With its hulking solidity and its icy, aquamarine corridors reaching away into darkness, Blythe House can’t but call to mind the proverbial iceberg-below-the-waterline. Once the Victorian headquarters of the Post Office Savings Bank, the building’s recesses now hold some of the roughly 95 per cent of the major London museums’ collections not currently on public display. It’s a vast resource, and it is possible to visit, but access is hardly easy: aside from the logistical hassles of applying for permission and getting to or across London, even senior curators, once having navigated the building’s byzantine security, risk getting lost among their own skeletons every time they descend into its labyrinthine bowels. It’s not somewhere you’d want to unleash a school party, and so the Science Museum has launched a new website – Brought To Life: Exploring the History of Medicine – putting some of these objects, as well as items from its public galleries, online.

Most of the medical history objects crammed into Blythe House’s cupboards and jostling for space on its shelves come from the collection of the pharmacist and philanthropist Henry Wellcome (1853-1936), and the air of barely contained chaos seems somehow to bear the echo of his exuberant, omnivorous delight in things. In the surgery room, lines of near-identical scalpels and tonsil guillotines are marshalled in drawerfuls of menace; nestling nearby are materials and skull fragments used in experiments by an English doctor interested in Neolithic trepenation; German WWI cotton wool is bundled in corners; surgeons’ ornate walking sticks hang over high shelves, lasting testimony to the status anxiety of their owners. Locked up in the drugs room are the antidote cases and medicine chests sent by the publicity-savvy and lionizing Wellcome on famous adventurers’ expeditions to Everest or Brazil or the Antarctic, and thousands of jars of exotically strange natural medicines collected from around the world and inscribed with apothecary-evoking legends like ‘East Indian Blistering Fly’ or ‘Dragon’s Blood’. The room of x-ray machines crosses an eccentric inventor’s workshop with a torture chamber, and contains oddities like the Pedoscope, left-over from the days when irradiation seemed a fun way to fit shoes, and early MRI brain scan equipment disguised as Jedi helmets so as not to scare the children.

Step into the ‘Large Oriental’ room, though, and it’s a different museum – one owned by an eccentric and defiantly un-PC amateur-anthropologist uncle. It’s stuffed with masks and smoking pipes; a poorly made plaster ‘severed head’ abuts the dioramas Wellcome had made depicting Chinese life; shelves stand empty that were once filled with Tibetan skulls. Wellcome’s collection, which once numbered 700,000 items (the Science Museum received a 100,000 object ‘core collection’) might initially seem a senseless jumble of important acquisitions and outright junk, but in fact is strongly shaped by his enthusiasms and intellectual beliefs. These included great men – leading him to invest in relics like Napoleon’s toothbrush – torture implements, and other cultures, a fascination which dated back to his childhood and an attack on his hometown of Garden City, New Jersey, by the Sioux (an incident which also sparked his interest in pharmaceuticals; he helped his uncle, a medical practitioner and drug store owner, care for the wounded). He had strong opinions about human progress, seeing technology as an indicator of increasing civilisation, and his collecting outside of Europe aimed to provide evidence for this belief – to the extent of manufacturing ‘missing links’ if he couldn’t find them.

Wellcome subscribed to a broad definition of medicine, which he interpreted as anything believed to protect you from harm, and so his collecting took in quack medicines sold at 17th-century travelling fairs as well as vaccines, a mediaeval statue of Saint Apollinia, patron saint of toothache, as well as an adjustable dental chair. He became increasingly interested in archaeology and ancient history, even funding a dig in the Sudan, and the wall of one room in Blythe House is devoted to votive offerings – pottery feet, penises and intestines. The creators of Brought To Life share Wellcome’s view of the spiritual being intrinsic to any history of health. One of the site’s 10 themes is “Belief and Medicine”; as well as entries on subjects such as astrology and amulets, it includes an interactive tour of the Asklepion – you walk past the Shrine of Artemis and sacrificial altar, stop to read the inscriptions on votive tablets, then wash and fall asleep in the Abaton hoping Asklepios will visit in your dreams and suggest a cure.

Brought To Life is funded largely by the Wellcome Trust. Not only is it an extensive photographic catalogue of medical history objects (photos of 2,500 objects are already online, and this will rise to 4,000 by 2011; high resolution versions are downloadable free for non-commercial use), but through the addition of short blocks of text it uses these objects to unfold a history of medicine from ancient Egypt to the near-present. It’s designed to be an authoritative but accessible educational resource for students from GCSE to undergraduate level, combining text by expert medical historians with quirky details and multimedia that bring history ‘to life’, and with a separate teachers’ section. The ten themes into which the content is organized are largely dictated by the requirements of syllabuses; entries are also categorised into people, objects and techniques and technologies. There’s a glossary, a timeline, bibliographies and further reading suggestions, and links to other reputable sites. It’s intuitive and cleanly presented, with neat features like the ability to export text or images to your own document.

What the site does best, however, is what Lisa O’Sullivan, Senior Curator of Medicine, describes as “telling stories with our objects” – the guiding principle both of the museum’s acquisitions and Brought to Life. O’Sullivan herself is particularly fond of a set of tattoos sliced from the corpses of 19th-century French soldiers by Dr Villette, a Parisian surgeon [1]; Robert Bud, Principal Curator of Medicine, gets equally excited about mice, in particular the oncomouse, the first ever patented animal, made in Harvard in 1987 with a gene that ensures it will get cancer. The site exudes a similar air of enthusiasm, with its short, leading blocks of content encouraging you on to the next tale a mere hyperlink away: the entry on wise women links to the doctrine of signatures which links to homeopathy; the ‘related objects’ section below the entry on a Nigerian divination bowl includes an East Anglian mole’s foot amulet, a Babylonian clay model of a sheep's liver, and a diorama of Chinese men requesting a prescription from a Taoist medical deity. The site’s miscellaneous curiosities also include an artificial leg made in a Japanese POW camp from a crashed airplane, lurid mementi mori, nineteenth-century disposable toilet covers and three wax legs showing the treatment of syphilitic ulcers which became part of a travelling freak show. And there are some fun interactive features, from a grisly illustration of the uses of various medical tools and a 1950s hospital where you get to play nurse and give a wardful of geriatrics food poisoning, to a fantastically gothic Black Death quiz, complete with flagellants and chickens under armpits.

Brought To Life is, in short, a great reference resource and starting point for researchers, presuming you have iron powers of focus, and, for those more given to intellectual rambling, a wondrous anthology of interlinking tales of belief, past cultures and forgotten science – rather like exploring Blythe House with an expert guide, but much, much easier to navigate.

The Brought To Life: Exploring the History of Medicine web address is http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife.aspx

[1] Collecting tattoos was a popular pastime among doctors at the time. They’d collect and attempt to interpret symbols from closed institutions like prisons; it was presumed that tattoos were a sign of primitivism among the working classes, who were appetitive and less sensible to pain – ideas that fed contemporary fears of atavism and degeneration.