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Who is Henry Wellcome; The Wellcome Trust
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Childhood
Henry Wellcome was born on 21st August 1853 in his grandfather's log cabin at Almond in northern Wisconsin, USA, the younger son of Solomon and Mary Wellcome. Solomon was a farmer and after the failure in 1861 of his potato crop, the family moved 300 miles by covered wagon to the town of Garden City, Minnesota where Solomon's brother Jacob was a successful doctor.
There, the Wellcome family were caught up in the bloody Sioux uprising of 1862 and the young Henry aided his uncle in tending to the wounded townsfolk.
Henry Wellcome's formative years in the pioneering world of the American Mid-West would shape the rest of his life. His God-fearing parents instilled in him a hard work ethic; the family drugstore suggested a career path and an escape route from Garden City.
Equally importantly, Wellcome's discovery of a Neolithic stone implement kick-started a fascination in the past, and the surrounding Sioux Indians would foster in him an interest in the well-being and cultures of indigenous societies.
Apprenticeship
Between 1870 and 1880, Wellcome's interest in pharmacy solidified into a career. At 17 he became a prescription clerk for a pharmaceutical company in Rochester, Minnesota. To further his training in the field of pharmacy, Wellcome moved to Chicago, and then to Philadelphia.
Whilst apprenticing himself to a local apothecary, Wellcome attended the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and graduated in 1874. During his time at Philadelphia he established important contacts with fellow students and specialised in his studies in the marketing and production of drugs. As a result, it was unsurprising that Wellcome soon found work after graduating, as a travelling salesman with Caswell Hazard & Co, a large New York pharmaceutical firm.
Two years later, Wellcome was on the move again, joining an even larger firm, McKesson and Robbins. For them, he travelled further afield, searching the forests of Ecuador and Peru for new sources of Cinchona bark (the raw material for quinine, one of the most important drugs of the time). Wellcome wrote a description of his expedition for the American Journal of Pharmacy, one of several articles he published on pharmaceutical research in this period, which helped established his name amongst his peers.
In 1880, McKesson and Robins offered Wellcome promotion, but Henry had already decided take up an offer in London, to set up in business with his friend and fellow pharmaceutical salesman, Silas Mainville Burroughs.
Socialite
From 1880 to 1900, the pharmaceutical firm Henry Wellcome founded with Silas Burroughs - Burroughs Wellcome & Co - gradually established itself as a reputable and reliable business. At the same time, Henry Wellcome was establishing himself as something of a London socialite. The friends and contacts Wellcome would make socially would have a great impact on both his business and later his philanthropy.
Henry Wellcome's social contacts were mostly drawn from fellow American expatriates. He was a great fan of the American comedian Frank Lincoln and organised an event to showcase his act (a project that would see Wellcome come into contact with theatrical people such as Oscar Wilde and George Grossmith).
Wellcome also in this period became acquainted with explorers and travellers, most notably Henry Stanley - of "Dr Livingstone, I presume" fame. The tales which Wellcome heard of Africa would foster in him a deep interest in a continent where he would later found a Tropical Research Laboratory and fund archaeological digs.
A series of photographs taken in 1886, capture a light-hearted side to Wellcome's personality, showing him dressing up in a number of different costumes, including those of a sallor, a monk, a huntsman and in a head-dress. Yet despite the jollity of these images and his social networking during this period, Wellcome still comes across as a rather solitary individual: a man more comfortable organising parties than attending them. He appears more comfortable in male rather than female company, joining a number of men only clubs and enjoying rigourous outdoor pursuits.
Burroughs Wellcome & Co
Established in 1880, Burroughs Wellcome & Co quickly developed from marketing other companies' pharmaceutical products, into a manufacturing business in its own right. A bright, modern head office was built in London's financial area in 1883 and the company's increase in production meant the acquisition of a new factory site in 1889. The first overseas branch opened in Sydney in 1898: by 1912 another seven branches had opened.
The company was quick to take advantage of new technologies: most notably in importing a new form of compressed pill from the USA, which provided a more accurate dose than traditional medicines prepared by mortar and pestle. Wellcome's coining of the term 'Tabloid' - from 'tablet' and 'alkaloid' - to describe the company's compressed pills, established one of the most memorable brand names in business history.
