”

I thought for a moment that within those 99 phallic objects might be my phallus but as Johnston Saint drily records:

 “The price asked is a very high one and I do not think the collection worth it”

He did not purchase them.

But later that same day he is to be found in further small establishments:

 “At another a shop I found a fine Roman lancet, a bronze stigel with unusual form of handle – a weight decorated pornographic subject and a Roman bronze probe. Price £4.”

To put this in some context the average annual wage in 1929 was £200 per year. Johnston Saint spent £25 in a single day and this compared to some days was a low amount. Later this same week he spends £64 on a single drawing. Henry Wellcome's pocket was swimming pool sized, however, as we have seen Johnston Saint is very much using his own judgement on artefacts. Several he rejects as inadequate or over priced but not:

"A huge terracotta Priapus from Pompeii"

Which he snaps up. Priapus is the Roman God of Fertility and is usually represented with a grossly oversized erect penis.

A Priapus from Pompeii. Not
the one JS purchased.
Attributed to Aaron Wolpert

It's not all buy, buy, buy though. Johnston Saint takes the time to visit the sites. A trip to the Vatican Library on Friday 25th January impresses him much:

 “This marvellous collection particularly rich in manuscripts,.. And housed in the most luxurious surroundings. What impressed me most was the excellent state of all the books and manuscripts... although the library consists of some 300,000 books there was sufficient room for 4 times that number”

The baths of Caracalla have him recording wistfully:

 “Their magnificence, their luxury and their marvellous efficiency are only one of the many wonders of ancient Rome.”

 Writing Roman based Historical Fiction I have visited Rome numerous times for research and I found it quite fascinating to read Johnston Saint describing the exact same sites I have visited only eighty years before.

What I found really special was his description of a day trip to the nearby Lake Nemi on Sunday 27th January

“I was anxious to see the Largo di Nemi, the Lake in the Alban hills which the Italian government are draining in order to recover the two Roman galleys which were sunk there in the time of Caligula. The level of the water in the lake has already been reduced by ten feet,exposing the small Roman habour….. The bad weather and the recent heavy falls of snow have more of less held up the work for the present.

..... I think when these galleys are recovered we might be able to get hold of something. At this moment it is not possible to do anything nor there anything to be found.”

Bad weather might have prevented the work that day but work did continue and these massive ships were eventually exposed.

The now lost pleasure barge of Caligula. Look
at the man to the left to see the huge awesome scale
of this boat.

Sadly they were destroyed during the second world war. All that is left of them is a few artefacts recovered and displayed in Rome’s National Museum and photographs that show the epic scale of these ships. They were truly awe inspiring and to think that Peter Johnston Saint was so close to seeing these epic pleasure barges revealed from the water!








On Tuesday 29th January Johnston Saint reveals that he is leaving for Naples. Would he visit Pompeii? Would he stumble across a certain small white phallus, and hopefully write down that he did? Or did the phallus not come from Pompeii at all? Was it maybe discovered in one of those small shops by the Forum selling phallic objects by the hundreds?
There was only one way to find out. I kept reading.....


Those letters of introduction obtained from the Ambassador come in handy now as they gain him access to the Director of the Naples Archaeological Museum and a very famous cabinet:

“I also inspected the Pornographic Cabinets which is ordinarily closed. Here they have many friezes and stuccos found in various houses in Pompeii - a collection of lamps, phallic objects.”

The Pornographic Cabinet of Naples Museum was where some of the most extreme (to Western eyes of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries) were housed. It contained, as Johnston Saint mentions, many phallic objects and imagery. As well as a truly stupendous statue of the God Pan having it away with a goat.

From Naples Museum's famous cabinet. Photo attributed Kim Traynor.

It’s probably worth me pointing out, if you hadn’t already gathered, that Wellcome was very much interested in acquiring erotic/sexual material. The Wellcome Historical Medical Museum contained 300 sexually themed Roman objects. They were very much in keeping with his ambition of a museum dedicated to human kind and biology.

Dr Jen Grove of Exeter University has written a very thorough account of the collecting of sexually themed materials in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This is what she has to say about Wellcome’s collection:

“In the large, richly bound accession registers which the museum used to record acquisitions, a member of Wellcome’s staff entered the term 'PHA' next to each of these items. This stood for 'Phallic Worship' and this label would also be given, almost uniformly, to each of the hundreds of objects featuring phallic and other sexual imagery in Wellcome’s collection from across world history. This tells us that Wellcome was interested in an anthropological theory, first developed in the Enlightenment period, which looked for the origins of religion in the worship of procreation. “

He also collected images and objects outside of this sex/religion theme including materials dealing with the pleasure aspect of intercourse:

“Objects which seem to indicate an interest in sexual pleasure for its own sake include a collection of historical and cross-cultural sex aids.”

