When I used to go to meetings at the Institute of Education in London, I developed the habit of dropping by the Wellcome Trust's coffee and book shop on the Euston Road. It was and remains a good place to meet and eat. I've been to a few of their exhibitions as well, most memorably to the Charles Foster curated event on humans and animals back in 2016. I've walked round their Medicine Man collection a few times as well and gazed at the eclectic compilation of artefacts compiled by Sir Henry Wellcome.
That exhibition has now been shut to great fanfare and ridicule. In a letter to The Times, Sir Jeremy Farrar, Wellcome Director, and Julia Gillard, its Chair, say:
"With much more material than we can exhibit, every curatorial decision is a choice not to tell another story. When Medicine Man opened in 2007, we chose to focus on the collector. This was also a choice not to focus on the people, often marginalised and excluded, who made and used the objects collected. We no longer consider this the right choice. Henry Wellcome’s vision, of advancing health through science and culture, remains central to Wellcome’s work. It means exploring broader experiences of health than those in Medicine Man. We continue to do this through objects from our founders’ collection, set in their full human context."
Fair enough you might think. A 15 year old exhibition might well be overdue for a rethink. Bur Farrar and Gillard have only had to write to The Times because their colleagues at Wellcome made such a terrible bodge of communicating their intentions about changes to the exhibition.
In the language activists curators prefer these days, Medicine Man was condemned by the Wellcome Collection's social media output as "racist, sexist and ableist”. Announcing the closure on Twitter (where else?) they said: “What’s the point of museums? Truthfully, we’re asking ourselves the same question."
The Collection, it said: "told a global story of health and medicine in which disabled people, Black people, Indigenous peoples and people of colour were exoticised, marginalised and exploited — or even missed out altogether. We can’t change our past. But we can work towards a future where we give voice to the narratives and lived experiences of those who have been silenced, erased and ignored."
Breathless stuff! Let's hope they've not buggered about with the coffee.
There is a more rational explanation on the Collection's website, but don't tell the activists as the poor things will only have an attack of the vapours.
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