'Living and Dying' Exhibition at the British Museum

The Pharmacopoeia team and 'Cradle to Grave'

I recently went to see Pharmacopoeia (the artistic team consisting of Susie Freeman, Dr Liz Lee and David Critchley)'s 'Cradle to Grave' piece at the Living and Dying permanent exhibition at the British Museum.

One of Pharmacopoeia's most well-known works, 'Cradle to Grave' was created to illustrate the pharmaceutical life of a typical man and woman in modern Great Britain. The piece contains more than 14,000 pills for each person, which is the average amount prescribed during a lifetime.

(This shocking figure and the sheer size of the fabric is an effective way of bringing home the excessiveness of our dependence on pharmaceuticals.)

The piece is fitting with the theme and purpose of the room, which focuses on 'how diverse cultures seek to maintain health and well-being'. It explores our approach to medicinals in our search for a 'healthy' lifestyle and attempts to delay death as effectively as possible.

'Cradle to Grave' is not only made up of pills and tablets, but also of other objects such as photographs depicting personal moments of people's lives (the length of fabric advances in a time-line fashion) and other medical instruments such as syringes, an IV drip, condoms, a wine glass and a dirty ashtray. The photographs reflect personal responses to health, and the other objects represent how people can improve their well-being (through treatments etc.) or harm it (through lifestyle choices such as smoking).

Other pieces in the 'Living and Dying' exhibition show various cultures' approach to well-being and death. There were images of people with a vast quantity of medicinals, while other cultures exhibited traditional techniques and medicines, as is shown in the photos below.

Traditional Chinese medicine - ingredients to make tea, herbal ointment and pills