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1129 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 29, 2008 Tuesday

Late Edition - Final

One Man's Jigsaw Puzzle, Capturing an Odd World
BYLINE: By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
SECTION: Section E; Column 0; The Arts/Cultural Desk; MUSEUM REVIEW; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1434 words
DATELINE: LONDON
The classical facade of the Wellcome Collection here makes it seem as if this museum, which opened last June, were going to treat medical history the way the nearby British Museum treats Greek and Near Eastern civilizations, with an ordered, carefully annotated display of marvels and antiquities. But it doesn't take long before that notion is thoroughly overturned.

Perhaps it happens when you watch the famous 1929 Surrealist film (''Un Chien Andalou'' ) made by Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, in which an eyeball is slit by a razor. Or perhaps it is when you come upon a fragment of skin from the dissected body of the 19th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Or an 18th-century tubular bellows used to resuscitate the unconscious by blowing tobacco smoke into their rectums.

Certainly by the time you see more contemporary objects -- a world map whose borders are made out of mosquitoes or a sculpture of superhuman-size globules of bulbous fat and cellulite perched on tiny legs -- it is clear that something very different is going on here. Chinese porcelain fruits open to reveal lovers coupling. Florence Nightingale's moccasins and Napoleon's toothbrush share company with a van Gogh etching. A lock of King George III's hair (found to have traces of arsenic) is here, along with a chilling array of amputation saws.

The question is: Just what is going on at the Wellcome Collection? Answering that isn't made any simpler by the fact that this museum manages simultaneously to present one of the most successful science-oriented shows I have seen anywhere (a temporary exhibition, ''Sleeping and Dreaming,'' mounted in collaboration with the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in Dresden, Germany), along with one of the most banal and uninformative (a permanent exhibition called ''Medicine Now,'' which mixes unimpressive contemporary artworks with cursory discussions of genetics, obesity and malaria).

Most of the older items here were acquired during the early 20th century by Henry Wellcome, an American-born pharmaceutical entrepreneur. Wellcome used his fortune (which came partly from his introduction of an alternative to powders and liquids, the medicinal pill, which he called a tabloid) to send buyers around the world purchasing objects as varied as antique prosthetics and Sumatran amulets. During the 1920s he was spending more annually on acquisitions than the British Museum. By the early 1930s he owned five times as many objects as the Louvre. More than a million objects crowded his storerooms.

''My plans exist in my mind like a jigsaw puzzle,'' he told one of his deputies, ''and gradually I shall be able to piece it together.''

But that never happened. At Wellcome's death in 1936, the puzzle was left unfinished. Wellcome envisioned a definitive ''Museum of Man,'' but photographs from a 1913 incarnation of that museum show rooms stacked with medical jars, statuary, weapons, flasks, bundles of herbs and curios. In his will Wellcome left the collection, along with an immense endowment, to the Wellcome Trust, with the mandate to foster medical research. The trust is now the largest charity in Britain and the second-largest medical research charity in the world, spending more than $1 billion every year.

As for the collection, after Wellcome's death it seemed so miscellaneous that hundreds of thousands of objects were dispersed. (Many pieces of medical equipment are now on permanent loan to the Science Museum here.) Interest was partly revived by ''Medicine Man,'' a 2003 exhibition of some 700 of Wellcome's objects at the British Museum (with an accompanying catalog). It has now been reincarnated as a permanent show at the Wellcome museum.

The new museum, which cost $60 million to carve out of Wellcome's 1932 headquarters, is partly meant to give a home to the still immense remaining collection. The building's 15,000 square feet of exhibition space also allow for visiting exhibitions and public events. Its library contains more than two million items, including 70,000 rare books and 250,000 paintings, prints and photographs. With new acquisitions, pieces of this elaborate jigsaw keep being added.

But what sort of picture is taking shape? If a great institution is the lengthened shadow of a single man, a collection provides a reflection of that man and an image of how he understood the world. We honor the collections of a Mellon or a Rockefeller because their taste and wealth reshaped the way we see and interpret the world.

Wellcome's collection, with its anthropological oddities and relics of celebrity, is almost too easy to dismiss as grotesque -- as a highbrow version of Ripley's Believe It or Not. That impression is strengthened because detailed descriptions of the objects are placed far from the displays, as if ensuring that the objects remain mysterious as long as possible.

