Wellcome Library archives: buried treasures of bibliophilia

We were recently invited to a tour of the closed archives of the library at the Wellcome Collection. We've explored the library before and are perpetual visitors to the Reading Room, but who could pass up a chance to visit the stores of rare books and medical artefacts that made the historic Wellcome Institute so famous?

In the lower levels of the Wellcome Collection are huge rooms accessible only to library archivists. The shelves are so full they're mounted on moving bookcases that slide together to save space and are pulled apart by hand cranks to access the books.

These keepers of medical history work every day with alchemical tomes, treatises by the great minds of science, and other books from the dawn of printing...and some from before that!

This bestiary was written and drawn by hand. A bestiary is a medieval catalogue of known beasts of the natural world, usually compiled and written by monks.

Each description carried a moral lesson - the animal (or plant, if a botanical treatise) reflected the perfect will of God in creating it.

As long voyages were too dangerous for most people, many of these beasts were drawn from traveller's accounts, and descriptions of their appearance and behaviour were often exaggerated. Some of the beasts listed alongside snakes and eagles weren't real at all!

A natural history of dragons. This page: the Ethiopian.

There were also books on alchemy, with similar mixing of fact and fiction.

Articles detailing the process of distillation mingled with theories on how to transmute lead into precious metals, and the mystical properties of substances like mercury and iron.

My favourites were the books on witchcraft - usually on how evil it was, but feverishly descriptive for a moral lesson!

In those days the title page usually included a summary of the book,
much like the abstract for a thesis.

Due to the delicate nature of the books, none of them could be opened flat, and some not at all. Many of them are kept in boxes for conservation.

Some of the books were bound with pigskin, a cheap local option when one couldn't get the cured and tanned leather used to bind most books. There are a few books that were bound with human skin, although some of those were proven to be fake - their price driven up by a gruesome reputation.

This one is definitely only pigskin - brittle
and crackling with age.

The historical treasures of the Wellcome Library don't end with the books. What we didn't expect at all were the slides - glass slides of real specimens used in biological and medical research over hundreds of years, some from the very invention of the microscope. There were also boxes of glass photography plates from before the use of film in cameras!

And then there were the paintings. There are over 250,000 works in the Wellcome Art Collection, and about 1,300 of those are paintings.

The collection had just got back works from an exhibit about Doctor John Dee, physician and astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I.

Dr. Dee performing alchemical rituals for the Court.

The original painting, revealed by X-ray underneath the present one, originally had Dr. Dee surrounded by a circle of human skulls.

History reveals how the early days of science and medicine felt its way through mysticism and metaphysics to arrive where it is today. Even now that the sciences are based on evidence and experimentation, they also continue to ask questions and seek answers to the workings of the universe and the mysteries of nature and the human body. 

A Verger's Dream by Master of Los Balbases