The Wellcome Trust, a leading British health organization, has created an online database of over 100 000 historical images, including many from the Middle Ages. The images can be found on the Wellcome Images website and come from manuscripts, paintings, etchings, and early photographs.
The unique and diverse holdings of the Wellcome Library, one of the world’s leading libraries on medical history and the human condition, offer a rich body of historical images, ranging from ancient medical manuscripts to etchings by artists such as Vincent van Goghand Francisco Goya. The earliest item is a 2000-year-old Egyptian prescription on papyrus, and treasures include exquisite medieval illuminated manuscripts and anatomical drawings, from delicate 16th-century fugitive sheets, whose hinged paper flaps reveal hidden viscera, to Paolo Mascagni’s vibrantly coloured etching of an ‘exploded’ torso.
From the beauty of a Persian horoscope for the 15th-century prince Iskandar to sharply sketched satires by Thomas Rowlandson, James Gillray and Robert Cruikshank, the collection is by turns both sacred and profane. Photography includes Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of motion, John Thomson’s remarkable 19th-century portraits from his travels in China, and a newly added series of photographs of hysteric and epileptic patients at the famous Salpêtrière Hospital.
