Wellcome Collection

Wellcome Collection

This museum and library collection emphasizes the history of health and medicine, broadly defined. The “location” button in the advanced search allows on limit results to materials available for view online. Searching the catalogue for “Sri Lanka” yields over 200 items available to view online. A search for “Ceylon” yields more than 200 more entries, many of which are not found in a “Sri Lanka” search. Unique strengths of the collection include annual public health reports from throughout the twentieth century, nineteenth-century paintings and drawings by European and Sri Lankan artists, and late twentieth-century posters warning of the AIDS epidemic. A search of the catalogue for “Sinhalese” leads to about a dozen palm-leaf manuscripts digitized from the more than five-hundred housed in the Wellcome Collection, as documented in K.D. Somadasa’s catalogue. High resolution images are available to download.

• Science & Medicine
• Art History
• Development Studies
• Material Culture
• History