This was why Johnston Saint was dutifully examining and purchasing statues of Priapus and other phallic related materials. Although Johnston Saint cannot purchase anything from the pornographic cabinet he does buy an extensive range of photographs of the objects it contains.

One of Peter Johnston Saint's photographs from his 1929 trip to Rome. Image courtesy Wellcome Collection

The next day on Thursday 31st January Johnston Saint is given a tour of Herculaneum. His mood is greatly different from the interest and excitement at securing his photographs from Pompeii. To see the theatre at Herculaneum he had to walk down through 60 feet of lava (this is still the case today).

“One proceeds down a tunnel to the excavated portion and it is here that one can realise to some degree what a tremendous catastrophe the eruption of 79AD was.”

He is deeply moved by what he sees. One description he gives is particularly poignant and evocative:

“In one of the bedrooms on the first floor I saw a lamp, a glass bottle, and other objects including the marble table on which these things stood exactly as they were in AD 79”

That afternoon after his tour of Herculaneum he’s taken to see a local Hotel Proprietor. The hotelier's estate borders the Pompeii site and he has excavated his own grounds and found some objects he wishes to show off (and sell).   The hotelier had the permission of the Italian Government to offer these objects for sale, but with 50% of the receipts going back to the government. A fact that does not please Johnston Saint, as he notes;

 “So naturally there were no great bargains to be picked up.”

However what the hotelier shows him is so impressive that he cannot hold back the bucks:

“I brought some interesting objects. The following are the details. Excavated at Pompeii 1927. A Roman bronze lancet, a bronze probe on spatula handle decorated, a fine pair of tweezers in bronze and two surgical needles both fine in bronze. Then a terra cotta figure of a woman which is very interesting anatomically”

Also he buys a votive leg and foot. And records one final item of purchase:

”A marble phallus about 4 inches long with bronze wings, a chain and ring for suspending – perfect -used against the evil eye.”

A marble phallus you say? 4 inches long? Bronze wings? And a chain for suspending?
A bit like this one then?

Miraculously I had found it! I had found my phallus! It had been excavated in 1927 by the proprietor of a hotel that stood on the Porta Marina gate into Pompeii. He met Peter Johnston Saint on Thursday 31st January 1929 and showed him his collection of artefacts. Johston Saint purchased several of these objects on behalf of Henry Wellcome, including the phallus.
And that folks, is how my little white phallus ended up in a gallery in London’s Euston Road!



Epilogue


For some reason I feel this piece needs an epilogue. So here it is.

Henry Wellcome and Peter Johnston Saint
Courtesy of  Wellcome Collection

Henry Wellcome died in 1936. He left quite a legacy. Not just for his vast collection of curios (of which a very small slice can be viewed today in London’s Science Museum and the Wellcome Collection which stands on Euston Road) but also for science. His will set up a charity named The Wellcome Trust. He wanted the profits from his business to advance medical science.

The company Henry founded with Silas Burroughs went through several incarnations (including Glaxo Wellcome) before it was finally sold off and GlaxoSmithKline one of the largest pharma companies on the planet was formed. The money from this sale was ploughed into the charitable Wellcome Trust. Today the Wellcome Trust has assets worth £20 billion and in 2017 spent £1.1 billion advancing medical science.

And as for that small marble phallus? Well 700,000 people visit the Wellcome Collection each year and let’s assume absolutely all of them stare at that little white phallus and think firstly “Wow” and then secondly “I wonder how it got here?"


Further Reading

I'd highly recommend Frances Larson's "An Infinity of Things: How Henry Wellcome collected the World." if you are at all interested in Henry Wellcome and his mania for collecting. This book gave me much of the material for this article.
Special thanks also to Dr Jen Grove and Ross Macfarlane for their assistance.



L.J. Trafford is the author of the Four Emperors Series set in ancient Rome. She also runs the hashtag #phallusthursday on Twitter, which examines the use of  phallic imagery in ancient art and has a bit of a puerile snigger about it all. 