But in an essay in the ''Medicine Man'' catalog, Ghislaine Lawrence, a curator at the Science Museum, explains that Wellcome developed his collection around a 19th-century notion of progress and evolution. Every type of object, whether lancet or toothbrush or obstetrical clamp, is represented from as many periods and places as possible, creating what Wellcome once described as ''links in the chain of human experience which stretch back from the present time into the prehistoric period of the early ages.''

In its unviewable whole, the collection would have displayed these objects as if they were part of an evolutionary chain leading to superior contemporary models. Wellcome paid attention to African and Asian ritual objects, for example, not because of their beauty or cultural distinctiveness, but because they were way stations in the evolution of modern medical understanding. The early version of this museum, which was never open to the general public, also reflected racialist ideas about evolution, flawed peoples giving way to what Wellcome called ''the fully developed man of today.''

But this dated perspective does not constrain how these objects can be experienced; as displayed here, Wellcome's evolutionary preoccupations are irrelevant. Instead the display cases provide an almost visceral impression of the variety of human preoccupations with the body, its ailments, its pleasures and its trials. It is too bad that the museum could not display thousands of these pieces, because quantity really is as important as selectivity, and repetition as crucial as variation. A vast yearning can be sensed in them, an attempt to comprehend birth, master death and confront human frailty. It is not the history of medicine that is on display; it is the enterprise of medicine in its largest sense. The art of healing merges with the art of living and dying. Science and religion are intertwined.

This is not really a distortion of Wellcome's original ambitions; it is a revelation about them. Despite his evolutionary preoccupations, his collection is not a paean to the powers of the Enlightenment and the triumphs of modern medicine. Instead, it is an appreciation of the primal and universal impulse that inspired them. That is one reason that it is so jarring to emerge from ''Medicine Man'' and enter the sterile, surgically lighted, Tate Modern sensibility of the ''Medicine Now'' exhibition, which looks at medicine as a socially progressive enterprise, full of earnest sensitivity toward those who suffer, whether from obesity or malaria.

The ''Dreaming'' exhibition, on the other hand, manages to combine the uncanny with sophisticated analysis in displays on snoring, Freud, alarm clocks and thalidomide. It mixes pop appeal and historical example, demonstrating inventions and artwork related to sleep, creations inspired by dreams, and continuing experiments. It surpasses the Wellcome collection because it surveys, explains and teaches, but it also seems an extension of it because of its respect for the mysterious aspects of our physical lives.

Wellcome wanted his collection to be ''as complete as possible.'' What, though, would a complete Wellcome collection look like? This museum is, on balance, so effective that you begin to understand. A complete Wellcome collection would be nothing less than the world itself, in all its immense variety, its residents probing their physical frailties, creating instruments and rituals, struggling through time and space against the limits of illness and death and displaying, in their possessions, all the perversities of our biological natures.

The Wellcome Collection is open Tuesday through Sunday at 183 Euston Road, London; www.wellcomecollection.org.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: MUSEUMS & GALLERIES (90%); EXHIBITIONS (89%); SCULPTURE (78%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (71%); MALARIA (67%)
ORGANIZATION: BRITISH MUSEUM (84%)
GEOGRAPHIC: LONDON, ENGLAND (94%) UNITED KINGDOM (73%); ENGLAND (94%); GERMANY (90%)
LOAD-DATE: January 29, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: The Wellcome Collection: in London now offers ''Sleeping and Dreaming,'' a temporary exhibition that includes ''Headthinker V,'' left, by Laura Ford.(PHOTOGRAPH BY MARCUS ROSE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)(pg. E1)

A 1902 portrait of Henry Wellcome, who died in 1936.(PHOTOGRAPH BY WELLCOME LIBRARY, LONDON)

Amputation saws from the Wellcome Collection, compiled by Henry Wellcome, who had made his fortune in pharmaceuticals.(PHOTOGRAPH BY MARCUS ROSE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)

Chinese porcelain fruit with erotic figures inside.(PHOTOGRAPH BY WELLCOME LIBRARY, LONDON)(pg. E5)

DOCUMENT-TYPE: Review
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

1130 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 29, 2008 Tuesday

Late Edition - Final

Operator of Walk-In Clinics Shuts 23 Located in Wal-Mart Stores
BYLINE: By MILT FREUDENHEIM
SECTION: Section C; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 3
LENGTH: 551 words
CheckUps, a start-up operator of walk-in medical clinics, has shut down 23 of the clinics operating in Wal-Mart stores in Florida and three other Southern states.

