Henry Wellcome

Henry Wellcome, 1890

Henry Wellcome, 1930

Sir Henry Solomon Wellcome , FRS , (born August 21, 1853 in Almond , Wisconsin , † July 25, 1936 in London ), was a British-American pharmaceutical entrepreneur and philanthropist .

Family and early years

Henry Wellcome was born in a log cabin in Almond, Wisconsin, to Mary Curtis Wellcome and her husband, Reverend Solomon C. Wellcome, an itinerant preacher who traveled around in a covered wagon . He grew up on the American border to the west during the Civil War . The father was a member of the Second Adventist Church and a Freemason . Henry Wellcome was brought up strictly religious, with references to the abstinence movement ; this gave him a rigor and determination that characterized him throughout his life.

When Henry was 13, his father and his uncle, a doctor, opened a drugstore in Garden City , Minnesota . Henry became interested in medicine and its sales from an early age . At the age of 16, he advertised in the Garden City Herald for an "invisible ink" that actually consisted only of lemon juice .

Wellcome as an entrepreneur

In 1870 Wellcome took over his own pharmacy with the support of the doctor William Worrall Mayo , who also taught him chemistry and physics . He later worked as a representative for pharmaceutical companies and was sent to South America to find out about medicinal plants there. In 1880 he founded the pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome & Company with Silas Mainville Burroughs . They introduced the sale of medicine in tablet form in England in 1884 under the brand name Tabloid ; previously drugs were sold in liquid or powder form . Burroughs Wellcome & Company was also the first company to use direct marketing and gave free samples to doctors.

In 1895, Silas Burroughs died at the age of 48, leaving the company to his partner. At this point the relationship between the two very different men had become difficult; they should not have spoken to each other anymore. The company flourished and Henry Wellcome set up several laboratories to work with his company. His desire to combine research and medicine also arose because there was a diphtheria epidemic near his home town in 1894 , in which 55 people, most of them children, had died. The discoveries of Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur moved Burroughs Wellcome & Company to produce diphtheria antitoxin on a large scale .

In 1910 Wellcome was granted British citizenship. In the same year he traveled to the Panama Canal Zone to write a report on the sanitary facilities there. In 1924, Wellcome merged its commercial and non-commercial activities into The Wellcome Foundation Ltd holding . In 1932 he was knighted and made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England . He died of pneumonia in a London hospital in 1936 at the age of 82 . After his death, the Wellcome Trust was established.

In his will, Henry Wellcome determined that the entire capital of his company should be invested in various foundations. After being cremated in Golders Green Crematorium , Wellcomes urn was lost until 1987. When they were rediscovered, Wellcome's ashes were buried in the churchyard of St. Paul's Cathedral in London.

Private

In 1901 Henry Wellcome married Gwendoline Maud Syrie Barnardo , the daughter of orphanage founder Thomas John Barnardo . The couple had a son, Henry Mounteney Wellcome, in 1903, who was fostered at the age of three. It is believed that he was sick at the time, and his parents traveled a lot. The marriage was unhappy - Henry was strict and humorless, Syrie was much younger and fun-loving - and in 1909 the couple separated. Wellcome, who hit workers with a stick while they were sleeping, is also said to have beaten his wife with a whip. After Syrie Wellcome had several affairs, including with the department store owner Harry Gordon Selfridge and the writer William Somerset Maugham , with whom she had the daughter Mary and whom she later married, Wellcome filed for divorce in 1915, citing Maugham as the reason for divorce. It got a lot of publicity that Wellcome would have liked to avoid. Henry Wellcome received custody of the son Henry, which his ex-wife never contested. He never mentioned his ex-wife's name again, and the failed marriage is said to have made him even stricter than before.

After Wellcome's death in 1936, the Liverpool Echo newspaper reported that he owned three cats who lived in his London townhouse. He himself had only spent three weeks in the palatial building in the last ten years, and the furniture was wrapped in brown paper and labeled. When Wellcome was in London, he stayed in a hotel. On Sundays he visited the cats and inspected the house.

Syrie Wellcome had deplored her husband's "cruelty" and after his death most of his personal papers were destroyed by his staff in order not to undermine Wellcome's image as a pure benefactor. A biography created by an employee in 1940 disappeared in the poison cabinet because it was obviously written too honestly. Today it can be viewed in the Wellcome Library .

The Wellcome Trust

→ Main article : Wellcome Trust

After his death, Wellcome's last will made it possible to set up a global foundation called the Wellcome Trust to improve human and animal health. During the decades of its existence, the organization has grown to become the largest charity in Great Britain; it supports the establishment of biochemistry , technology transfer , public engagement and bioethics . The foundation awards grants and grants for research that leads to usable health products. The foundation spends £ 600 million annually on medical research training.

collection

This Napoleon Bonaparte toothbrush was part of Wellcome's collection.

Henry Wellcome's passion was collecting historical medical objects with the aim of establishing a museum. He bought almost every object related to medicine, including a Napoleon Bonaparte toothbrush . At the time of his death, his collection consisted of around one million objects, including 125,000 with medical relevance; the others were sold after his death. He was also an avid archaeologist and spent several years digging on Mount Muya in Sudan , for which he hired around 4,000 workers. The aim of the Bible-faithful Wellcome was to prove that the theses of evolution were wrong and that the white race came from Africa. He was one of the first to use kite aerial photography for the dig; surviving images of this are in the Wellcome Library .

Portions of Wellcome's collection have been on display at the London Science Museum since 1976 . His books, paintings, drawings, photographs and more are accessible in the Wellcome Library . Another part of his collection can be seen in the exhibition The Man , which will be shown again in the Wellcome Collection from 2014 .

Publications

• The story of Metlakahtla. Saxon, London / New York 1887.
• The Evolution of Urine Analysis. An historical sketch of the clinical examination of urine. Lecture memoranda, British Medical Association. Burroughs, Wellcome & Co., Birmingham 1911.
• Jebel Moya . 1949.

Web links

Commons : Henry Wellcome  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files

• Frances Larson: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World at literaryreview.co.uk

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} William Hoffmann: The Long View From The Watonwan River. The Millenarian Odyssey of Pioneer Druggist Henry Wellcome. on mbbnet.umn.edu
2. ^ ^{A b c d e} Brian Deer: Wellcome: Hard sell. on briandeer.com
3. ↑ Wellcome History on wellcomepensioners.org ( Memento of the original from September 22, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ^ "Millionaire's Mansion for Cats," Liverpool Echo , August 1, 1936
5. ^ Henry Wellcome's Faces of Philanthropy profile page . Faces of Philanthropy, accessed December 16th, 2010.
6. ↑ wellcomelibrary.org
7. ↑ wellcomecollection.org ( Memento of the original from September 21, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.