A very welcome development – Michelle Lovric

The history of medicine is the history of mankind. We know ourselves through the adversities our bodies face and the ways in which, through the ages, we have confronted them. Our cultural identities are aligned with and imprinted on our bodily operations. It is medical history that records plagues including AIDS, tattoos, sport and eating patterns, keeping the most scrupulous records of our physical existence.

This post is about a refreshing new development in the field of medical history, and includes a set of images that demonstrate just how wide a field is covered by that term. All the illustrations in this blog come from one place: Wellcome Images.

Venus's Bathing (Margate). A woman diving off a bathing wagon in to the sea,

       hand coloured etching by Thomas Rowlandson, 1790

The Wellcome Trust has recently taken the plunge (forgive me! but I love this picture) of making its historical images freely available for download for personal, academic teaching or study use, under one of two Creative Commons licences. Hi-res historical images are also available to download free of charge, for any usage, under a Creative Commons Attribution Only. Historical images are free of all reproduction fees.

This news will bring shock and awe (in a good way) to those of us who have had to laboriously and expensively negotiate reproduction rights for books, PowerPoint presentation and blogs.

Not only is this a most generous gesture by the Wellcome, but there’s an impressively well managed image bank site. Searches are easy and extensive. Each free-usage picture comes with the Wellcome Library attribution embedded in it, so one doesn’t have to accessorise and clot up one’s text with attributions as with (the much appreciated) Wikimedia commons, for example.

Effigy of the false Imposter (Satan) sitting on a brass throne wearing on his head a crown like the tiara of the Pope. From the Histoires Prodigieuses, by Pierre Boaistuau, a sixteenth-century French writer presented to Queen Elizabeth I in 1560.

Wellcome searches enable the user to consult History, Contemporary or Historical & Contemporary. Advanced search options include date and medium (i.e. carving or painting).

When searching, it is easy to see which images are free usage: those that require clearance are labelled ‘rights managed’ even in the search thumbnails.

Clearly a great deal of thought has gone into this process. So this month I interviewed Simon Chaplin, head of the Wellcome Library, about the developments.

ML Can you tell me briefly about the history of the Wellcome collection of images and how it started?

Wellcome Images is an amalgam of two things: the Wellcome Trust’s medical photographic library, and the picture collections of the Wellcome Library. As the delivery of images has moved from analogue to digital, so these have been combined into one service, Wellcome Images. Today we have hundreds of thousands of digital images freely available online at wellcomeimages.org, covering the history of medicine and current biomedical science and clinical practice.

ML Can you explain how all the different parts of the Wellcome Trust work – the Image Library, the Library, the Collection, the Trust, and anything else I have forgotten?

Henry Solomon Wellcome, 1906. Oil painting by Hugh Goldwin Riviere

We’re all part of the Wellcome Trust, the charitable foundation set up by pharmacist and collector Henry Wellcome. Our mission is to improve human and animal health by supporting research and public engagement around biomedical science. In line with Henry’s vision, this also includes understanding the place of medicine in culture, past and present. Like the BBC, we have different elements that serve different audiences – Wellcome Collection is our public exhibition and event venue, the Wellcome Library supports researchers interested in the place of medicine in culture, Wellcome Images serves up images drawn from all of our activities. There’s lots of parts to Wellcome, but underneath it we all share a common purpose.

ML I believe you are the first major picture library to take this unusual step of freeing your historical images for use. Is that true?

I’d love to say we are, but actually we’re part of a growing trend. In the US federally-funded institutions such as the Library of Congress or the Smithsonian have always made their out-of-copyright collections freely available. More recently places like the Rijksmuseum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have made high-resolution images freely available. We’ve gone  a step further than some by allowing anyone to use the images for any purpose rather than just restricting them for educational or private research use.

ML What was the thinking behind this move?

Our mission is to encourage knowledge creation and engagement. What matters to us is that people find and use our images, so the fewer restrictions we have in place the better. It helps that for us generating revenue isn’t the most important factor – we have Henry Wellcome’s endowment and the team who manage it to thank for that. But I think that even for museums and libraries that don’t have the same kind of funding that we do, there is often not much profit to be made from selling rights to your images when you factor in all the time needed to manage permissions, negotiate fees and then ensure that people are following the rules!

Picturesque sales techniques for medical wares

ML Do you think other big image banks, like Bridgeman, Getty or similar will follow suit?

