Objects in Stereo

Captions and transcripts

The soft mineral meerschaum is used to make tobacco pipes. This one playfully resembles a bird’s head when seen upside down. Some elaborately carved pipes were not designed to use. They were decorative objects that showed the owner’s wealth. This pipe is stored with hundreds of others in the ‘Smoking Room’ at Blythe House, where the smell of tobacco is inescapable.

This ornate angel is one of a pair that supported a metal screen for hanging weighing scales. It originates from a Swiss pharmacy and was included in Wellcome’s original museum displays in 1913. The angel sits in store, delicate plaster hands now cracked. Future conservation work may restore him to a displayable condition.

These conservation-grade cupboards are in a room focused on public health collections and are filled with chamber pots and bedpans. Yet the elegant parquet floor and fireplace give glimpses of the building’s former use, as a manager’s office for the savings bank.

On top of the medicine cupboards is a pharmacist’s shop sign made from a deer antler, seen here under Blythe’s ever-present fluorescent strip lights. Wellcome’s museum staff collected the contents of pharmacies across Europe, from the medicines now safely stored in cupboards, to shop fittings including these decorative tiled tables. Green labels in this room indicate that the Science Museum’s inventory team have finished surveying for any hazardous materials.

Museum stores operate on long timeframes and provide glimpses into previous museum practices as well as collection objects. Naughten captures these histories, including a period of Blythe’s history where the building was only occupied by a few staff, familiar with navigating its corridors. With Blythe’s closure many new staff have entered the space to inventory and move the collections. Here, newer signage for the pharmacy room sits alongside earlier wayfinding signs from the 1990s.

These remedies for sore throats, particularly for the severe sore throats of diphtheria, were sold loose in the 19th century. Pharmacies displayed a set of matching jars and bottles, each marked with the product’s name. These two bottles are among the entire contents of a London pharmacy purchased in 1962.

The accumulated smell of thousands of medicinal plant specimens stored together for a long period of time can be overpowering. Staff follow procedures to ensure safe working with these items. A simple note reminds staff opening this basement room to “vent for 10 minutes before entering”, to let fresh air circulate.

Chamomile flowers have a long history of use for digestive issues and other ailments. Wellcome’s museum collected medicinal plant specimens like these from across the world. Plants were acquired from multiple sources, including through colonial exploitation of resources by Wellcome’s drug company. These chamomile flowers are stored in glass jars labelled with the botanical name, and museum conservators have sealed the jars with a protective film.

Objects related to pharmacy are stored in two expansive basement rooms. On the rear shelves are large stone bowls, called mortars, used for grinding medicinal preparations. The pharmacy angel shown in Naughten’s photograph on the opposite wall is stored in this room, just out of view here.

Head tilted upward, eyes wide open, this wax bust has a detailed anatomical focus on the man’s neck, possibly a thyroid condition called a mastoid. A combination of artistic expression and medical imagery combined in this image likely made it attractive to collect. The delicate wax has been historically damaged in the chin area, revealing natural wax underneath the brown colour.

A highly personal item; whoever owned this prosthetic hand used it until the wood and leather became scuffed and worn. Since entering the museum collection, conservation treatments for woodworm pests have made it hazardous. The red label warns that that the object must now be “handled with gloves”. This once intimate and regularly touched part of someone’s body has been profoundly changed.

Made to fit a small adult man, this iron corset was intended to support the spine after injury or because of spine curvature. The rigid metal would be highly uncomfortable after a day of wear, despite being padded under the arms with leather, and adjustable using the front notches. Leather straps stitched onto the iron structure are now extremely fragile, and museum staff handle them as little as possible.

The intricately carved anatomical detail drew Wellcome’s collecting agent to purchase this wooden sculpture. A piece of Christian religious art from an abbey in France, it depicts the severed head of a Christian martyr who died for his faith. The inner organs of his neck are revealed – windpipe, oesophagus, bones – expressing the saint’s bodily suffering. Long cracks in the aged wood run down the martyr’s left cheek.

The figures that populate this basement room were collected for their associations with healing or illness. On the right, an almost life-size 18th-century figure of St Denis holds his severed head in his hands. In the centre is the Aztec god of death, Mictlāntēcutli, now known to be a modern imagining by a British sculptor.

