Taking inspiration from Wellcome Collection’s rich archive, ‘Clarke’s Cabinets of Cures’ by Mark Clarke is a series of mismatched cabinets with fascinating stories to tell. Each cabinet is created from disparate reclaimed fabrics and everyday products to reveal a series of surreal moments in medical history. An intriguing cast of characters emerge, from the Crimean War heroine Mary Seacole to the Spanish Countess of Chinchón seeking a cure for malaria.

The five cabinets will be on display on the ground and first floor.

The Countess of Chinchón
When court physicians were unable to treat her malaria fever, the wife of the Spanish Viceroy of Peru (the Countess of Chinchón) turned to an alternative native remedy: cinchona bark that later, farmed in India and Africa, became known as quinine. We see her en route on elephant-back wearing golden designer trainers in a seed propagator glasshouse.

Hildegard of Bingen
Hildegard of Bingen began having religious visions at an early age and practised medicine in her role as Abbess of Rupertsberg. Her main work was on the curative powers of herbs, stones and animals. Here this 12th-century nun features as part of a felt-worked altar inside the case of an 18th-century grandfather clock.

Scurvy
The classic shipboard disease triggered by a deficiency of vitamin C. The cabinet features a Biba Nova scurvy-scarred mermaid basking on a mirrored seabed of 1930s sequinned fruit.

Mary Seacole
Mary Seacole is the Jamaican-born nurse who battled against prejudice and travelled under her own steam and at her own expense to care for the troops in the Crimean War. She was a character as exceptional and heroic as her ventures. The cabinet features Seacole toting her bag of lucky charms in her makeshift field hospital under a patchwork parasol.

Blood-letting
Through history, blood-letting has been used to treat all manner of ills including madness, syphilis, fevers and love-sickness. The cabinet features a Revolutionary merveilleuse dripping her way through an upturned Paris, trying out the treatment and putting on a ball-of-string aristo’s wig. She is dressed in a Victorian muslin collar, dragging a World War II nurse’s apron.