Museums are vandalising themselves

The Wellcome Collection has closed its flagship exhibition over claims it is ‘racist, sexist and ableist’.

Joyofmuseums, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

‘What’s the point of museums?’ We might expect this whine from a bored 10-year-old, reluctantly dragged along on a family day out. Not so much from gallery directors and curators. And yet staff at the Wellcome Collection, the Wellcome Trust’s famous medical museum in London, have been asking this very question. In a statement issued last week on Twitter, announcing the closure of Wellcome’s flagship exhibition, the museum’s curators revealed their deep loathing for their own profession.

Wellcome’s ‘Medicine Man’ exhibition, launched in 2007, gathers together objects, paintings and instruments relating to the history of anatomy, surgery and medicine. They were collected by Sir Henry Wellcome, an American pharmaceutical entrepreneur who founded the Wellcome Trust in 1936, over the course of his life.

This free exhibition told not just the story of Wellcome’s own inspirational life and work, but also a global history of science and medicine. But those in charge of it have now decided that this is a story ‘in which disabled people, black people, Indigenous peoples and people of colour were exoticised, marginalised and exploited – or even missed out altogether’. Apparently, it told ‘a version of medical history that is based on racist, sexist and ableist theories and language’. As a result, the exhibition has been permanently closed.