When plague raged across medieval Europe, Christians sought help from God through St Sebastian. He became a venerated saint for his powers to protect against plague and heal sufferers. Legend tells that Sebastian was shot with arrows for his beliefs but later recovered. The arrows are also symbolic for pestilence, in a tradition adopted from ancient Greek mythology.

The Epa festival, performed in Nigeria’s Ekiti region, celebrates Yoruba culture and ancestry through ceremony and dance. Masqueraders wear sculptural masks such as this one featuring a mother with children (olomoyeye), associated with women’s fertility and community prosperity. The mask’s history is tied to Britain’s colonial control of Nigeria. Made in Nigeria, it was brought to London for the 1924–5 British Empire Exhibition, which exhibited cultural arts from colonised countries. Exhibition organisers required the visiting Nigerian artists to be publicly visible in a racist ‘display’.

These Christian saints once populated European churches and abbeys, but now share a shelf at Blythe. St Barbara, wearing a crown and standing by a tower, is patron of workers in dangerous occupations. St Nicholas is shown as patron of children. Many figures were purchased from antique dealers on collecting trips in France and Spain in the late 1920s. Museum employees wielded the power of Wellcome’s wealth to buy large numbers of objects at the lowest prices.

Masks of Gurulu Raksha, a demon in bird form, have featured for centuries in kolam dance drama in southern Sri Lanka. In legend, Gurulu Raksha defeated the evil cobra demon Naga Raksha and so protects against illness and dangerous snakes. Bird-demon masks hang on house doors to ward off evil spirits, recognisable by the headdress of defeated snake enemies. This mask was purchased at a London auction sale, its previous history obscured in the colonial-era antiquities market.

The physician in the blue hat is taking a patient’s pulse or physically manipulating them. This scene is a 20th-century reimagining of a medieval manuscript illustration, made by sculptor Jane Jackson. It was displayed in Wellcome’s museum in the 1940s to help narrate the past. It is now a historic object in its own right, showing how Henry Wellcome’s museum used art commissions to engage visitors.

This cupboard contains objects from East Asia and South Asia. Clear pull-out trays help to keep each item visible. Many relate to practical medicine, such as surgical tools from Lahore, Pakistan. Others are artistic objects, including numerous medical-themed Japanese netsuke. Grouping items by their geographical origin makes researching similar material easier, but also reflects a long history in museums of Europe-centred categorisation. A few 1980s labels remain in the drawers, one of them exoticising East Asian sex-related objects as ‘erotica’.

This basement room was a money vault when Blythe House was a bank headquarters. Now it stores around 30,000 surgical instruments in wooden drawers. Collecting multiples of similar objects was common in early 20th-century collections, but museums are less likely to collect in such quantities today. Museums must consider how each item is meaningful for audiences, as well as the costs of storing them.

Anthropometry is the physical measurement of individual humans. These late 19th-century plaster casts are of individuals’ heads, taken for the purposes of classifying them. They sit alongside phrenology models that falsely claimed to map mental characteristics based on head shape. Some casts are the heads of people convicted of crimes, seeking a physical rather than social basis for criminality. On the top shelf is the anatomical head pictured in Naughten’s next photograph.

This painted plaster model looks so real because it is likely a cast of a person’s head, modelled to show the brain structure. It was previously associated with Wellcome’s academic institute, and before that owned by the British Phrenological Society. Phrenology is a false 19th-century theory that categorised people into types using physical features. It was used to support racist ideas of white superiority and argue for removing groups and individuals deemed to be inferior from society (eugenics).

Each clay foot lined up on the shelves is an ancient Greek or Roman votive prayer offering to the gods, a prayer to heal the affected body part or in thanks for being healed. The store room is filled with votive body parts – from ears and teeth, to genitalia representing fertility. Together they give an insight into a society’s collective hopes and fears.

These palm-sized pieces of flint are quietly present among many drawers of English amulets and charms. Each stone piece naturally resembles a leg or foot and was carried as a preventative charm against gout, a painful condition that affects the joints, often in the knee or toe. We know the names of collectors, including folklorist Edward Lovett, but rarely names of the working-class people who carried these objects.

Use the floor marker to position your viewer in front of the print at the recommended distance away.

Hold the viewer up to your face and look at the print.

Slowly look towards the centre of the image. The 3D effect should appear.

If you have trouble seeing the effect, keep the viewer to your face and try moving slightly closer or further away.

Once you see the 3D image, you can explore the depth and detail of the picture.