I think it’s different for commercial images libraries – clearly they need to make a profit, as do people whose livelihoods depend on the copyright they own on images they’ve created (just like authors!). But like music and publishing companies they are adapting to a changing environment, and I think there is growing awareness that in some cases it is better to embrace limited free use than to become a kind of digital Canute. For example, Getty has recently made millions of its images freely ‘embeddable’ in web pages.

ML The Wellcome Trust has a vast collection of medical history artefacts. Are modern photographs of the artefacts included in the free usage?

Yes, the free images include modern photographs of objects in the library collection or in the Wellcome collections held at the Science Museum in London (like this one, http://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/L0034909.html, which is a good reminder of why locking precious things up is sometimes not the best solution)

Wax anatomical figure of a woman, by Clemente Susini, Florence, 1771-1800

ML What kind of images are restricted in use? This is because the copyright rests with the photographer or artist?

We have some images that are only freely available for educational or private research use. This is because they’ve been supplied to us by photographers or artists who trust us to manage the image rights on their behalf. When we license these we pass the fees back to the photographer. It’s a good system – they benefit, and we help achieve our mission because we have these fantastic images that can be used for education and research (as our Wellcome Image Awards demonstrates, http://wellcomeimageawards.org)

The life and horrible adventures of the celebrated Dr. Faustus; relating his first introduction to Lucifer,  and connection with infernal spirits; his method of raising the Devil, and his final dismissal to the tremendous abyss of Hell, 1825

ML Tell me a little about the length and breadth of the image collection and what are its biggest strengths, in your opinion?

Where to begin? Well, our images reflect the wonderful variety of stuff we have in the Wellcome Library for a start – so illustrations from printed books and manuscripts, paintings, prints, drawings and photographs and so on, mostly relating to medicine or health in some way, but not all. For example, our collections are strong on subjects like travel, food and religion – all of which are closely associated with health and well-being. (Ed. note - and animal well-being: see below)

A group of dandies stand by while a lady's dog receives an enema. Coloured engraving.

Our collections are strong in non-western material so we have a lot of illustrations from East and South Asian manuscripts as well.

Early 18th-century Chinese woodcut illustrating 24 types of external haemorrhoids. From Yizong jinjian: Waike xinfa (The Golden Mirror Of Medicine: Essential Knowledge and Secrets of External Medicine)

ML I understand that there are new developments underway for the Research Library.

We’re in the process of revamping it, creating a new public library – which visitors can go into without becoming a member – alongside the research library. We want to encourage people to use our collections for study, and to explore what we have but we also recognise that a good research environment should be quite and not crowded, so separating the two seemed like a better way to go. The research library is almost finished – it has a richer feel, with more paintings on the walls and colour in the décor. And on a practical level we’ve enlarged our rare materials room so there’s more space for people wanting to look at archives, manuscripts and older books.

Miniature of St Luke, patron saint of medicine, and the beginning of the third Gospel. Transcribed by Shmawon the scribe and illuminated by Abraham for the sponsor Lady Nenay – Armenia Gospel of 1495

ML How easy is it for a novelist or researcher to become a member of the Wellcome Library?

About as easy as it can be: you turn up, you show us some picture id and proof of address and we give you a membership card. It’s all free and membership lasts five years before you need to renew it.

The evolution of a writer: a fox riding a goose turns into a writer seated at his typewriter - which in  turn evolves into accordion, bellows, money-bag, and handcuffs; satirising Darwin's theories. Wood engraving after C. Bennett, 1863.

ML Once they are members, they have access to all kinds of materials by remote access, something I have found very useful in own my work. Can you tell us a little about the electronic collections available to writers remotely?

I’m a historian of the 18th century so the ones I love best are the Burney collection of newspapers from the British Library – read the small ads in particular for a wonderful insight into texture of life in Georgian England – and Jisc Historic Books, which brings together three vast collections of English printed books from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. There’s a full list of all the journals and databases we subscribe to here: http://catalogue.wellcomelibrary.org/search/l.

ML And there are plans to expand the remote resources too, by digitizing a substantial proportion of its holdings and making the content freely available on the web. This already includes some cover-to-cover historical books, but I understand that you are now working to upload video and audio, entire archive collections and manuscripts, paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, ephemera and more. What is the thinking behind this?