CheckUps, based in New York, fell behind in paying its nurses and other vendors late last year, apparently running short of cash to meet its bills, according to a lawyer for one of its creditors.

Nurses arriving for work at the clinics on Jan. 18 found them to be closed.

CheckUps stopped paying some of its nurse practitioners in December, and it owes about $108,000 to Medtracker Personnel, said Stephanie Granda, a lawyer for Medtracker Personnel, a Louisiana employment agency that provided nurses to CheckUps clinics.

Wal-Mart said Monday that it was concerned about the impact on clinic customers. ''It is obviously not a good thing that CheckUps has decided to close,'' said Deisha Galberth, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman.

Starting with three clinics it acquired in Florida, CheckUps added 20 more last year in Wal-Mart stores, expanding to Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi.

William Armstrong, a spokesman for CheckUps, said Jack Tawil, an entrepreneur who is chief executive of the privately held company, was talking to investors and ''evaluating which of the operations in the retail stores they should keep open.''

Industry experts estimate that a company can consume $300,000 to $600,000 to finance a clinic and keep it running until it reaches a break-even point of 25 to 30 patients a day.

Wal-Mart has leased space to about 80 clinics in stores across the country, including the CheckUps clinics now closed. They are all operated by independent firms, including 13 by RediClinics, a unit of Steven Case's Revolution Health company, and two by hospital companies in Wisconsin and Florida.

While some of the Wal-Mart clinics are headed by doctors, most are run by nurse practitioners who are limited to providing routine medical care like giving flu shots or prescribing drugs for sore throats. Operators say their main clients are mothers with small children, and that about 30 percent do not have a family doctor.

Wal-Mart said it hoped the CheckUps clinics would not stay vacant for long.

''We are working to reopen the clinics as quickly as possible, whether or not they are operated by CheckUps,'' Ms. Galberth said. CheckUps still holds leases on the spaces, which are typically near the store entrances, alongside eye-care centers and other convenience tenants that besides paying rent are meant to help Wal-Mart attract customers.

She said Wal-Mart was proceeding with plans to lease space for several hundred clinics in the next two years. Lee Scott, Wal-Mart's chief executive, said last year that the chain could serve as landlord to as many as 2,000 clinics by 2014.

Mr. Scott said Wal-Mart was looking for more hospital partners to add to the Aurora Health Care system in Wisconsin, which is already operating in seven stores in that state, and the North Broward Hospital District on Florida's east coast, which plans to open one soon.

Tine Hansen-Turton, the executive director of the Convenient Care Association, a clinics trade group, said Wal-Mart had also been discussing making leasing deals with independent clinic operators that would be affiliated with local and regional hospitals.
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: CLINICS & OUTPATIENT SERVICES (91%); URGENT CARE CENTERS (90%); NURSES & NURSING (90%); RETAILERS (89%); FAMILY PRACTICE (78%); CLOSINGS (78%); HOSPITALS (78%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (78%); PRIVATELY HELD COMPANIES (78%); EMPLOYMENT SERVICES (76%); LAWYERS (76%); RECRUITMENT & HIRING (75%); PHYSICIANS & SURGEONS (73%); EMPLOYMENT (69%); CHILDREN (50%); INFLUENZA (50%)
COMPANY: WAL-MART STORES INC (90%)
TICKER: WMT (NYSE) (90%); WAL (LSE) (90%)
INDUSTRY: NAICS452910 WAREHOUSE CLUBS & SUPERCENTERS (96%); NAICS452112 DISCOUNT DEPARTMENT STORES (96%)
PERSON: H LEE SCOTT JR (50%)
GEOGRAPHIC: FLORIDA, USA (92%); NEW YORK, USA (91%); LOUISIANA, USA (91%); MISSISSIPPI, USA (79%); WISCONSIN, USA (79%); SOUTHEAST USA (73%); ALABAMA, USA (58%) UNITED STATES (92%)
LOAD-DATE: January 29, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

