Evaluating the nature of philanthropy in 2022, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that private giving has become a prominent industry in which high net worth individuals systematically distribute private wealth into critical public infrastructure and research. A central institution through which private giving now occurs is the philanthropic foundation, an institutional form that emerged in the last quarter of the nineteenth, and early twentieth century. Commonly associated with the industrialists John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford, it is important to recognise the existence of European variants of such foundations, most notably the Carlsberg Foundation. While philanthropy is widely recognised to have a long history, the scientific systematised version of philanthropy, based on the industrial wealth of super-rich entrepreneurs or “entrepreneurial philanthropy” was something distinctly new and innovative.
This paper examines the creation and “re-invention,” of one such foundation in a European context, by analysing the emergence and development of The Wellcome Trust. Formed in 1936 by the will of Sir Henry Wellcome the pharmaceutical entrepreneur, and owner of the Wellcome Foundation (a commercial not a philanthropic organisation) the Wellcome Trust was an innovative UK philanthropic organisation, funded not by an invested endowment but by the profits of a large, multinational company, in which the trustees (initially) held the entire share capital. Based on research conducted in the archives of GlaxoSmithKline (who would later acquire the Wellcome Foundation) and the Wellcome Trust, this paper assesses not only the Trust’s position as the largest foundation supporting medical research in the UK during the twentieth Century, but also its broader institutional, international role in shaping relationships between industry, governmental and research communities. We analyse the Wellcome Trust’s role not only in shaping medical knowledge and the business of giving but also conceptions of philanthropy as they exist today.