We’ve realised that while the Wellcome Library is a wonderful place to come and work and look at our collections in person, there’s many more people out there who’d love to make use of our collections but can’t get to London. So digitising our collections helps us share them more widely. We started with images, but have expanded into books and archives and we’re increasing the pace now. We aim to have about 50 million pages online by the time we’re done – we’re about a fifth of the way there. We’ve digitised archives about genetics and eugenics, reports about public health in Victorian London, books about sex and crime (which will link to exhibitions we have planned in Wellcome Collection).

Sex and crime: The rape of Proserpine. Engraving after Titian.

We are just starting two projects, one to do all the 19th-century medical books we can lay our hands on and the other to do all of our mediaeval manuscripts. All of the stuff we’ve digitised is completely free – you don’t even need to be a library member to see it online.

Witchcraft: a white-faced witch meeting a black-faced witch with a great beast. Woodcut, 1720

ML I understand that you also have picture researchers on staff who can help? Is that a free service? What is offered?

We have expert and very helpful staff who can help point you in the right direction, but we can’t do your picture research for you! We are trying to make our catalogues and image library as straightforward and easy to search as possible, and are making sure that our images are also indexed by google. We’d love to offer personal service to users but with over 40,000 visitors to the library a year, and over half a million images downloaded each year, we’d need to hire hundreds of people!

 ML We first knew one another when you were at the Hunterian Collection. I know you have personal research interests in medical history too. Can you tell me a little more about how you came to be involved in this field?

I really wanted to be a marine biologist, but I realised quite early on that my role model (Doc, from Steinbeck’s Cannery Row) wasn’t a reliable indicator of life as a research scientist. Instead I was drawn into the history of science and medicine at university and loved the subject. Since then I’ve been lucky enough to work at three institutions – the Science Museum, where I began my career; the Hunterian museum; and now the Wellcome Library – which all have a strong connection with medical history and a desire to see this translate into things that really appeal to non-specialist audiences. I loved the Hunterian, where I helped plan the redisplay of John Hunter’s collection of anatomy and pathology specimens – things which were for too long hidden away from non-medics, but which deserve to be seen and celebrated as the masterpieces of science and skill that they are.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, President of the Royal Academy at Somerset House, holding his ear trumpet. To his    left is Dr. William Hunter who was Professor of anatomy at the Academy and is directing the arrangement of a male model. Johann Zoffany, 1783

ML Clearly you believe that there is a place for writers of fiction in the field of medical history?

History of medicine is a thriving academic discipline, and has a strong following among professional historians and doctors and others who have a part-time interest. It’s a natural thing to see this knowledge feed in to fiction: it’s such a rich subject, and speaks so strongly to the human condition. And in turn, authors writing fiction can bring the subject to new audiences, so there’s a mutually beneficial reciprocal relationship.

An early History Girl: Anna Seward (1747- 1809), writer, literary critic and correspondent. Stipple Engraving 1823 by J. Chapman

ML The Wellcome offers opportunities for writers in various ways – even to writers of fiction, with the Wellcome Prize for the best book published on a medical theme each year. Can you tell us about the thinking behind that prize, one of the most valuable in the publishing industry?

The Wellcome Book Prize is open to fiction and non-fiction writers in any genre that touches on medicine, health and illness.  The Prize, and the brilliant writers it attracts, is uniquely placed to provoke, excite and sustain interest and debate in the many forms these experiences take.  We’ve revamped the prize this year and it is now a central part of our commitment to literature as a means of inspiring and nourishing curious minds.

ML There are other opportunities for fiction writers at the Wellcome too, I understand. Engagement Fellowships …? Can you explain?

The Wellcome Trust’s Engagement Fellowships enable talented communicators to make real advances in public engagement around biomedical science and the medical humanities. We fund people for up to two years, and the strength of the scheme is the diverse range of their disciplines, from clinicians to historians. We welcome applications from established writers and artists – one of this year’s Fellows is the award-winning poet Lavinia Greenlaw. The Trust also runs a Screenwriting Fellowship with the BFI, in association with Film4.

ML Finally, an obvious question but one I cannot resist asking. What is your personal favourite among the images at the moment?

It’s this one: http://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/L0030376, the reverse of an advert for Brooke’s Soap from our ephemera collection. I got it printed on to a cover for my phone, which (a) looks like a bar of soap and (b) can do lots of things but won’t wash clothes!

                 Thank you, Simon, and many thanks to the Wellcome, too.

Michelle Lovric's website

Her latest novel, The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters, was published last month by Bloomsbury.