It all had the simplest of beginnings when a four-year-old Henry Wellcome found an oddly chipped stone on the Wisconsin plains; at the time of his death in 1936, that first collected object had become a vast private collection.
In storehouses across London, already crammed to the ceilings, Wellcome's museum staff struggled to document the content of boxes, some of which had remained unopened since 1905. Meanwhile, crates of newly acquired material continued to arrive in the yard outside.
It was like a scene from The Sorcerer's Apprentice, in which Goethe's eponymous tyro starts something he cannot stop. For Henry Wellcome, collecting had become more than an obsession; it was a mania.
His ambition had been to unlock the secrets of the material world. His belief was that if the objects from this world could be gathered together in sufficient quantities, these mysteries would indeed be revealed.
This was a search for the pieces of an enormous jigsaw puzzle that Wellcome firmly believed would one day be put together.
Although he had modelled his early collecting on the approach of Pitt Rivers and Horniman, by the end the sheer volume and range of Wellcome's collection seemed more in the tradition of the Tradescants and Hans Sloane.
Frances Larson's immensely readable book is a not a biography of Wellcome, but the story of his collection. Inevitably, Wellcome's shadow, his obsessions and his ambition hang over every page, just as his collection dominated his own life, putting an often unbearable strain on personal relationships.
At 47 he may have already been too set in his ways to accommodate a young wife, 25 years his junior, in his obsessive world, but certainly the young Syrie Barnardo found, like others, that there were three people in their marriage - the third being her husband's collecting.
Wellcome had come to London from his native America in 1880 to set up a pharmaceutical business in partnership with his friend Silas Burroughs. Their American products, marketing know-how and Wellcome's own concern for perfection in every aspect of the company's operation were quickly successful.
In seeking the best for their company, Wellcome began to collect objects which might provide inspiration for new developments in products, presentation and marketing.
Not surprisingly, at first these focused tightly around medical history, but as Wellcome's vision expanded, so too did his shopping list. Increasingly, he relied on others to find and buy objects, requiring regular and full reports and setting ruthless targets.
His agent in India was instructed not to return home until "India is completely ransacked... for literature and other objects of interest connected with ancient medicine".
Larson tells a story that is full of passion and obsession, but little love. Secretive, slow to acknowledge individual contributions to the corporate cause, untrusting, certainly obsessed, the Henry Wellcome portrayed here is a difficult man to like.
His desire for recognition beyond his very considerable achievements as a pharmaceutical entrepreneur led him to be as guarded about his collection as he would about a new medicine.
Access and sharing were not words high on the Wellcome agenda and when the Historical Medical Exhibition finally opened in 1913, eight years later than originally planned, admission was limited to the medical profession, later extended to organised groups or those with a letter of introduction from a doctor. Women had to be accompanied by a doctor.
Wellcome's inheritance is of course immense and Larson is generous in her balanced summation of his life, both as a businessman and a collector.
But this is a story of a collection that ultimately he failed, not as a collector, a task he could delegate to others, but as an interpreter, a role he was unwilling to share and for which he could not "muster the energy or confidence to do... himself".
A man without a sense of his own mortality, Henry Wellcome simply ran out of time.
Timothy Mason is an arts and heritage consultant
