Heroes or hoarders? The strange brains of people who collect

"The Galileo Museum, a science museum in Florence, Italy, has astronomer Galileo Galilei's preserved middle finger on display. Encased in a gilded glass egg, the digit is exhibited "as if it were the relic of a Christian saint", remarks historian of science James Delbourgo in his illuminating and entertaining history of the 'dark side' of humanity's obsession with collecting things."

"a large driver of the desire to collect artefacts is curiosity - whether scientific, historical, religious or otherwise. But perhaps even more often, it is obsession. Delbourgo focuses on this compulsive aspect, and the varying ways in which society has regarded people who are driven to amass stuff. He offers "a grand portrait gallery that charts the changing image of the collector from the ancient looter and medieval idolater to the decadent of the fin de siècle and the modern-day hoarder"."

"A compelling example of such obsession is Henry Wellcome. He is known today through the biomedical research-funding organization Wellcome, and the Wellcome Collection museum and library in London. Born in 1853 to an itinerant missionary father in a log cabin in Wisconsin, by his death in 1936, Wellcome had become a highly successful pharmaceutical entrepreneur in the United Kingdom. He also owned a grotesquely overwhelming collection of objects, the variety and sheer number of which the world had never seen"

The Galileo Museum in Florence displays Galileo's preserved middle finger in a gilded glass egg, presented like a saint's relic. The finger was removed from Galileo's corpse in 1737, decades after his 1642 death, alongside an index finger and a vertebra now held elsewhere. Collecting often arises from curiosity—scientific, historical, religious—but frequently from obsession. Societal views of collectors have shifted across history, from ancient looters and medieval idolaters to fin-de-siècle decadents and modern hoarders. Henry Wellcome exemplified extreme acquisition, assembling an unprecedentedly vast and varied collection of objects by his death in 1936.

Read at Nature