Cradle to Grave by Pharmacopoeia
(Susie Freeman, Liz Lee and David Critchley)
Reproduced by kind permission of the British Museum (Copyright 2003, British Museum)
Running down the centre of the new Wellcome Trust Gallery at the British Museum is a 13 m installation entitled Cradle to Grave. It centres around a notional lifetime supply of drugs knitted into two lengths of textile, and represents a sort of therapeutic biography of everyman and everywoman.
Each length contains over 14 000 drug doses, the estimated average prescribed to every person in Britain in their lifetime. Both the man and the woman start at birth with an injection of vitamin K. In childhood they receive immunizations, and both take antibiotics and painkillers at various times during their lives. The woman takes contraceptive pills as a young adult and, in middle age, hormone replacement therapy. The man has asthma and hay fever when young, but enjoys good health until his fifties. He is treated for high blood pressure for the last ten years of his life, and dies of a stroke in his seventies. He takes as many pills in the last ten years of his life as in the first 66.
Cradle to Grave also contains family photographs and other personal objects and documents. The captions, written by the owners, trace typical events in people's lives.
The installation is intended to be an exploration of how we approach to health and disease in Britain today. Some will see it as a record of the triumphs of scientific medicine, others as a dismal, if rather literal, trope for the way medicine and the pharmaceutical industry have insinuated themselves into the fabric of everyday life.
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