Wellcome Library

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The Wellcome Library is hosted in The Wellcome Building, in London (183 Euston Road). It is "the most extensive history of medicine library in Europe"¹.

"Part of Wellcome Collection, a major new £30 million public venue developed by the Wellcome Trust, the Library has over 750 000 books and journals, an extensive range of manuscripts, archives and films, and more than 250 000 paintings, prints and drawings².

"The magnificent reading room is the only part of the interior, other than the entrance hall and the stairwell, where Septimus Warwick designed fine features. (…) The room was originally designed as a sculpture gallery, with free-standing sculptures - marbles, plaster casts and bronzes - standing on a dark blue linoleum floor. Its shaped was modelled on Wellcome's previous sculpture gallery (in the present John Bell and Croyden pharmacy shop, on the nort side of Wigmore Street). In 1945 it was taken over by the Wellcome Library, and the sculptures were put into store; many of them are now on loan from the Wellcome Trust to the Science Museum"³.

"In 1913 the founder of the Library, Sir Henry Wellcome, had the names of some of the most distinguished figures in medical history inscribed around the main gallery of the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum in Wigmore Street, London. The frieze was installed in the Reading Room at 183 Euston Road in a redesign in 1962 and the feature has been retained through several furbishments, including the development of Wellcome Collection in 2007"⁴.