Abstract
Sir Henry Solomon Wellcome was born on 21 August 1853 at Almond, Wisconsin, the second son of a small farmer. He attended the Chicago School of Pharmacy in 1872 but a fire forced him to move to the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy where he graduated aged 20 years and also where he was to meet his future partner, Silas Mainville Burroughs (1846–95). The pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome and Co was established on 27 September 1880 in London. In 1901 Wellcome married Dr Thomas Barnardo's daughter Syrie but in 1917 she left him for Dr Somerset Maugham (1874–1965). Wellcome became naturalized as a British citizen in 1910 and formed the Wellcome Foundation in 1924. He was knighted in 1932 and elected Fellow of the Royal Society and FRCS in view of his outstanding patronage of scientific research. He also received Honorary Doctorates from Edinburgh and Madrid and the Freedom of the Society of Apothecaries. He attended the Mayo Clinic for his sickness but returned to die in London on 26 July 1936. He endowed the profits of his company in his Will to the Wellcome Trust for the promotion of research in medicine.
In a systematic manner he collected a variety of items relating to medicine, sufficient to start a library in 1897 and a museum by 1903, and growing into The Wellcome Research Institution in Euston Road, London, which was formally inaugurated by the then President of the Royal College of Surgeons, Lord Moynihan (1865–1936) on 26 November 1931. It incorporated the Museum of Medical Science, the Hall of Statuary and all other research interests in one building; the library remained in Willesden until considerably later. It was made open to the public in 1949 and thereafter was administered at first as the Wellcome Trust and converted to the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in 1968. Henry Wellcome's Will of 29 February 1932 directed that an endowment be used for the maintenance of, and to improve and enlarge the collection of, pictures, books, manuscripts, documents and other works of art. This priceless collection remains on view in Euston Road, London.