For those who don’t follow Biomedicine on Display, Thomas Söderqvist has been spreading the news there that the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine is to close down over the next couple of years. Apparently the Centre’s history of medicine faculty are to be absorbed into University College London, and the Wellcome Library and Collection will remain largely unaffected. Nevertheless, even for those of us who rarely cross into the history of medicine and the life sciences, the Wellcome Centre’s reputation as a center of scholarship is well-known, and one has to wonder what the scale of the implications will be. For further information, see the recent posts and comments at Biomedicine on Display and the new Friends of the WTCHOM blog.
Update: There is now also a more definitive story at the British Medical Journal’s news site.