I suspect most Londoners discover the Wellcome Collection by accident. Occupying a handsome white building planted foursquare on a corner of Euston Road, its airy ground-floor cafe is the perfect place for a midday coffee meeting or solo work-stop. Unless people have a curious wander, little will they know that lurking one floor up is the perfect, morbid embodiment of the darkest shadow-sides of the Victorian mind.
The permanent collection of medical artefacts is a ripe mix of Angela Carter, Freud and David Cronenberg, with dim red lighting hitting shining rows of gigantic curved forceps, rusty ancient prosthetic limbs, phrenology skulls, big-boobed fertility goddess effigies, historical sex aids, apothecary jars, smutty pictures carved on ivory, intricate medicine-themed oil paintings and Napoleon’s manky toothbrush.
