Medicine and medicines: the whole person and its artefacts

The Pavis Lecture 2004, 0rganised by the Pavis Centre for Social and Culture Research at The Open University.

This lecture is stimulated by the new Wellcome Trust Gallery which has just been opened at the British Museum. It takes up the theme of well-being that informs the gallery's use of artefacts from many times and places to talk about ways people deal with health and illness. And it explores the paradox: how particular objects can point sometimes to very particular values and sometimes to very general ones.