London’s Wellcome Collection is one of my favourite haunts for random curiosities and unexpected bibelots. I popped in yesterday to check out their latest installation: Clarke’s Cabinets of Cures.

The titular cabinets inhabit a niche beside the building’s art deco staircase. They’ve been placed as treasures to be stumbled upon, outside of the main galleries.

Each box contains a ‘surreal moment in medical history’, as crafted by Artist Mark Clarke from a melange of fabrics and everyday items. Here, for example, is Hildegard of Bingen.

Mark Clarke/Wellcome Images

Frau Hildegard was a true Renaissance woman, or would have been if the Renaissance had happened 300 years earlier than it did. The German Abbess contributed to philosophy, science, medicine, poetry and music. She even found time to invent her own language, and almost became a saint. Here, according to the blurb, ‘this 12th-century nun features as part of a felt-worked altar inside the case of an 18th-century grandfather clock’. It’s what she would have wanted.

And here we see The Countess of Chinchón astride an elephant.

Mark Clarke/Wellcome Images

This lustrous lady, wife of a Viceroy of Peru, may have been the first European to benefit from the medicinal properties of the cinchona bark. The plant contains alkaloids similar to quinine, and supposedly saved the Countess from a bout of malaria. Although the story is probably apocryphal, the plant genus was named Cinchona by Carl Linnaeus in honour of the Countess. Here we ‘see her en route on elephant-back wearing golden designer trainers in a seed propagator glasshouse’. The mind boggles.

Three further dioramas illustrate the stories of Mary Seacole, bloodletting and scurvy in a similarly quirky way. Prepare to be dazzled and baffled in equal measure by this anachronistic freak show of felt and fancy.

Clarke’s Cabinets of Cures can be viewed for free until January 2009.