Museum explores medicine's impact on life

A new medical museum featuring oddities such as a Peruvian mummy, 16th century dissection tables, and a robot used to sequence the human genome opened in London on Wednesday. The Peruvian mummy is coiled up with its knees to the chest.(CBC) The $63 million permanent exhibit is dedicated to medicine and its impact on life. Curators selected the 1.5 million artifacts from the collection of Sir Henry Wellcome.

Wellcome, a pharmaceutical entrepreneur, philanthropist and collector, travelled the Victorian world looking for treasures such as a lock of George III's hair, Napolean's toothbrush, Charles Darwin's walking stick with a skull-shaped handle, and Lord Nelson's razor. The national museum combines medicine and art, and is a place for people interested in what it is to be human, said curator Ken Arnold.

See the Wellcome Collection website for more details.