Black stone head form

Provenance

31 objects from Central and South America which were given to the UEA by the Wellcome Trust in 1981. They had been acquired for the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in 1931 from the sale in Paris of the ethnographic collections formerly belonging to surrealist writers Paul Eluard and Andre Breton.

The Wellcome institute was interested in acquiring artefacts relevant to the history of medicine for the Wellcome museum and they bought many entire collections of all kinds of objects from all over the world. From 1936 until 1983, the Trust began sorting their vast collections, and items which were deemed to be ‘surplus to requirements’, because they were not of strictly medical relevance, were given to other museums.