A key factor in the company's astonishing success was its drive for respectability. In an age where patent medicines promised much but delivered little, Burroughs Wellcome & Co laid great emphasis on establishing good relations with medical professionals, in order to prove the worth of their goods. The company's promotional material also made strong use of endorsements by many of the most respectable figures of the day. With the British Army, Edward VII, Henry Stanley and Scott of the Antarctic numbering amongst their clients, the company founded by two Americans had established itself by the turn of the twentieth century as the British Empire's pharmacy.
Though they played up to patriotic British traditions Burroughs Wellcome & Co were a very modern company: their snappy advertising, sleek head office and paternalistic attitude to their employees, generating the sense of a company ahead of its time.
Physiological Research Laboratories
The Wellcome Physiological Research Laboratories (WPRL) were created in 1894. Initially located in central London, they moved to the more rural locale of Brockwell Hall in Herne Hill in 1898, before moving to Langley Court in Beckenham in 1921.
Although Wellcome was at pains to stress the independence of Burroughs Wellcome & Co from his research laboratories, the creation of the WPRL was in part due to a business opportunity. Research had shown that animals in experimentation could be successfully immunized against diphtheria. If the correct bacterial toxin was injected into horses, a therapeutic serum could be prepared from their blood and used to protect other animals and humans from the disease - a major killer at the time. The WPRL's origins then, lay in Burroughs Wellcome & Co attempting to produce their own sera.
At the time of their creation, for a UK pharmaceutical firm to establish a research laboratory was an unusual and ambitious idea, and it was one that owed more to Henry Wellcome than to Silas Burroughs. At first, the WPRL struggled for respectability against a sceptical scientific establishment, who questioned the quality and independence of research being funded by a business.
A major victory in establishing the WPRL came in 1901, when it was registered under the 1876 Cruelty to Animals Act as a laboratory where experiments on living animals could be performed by properly licensed scientists. This decision not only established physiological research within Burroughs Wellcome, but to a large degree, set the pattern for future pharmaceutical research in the UK.
The quality of the research conducted at the WPRL brought important breakthroughs in both drug development and in the wider world of medical science. And despite Wellcome's protests at the separation of his business from his research laboratories, the growth in the respectability of his laboratories meant they could be deployed as a marketing tool for his company. Introducing scientific credibility to pharmaceutical advertising was a Wellcome innovation that would quickly become standard practice.
Chemical Research Laboratories
In 1896 Henry Wellcome established the Wellcome Chemical Research Laboratories (WCRL). Seeking to invest the profits of his company into scientific research, the WCRL offered to scientists a research environment with good facilities and a freedom to publish their discoveries. Despite downplaying its associations, the WCRL was closely linked to Burroughs Wellcome & Co.
The WCRL's first Director was Frederick Belding Power, a contemporary of Wellcome's from his days at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy. Power's most widely known research concerned the examination of the seeds of chalmoogra, and the identification of two different ingredients, which had some success in the treatment of leprosy. In eighteen years of work in the WCRL, Power made detailed investigations of over fifty different plants used in medicine at the time, writing up his research in over seventy-five scientific papers.
In 1914, Power was succeeded as Director by Dr F L Pyman, under whose leadership the WCRL focused more on research linked to synthetic drugs and alkaloids. During the First World War, Burroughs Wellcome & Co undertook vital work in replacing drugs of German origin that had ceased to be available, and aspirin was manufactured by the Company following successful work in WCRL.
Whilst not as heralded as the Wellcome Physiological Research Laboratories, the WCRL - and in particular, Power - helped establish Wellcome's research laboratories as viable and legitimate operations to the scientific community, setting a pattern of work and a standard of publication that would be emulated in the years to follow.
Tropical Research Laboratories
Henry Wellcome's interest in Africa was stimulated through contacts and friendships made in the high society salons of Victorian London. It was there Wellcome encountered such explorers as Henry Morton Stanley and May French Sheldon, whose tales of bravery and adventure inspired Wellcome.
Wellcome first visited Africa in 1901, travelling to the Sudan after Lord Kitchener had recaptured Khartoum. Seeing the chaos and disease brought to the city by war, Wellcome believed scientific research could be directed to improve the hygiene and wellbeing of the population. He offered the Sudan Government, fully equipped research laboratories to be housed in the Gordon Memorial College in Khartoum. The Wellcome Tropical Research Laboratories - as the laboratories were named - opened in 1902.
