The Wellcome Collection, a renowned London medical museum, has shut down a 15-year-old exhibition on the grounds that it was “racist, sexist and ableist”. The collection is part of the Wellcome Trust, which was founded by the American-born pharmaceutical tycoon Sir Henry Wellcome. Its Medicine Man exhibition displayed some of the artefacts gathered by Wellcome, many of them curiosities from medicine’s history. These included Peruvian mummies, the death mask of Benjamin Disraeli and Florence Nightingale’s moccasins.
According to Wellcome, however, the aim of collecting objects to enable a better understanding of healing throughout the ages is “problematic”. The exhibition, it said, told a story in which “disabled people, black people, indigenous peoples and people of colour were exoticised, marginalised and exploited” and had been “silenced,
