Medicine and mortality: The dark world of medical history

It is one of life's constants: the heart beats approximately one billion times before it expires. What determines how long a creature lives is the speed at which its heart beats, whether it belongs to a whale, a humming bird or a human. The hearts of all three, along with several others, are displayed in the stunning new Wellcome Collection, the medical museum renovated at a cost of £30m, which reopened yesterday.

Designed to illuminate our own mortality, the efforts mankind has made to extend it and the impact this has had on our idea of ourselves, the exhibition includes the heart of 22-year-old Jennifer Sutton who had a transplant at Papworth Hospital, Cambridgeshire two weeks ago. She plans a visit to see it.

The collection, in the 1932 neo-classical pile on London's Euston Road that was once the headquarters of the Wellcome Trust, contains three galleries displaying the treasures and curiosities amassed by the trust's founder, Sir Henry Wellcome, together with modern acquisitions, commissions and art works.

There are 1930s sex aids, a Chinese torture chair constructed of lethal-looking blades, delicately carved Aztec sacrificial knives and scores of amputation saws, later versions of which were gap-toothed to prevent clogging. Napoleon's silver-handled toothbrush, Florence Nightingale's moccasins and Charles Darwin's walking stick are displayed alongside the mummified body of a Peruvian boy.

Together, they provide the visitor with a rapid, sometimes queasy, journey through the history of medicine, embracing everything from witchcraft and alchemy to prosthetics made of iron and leather to replace amputated limbs. There are showcases featuring birthing implements and chastity belts, syringes and a snuff box in a ram's head, alongside a used guillotine blade, death masks and execution implements. A dentist's signboard from China is strung with more than 100 teeth, testament to the skill of their extractor.

Sir Henry, a pharmacist, philanthropist and entrepreneur, founded the Burroughs Wellcome drug company that later became GlaxoWellcome and is now the multinational behemoth GlaxoSmithKline. After his wife left him for the writer Somerset Maugham in 1910, he stepped up his collecting, using his wealth to dispatch teams of agents to find objects for him from around the world.

Born in America's Midwest, his father was a farmer then a minister in the Adventist church. As a child, he worked in his uncle's drugstore advertising his first product in the local newspaper at 16: homemade invisible ink. After graduating from the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy he worked as a travelling salesman in New York and moved to London in 1880 to set up a pharmaceutical company with his friend, Silas Burroughs. The company was very successful, building groundbreaking research laboratories, and after Burroughs died in 1895, Sir Henry used a large part of the profits to develop his collecting.

At one stage, 1,000 objects a month were arriving at his London offices, and many parcels were left unopened. His vision was for a "museum of man", which would cast light on the development of medicine and attitudes to the body and to health across time and in all cultures.

Ken Arnold, curator of the Wellcome Collection, said: "He was a giant figure of the Edwardian age. He pioneered aerial photography and organised the biggest archaeological dig. He coined the word 'tabloid', for medicinal powders compressed into pill form, which was later applied to compact newspapers. He tracked how medicine spilt over into the rest of life and his great inspiration was to cast his net across the world."

His collection runs to almost two million artefacts of which the cream are displayed in "Medicine Man", one of two permanent galleries. For the last 25 years of his life, after the break-up of his marriage, he became a recluse, concentrating on his work, travel and collecting. At his death, he left a bequest which has made the Wellcome Trust the wealthiest charity in the UK with an endowment of £14bn, providing medical research grants worth £520m this year.

Steve Cross, the curator of Medicine Man said: "I don't think even Henry realised that within the dusty storerooms where he kept his collection, much of it unopened, lay one of the world's great museums. We have barely scratched the surface. These objects that we have brought together tell us something fascinating about humanity's perennial fascination with our own bodies, but they would never have been enough for Henry. He would have wanted us to show 10 times more."

To complement the collection and bring it up to date, a second gallery, "Medicine Now", provides a contemporary take on present concerns with a focus on one rich-world epidemic, obesity, and one of the poor world, malaria. Interspersed through the space are red boxes, galleries within the gallery, in which artists display their response to experiences of illness and treatment.

The third gallery, which houses changing exhibitions, is devoted to the heart, and includes intricate 16th-century drawings of the circulation by Leonardo Da Vinci, which remain astonishingly accurate four centuries later, displayed alongside MRI scans and a heart and lung machine.

It is here we learn that it is possible to calculate the length of any creature's life from its heart rate. Thus the shrew, whose heart races at more than 1,000 beats a minute, lives little more than a year but has the rapid metabolism necessary to escape predators. The sperm whale's heart, the size of a sack of corn, pumps at a more leisurely 10 beats a minute and keeps going for 70 years.

Only humans defy nature by living not the 30-odd years that this formula suggests - as they did in medieval times - but closer to 80 in the West. The explanation given is that our extra longevity is thanks to medicine. Perhaps that inflated claim is not surprising in a museum celebrating its achievements, but even Sir Henry might have added that better living conditions, clean water and improved diet have also made a difference.

TOOLS OF THE TRADE

Amputation saw

The deep notches on the saw, produced in Britain by John Weiss, are designed to prevent bone and tissue clogging the blade.

Body restraints

These are among the most freakish objects in the exhibition. They include a nickel-plated male anti-masturbation device, a brass corset, a scold's bridle and an iron chastity belt illustrating the centuries-old fascination with the body and our desire for control over it.

Peruvian mummy

One of five gathered by Sir Henry, the mummy is that of a young boy in a foetal position, dating from the 13th to 15th centuries. It is naturally dried, not preserved, and is testimony to the advanced biological understanding of the people of northern Peru 500 years ago.

Enema syringes

Made from brass, ivory, ebony and pewter.

Artificial limb

A left arm and hand made of leather and wood, jointed at the elbow and wrist, with articulated fingers and sprung thumb.

Model of pregnancy

An ivory anatomical model of a pregnant female with removable parts, possibly used by obstetric specialists or midwives to provide reassurance for pregnant women.