The Wellcome Tropical Research Laboratories brought state-of-the-art scientific resources to a war-ravaged and disease-ridden country. Under the Directorship of Dr Andrew Balfour, the staff at the Laboratories organised the health service of Khartoum and transformed the unsanitary mud huts of the town into a model settlement where sites of mosquito breeding were destroyed and malaria was brought under control. As a result, the city became one of the healthiest in Africa.
After establishing itself in Khartoum, the Wellcome Tropical Research Laboratories sought to extend its activities into other parts of the Sudan. With the waters of the Nile providing the most efficient channel of communication in the country, in 1907 Henry Wellcome provided a floating laboratory - equipped to the same high standard as the parent labs - which could be towed along the river to investigate diseases prevalent in different parts of the country and to collect specimens for study.
Such a practical contribution to the welfare of the Sudanese people was an early indication how Wellcome-funded research would bring benefits to peoples around the world. Sir Henry Wellcome would be proud to know that the Wellcome Trust still funds important malaria research across the world.
Wellcome Bureau of Scientific Research
The origins of the Wellcome Bureau of Scientific Research (WBSR) lie in the Tropical Research Laboratories created by Wellcome in the Sudan.
In 1912 Wellcome handed the running of the laboratories over to the Sudanese government and the Director of the Laboratories - Andrew Balfour - returned to London to direct the newly created WBSR.
The Bureau was intended to serve two purposes. Firstly, it would oversee the running of Wellcome's chemical and physiological research laboratories - a decision which would have an immediately negative impact on Wellcome's laboratories. Its role as an overseer of Wellcome's research operations would, however, lead to it undertaking important work during the First World War.
Secondly, the Bureau would also carry out its own research into tropical medicine. It was towards this aim that the WBSR established a museum of specimens and illustrative material that would act as a teaching resource. This museum's scope was widened in 1923 to cover general medicine and renamed the Wellcome Museum of Medical Science.
This museum would serve for over sixty years as a useful teaching resource to the medical profession, and whilst it did not contain items personally collected by Henry Wellcome, it does illustrate his creative support of the medical sciences.
Wellcome Trust
The Wellcome Trust was established under the will of Sir Henry Wellcome in 1936.
In his will, Wellcome vested the entire share capital of his company, The Wellcome Foundation Limited, to the Wellcome Trust. The appointed Trustees were charged with spending the income according to Sir Henry's wishes.
It also fell to the Trustees to decide what to do with Wellcome's collections, most of which at the time of his death remained in store, a large percentage of them still unpacked.
Over the seven decades since, not only have Wellcome's collections been assessed and catalogued, but billions of pounds have been spent on the wellbeing of the world. Henry Wellcome's enduring legacy continues.
Today, the Wellcome Trust remains very much in keeping with Wellcome's wishes. It is the largest charity in the UK and the second largest medical research charity in the world. Each year the Wellcome Trust spends around 500 million, supporting research to improve human and animal health.
A more detailed account of the Trust's history exists on the Wellcome Trust website, so what follows below so what follows below is an overview of 70 years of Wellcome funded research.
Travel
Henry Wellcome travelled extensively throughout his life. From his family's move to Garden City, to a last trip to the United States in 1936, Wellcome spent a great deal of his days on the move. This was especially the case during his early employment in the pharmacy trade in the 1870s, when he criss-crossed the United States as a travelling salesman, and also undertook an expedition to South American to look for new sources of Cinchona bark.
At the turn of the twentieth century, travelling united two of Wellcome's greatest interests: his long-standing love of the outdoors and his growing interest in collecting items of historical interest. His passion for travel was not shared by his wife Syrie - the long-distances they travelled during Wellcome's collecting tours, placing a great deal of strain on their marriage.
Wellcome's interest in travel also linked his business and social lives. Wellcome was a keen motorist in an age when the car was in its infancy and ownership of a vehicle was a sign of prestige and importance. Wellcome's adventurous spirit evokes the age of exploration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This mood was something which Burroughs Wellcome & Co tapped into, with specially designed products from their 'Tabloid' brand being designed for a growing market of hobbying sailors and motorists. An early member of the Automobile Association (AA), Wellcome even designed a special 'Tabloid' medicine kit for AA patrolmen.
http://library.wellcome.ac.uk
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