Henry Wellcome

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Sir Henry Solomon Wellcome (born 1853 in Wisconsin, died July 25, 1936 in London) was an American-British pharmaceutical entrepreneur.

He was born in a frontier log cabin to Rev. S. C. Wellcome, an itinerant missionary who traveled and preached in a covered wagon, and Mary Curtis Wellcome. He had an early interest in medicine, particularly marketing. His first product, at the age of 16, was invisible ink (in fact just lemon juice) which he advertised in the Garden City Herald.

He was brought up with a strict religious upbringing, particularly with respect to the temperance movement. His father was a strong member of the Second Adventist Church. He was a freemason.

In 1880, Henry Wellcome established a pharmaceutical company, Burroughs Wellcome & Co., with his colleague Silas Mainville Burroughs. They introduced the selling of medicine in tablet form to England under the 1884 trademark "Tabloid"; previously medicines were sold mostly as powders or liquids. They also introduced direct marketing to doctors, giving them free samples. In 1895, Silas Burroughs died, leaving the company in the hands of his partner. The company flourished and Henry Wellcome set up several research laboratories linked to the drug company.

In 1901, he married Gwendoline Maud Syrie Barnardo, a daughter of orphanage founder Thomas John Barnardo. They had one child, Henry Mounteney Wellcome. The marriage was not happy, and in 1909 they separated. After that she had several affairs, including with the department store magnate Harry Gordon Selfridge and William Somerset Maugham with whom she had a child (Mary Elizabeth) and later married. Henry sued for divorce in 1915, naming Maugham as co-respondent. This attracted large amounts of publicity that Wellcome had previously tried to avoid.

In 1910, Wellcome became a British subject.

Wellcome had a passion for collecting medically related artefacts, aiming to create a Museum of Man. Since 1976 some of these are exhibited in the Science Museum (London). He bought very widely anything related to medicine, including Napoleon's toothbrush. By his death there were 125,000 medical objects in the collection, of over one million total. Most of the non-medical objects were dispersed after his death. He was also a keen archaeologist, in particular digging for many years at Jebel Moya in Sudan, hiring 4000 people to excavate.

In 1924, Henry Wellcome consolidated all his commercial and non-commercial activities in one holding company, The Wellcome Foundation Limited. In 1932, he was knighted and made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. He died in 1936 after an operation, and on his death the Wellcome Trust was established. In his will, Henry Wellcome vested the entire share capital of his company in individual Trustees, who were charged with spending the income to further human and animal health. The Wellcome Trust is now the world's largest private biomedical charity.

The first biography of Wellcome, was commissioned by the Wellcome Trust in 1939, by AW Haggis, a member of staff at the Historical Medicine Museum Wellcome had established. However, the Trustees were dissatisfied with the final draft of 1942, and the biography was never published (the drafts are, however, freely available for consultation at the Wellcome Library). To date, the most complete biography of Henry Wellcome is that written by Robert Rhodes James and published in 1994.

He had a son, Henry Mounteney Wellcome, born 1903, who was sent to foster parents at the age of about three. He was considered to be sickly at the time, and his parents were spending much time travelling. Syrie never contested Henry's custody of their child.