Wellcome and "The great past".

In 1928 Henry Solomon Wellcome, facing the Royal Commission on National Museums and Galleries, elaborated on his deep fascination with "the great past".' The passion of this remarkable American-born entrepreneur, co-founder of the pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome & Co and "obsessive collector of medical artefacts, instruments and books",2 is amply evident in the Wellcome Archive, which is held by the Wellcome Trust in the Contemporary Medical Archives Centre (CMAC), London. The Wellcome Archive comprises the personal papers of Henry Wellcome and records of his various research laboratories and museums. It is one of the largest collections administered by the CMAC, second only in size to the mammoth archive of the Family Planning Association.3 Stored in nearly 700 archive boxes and described in a 4 volume, 728 page catalogue, it contains a staggering 6436 item references.4 In addition to hard copy format, the collection is also accessible electronically on a database. This database has an excellent search facility which acts effectively as an index to the entire archive, and is a most welcome feature to those seeking a first point of entry into the multi-volume catalogue. The database is currently only in the public searchroom of the Wellcome Library, although there are plans to make it available via the Wellcome Trust Library Websites in the next few years. The project to assemble, arrange, catalogue and make available to the public the body of collections now known as the Wellcome Archive was funded by the Trust in 1996, and completed in three years thanks to the sterling work of two CMAC archivists, Jennifer Haynes and Isobel Hunter. The result is a rich, wide-ranging