1131 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 29, 2008 Tuesday

Late Edition - Final

Paid Notice: Deaths LEVIN, WILLIAM A.
SECTION: Section B; Column 0; Classified; Pg.
LENGTH: 105 words
LEVIN--William A. , died January 26th, 2008, one day after his 84th birthday. He was an entrepreneur as President and Chairman of the Board of Gold Mills, Inc., a textile manufacturing company and Commissioner of New York State Thoroughbred Racing. He leaves his devoted wife Corinne Knepper Levin, his daughter Dr. Linda Levin Carmine, her husband Professor Michael Carmine, and their daughter, his adored granddaughter Gabrielle. He is predeceased by his late son, Louis R. Levin. Funeral Services will be held at Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home at 11:30 Tuesday, January 29th and burial at the Westchester Hill Cemetery to follow.
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: DEATHS & OBITUARIES (92%); TEXTILE MFG (87%); TEXTILE MILLS (87%)
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, USA (91%) UNITED STATES (91%)
LOAD-DATE: January 29, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
DOCUMENT-TYPE: Paid Death Notice
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

1132 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 28, 2008 Monday

Late Edition - Final

Smitten by Lyon, a Visitor Tries to Recreate the Magic
BYLINE: By ELAINE SCIOLINO
SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Foreign Desk; LYON JOURNAL; Pg. 4
LENGTH: 1037 words
DATELINE: LYON, France
Strolling the streets of Lyon with his wife last October, Buti Saeed al-Ghandi was suddenly overcome by a double wave of love, for the city and for his spouse.

So Mr. Ghandi, a 40-year-old entrepreneur, decided to capture the magic of the moment by building a little Lyon -- back home in Dubai.

''I travel all around the world, and Lyon is one of those places that make you feel different,'' Mr. Ghandi said in a telephone interview. ''The people do not live at a fast pace of life. There is an intimacy with visitors. There is so much history and culture, the small streets, the small shops, the old houses. I also fell in love again with my wife there, and that's also why I love Lyon.''

Certainly Lyon -- with its two rivers, its Gallic-Roman ruins, its 300 Renaissance merchant houses and its gastronomic reputation -- is special, even in France.

In early January Mr. Ghandi, chairman of Emirates Investment and Development, signed a memorandum of understanding with Lyon's mayor and several local entities to embark on a grand architectural adventure for Dubai, one of the seven principalities that make up the United Arab Emirates.

The project, temporarily called Lyon-Dubai City, will include a university; small versions of Lyon's main museums; housing, hotel and office space; cafes, restaurants, pedestrian malls, town squares, courtyards, a film center, maybe even a church, all inspired by Lyon, France's third-largest city. As of now, little Lyon will cover 750 to 1,000 acres, more or less the size of Central Park.

The Paul Bocuse Institute is hoping to set up a branch to train young chefs and restaurant and hotel managers. The Museum of Textiles is poised to open a silk museum and lend select treasures from its vast silk collection. Lyon's soccer team has signed up to operate a center to train a Dubai team. Research is under way to cool outdoor spaces naturally to make strolling bearable during dust storms and 105-degree heat.

What the project must not do, its participants insist, is clone Lyon.

''This will not be Disneyland or Las Vegas,'' said Jean-Paul Lebas, the project's planner, who helped rebuild Beirut after Lebanon's civil war. ''We have to make people feel that they are there without copying the architecture of Lyon -- that is the challenge. The social will be more important than the physical. The smiles seen on the faces of others will come first. I know it's a bit virtual, but if one succeeds. ...''

Mayor Gerard Collomb was more direct. ''We will give Dubai the soul of Lyon,'' he said.

Mr. Ghandi, who was born in Dubai and studied at George Washington University in Washington, first discovered Lyon last May when he came to close a deal with the University of Lyon to open a French-language branch in a university complex in the emirate. The university will open in September, initially with 300 to 400 students.

It was during a second trip that the city itself became a source of inspiration that has taken his imagination in a number of directions.

The over-the-top rococo decor, grand scale, golden mosaics and vaulted ceilings of the 19th-century hilltop Notre-Dame de Fourviere basilica, for example, has gotten him thinking about building a similar church. It would be set next to a mosque.

''I saw certain elements in the church that related to Islam,'' Mr. Ghandi said. ''I felt like I was walking into a mosque.''

He and others acknowledge they are making it up as they go along. ''A mosque next to a church? Why not?'' asked Mr. Lebas.

Last week, Mr. Lebas was in Dubai looking at three possible sites: an urban area near the Burj Dubai tower (which aims to be the tallest building in the world); a patch of desert near the planned second international airport; and Dubailand, a $10 billion complex of theme parks and entertainment areas under construction that Mr. Lebas describes as ''worse than Disneyland, Disneyland 1,000-times squared.''

Then there is the issue of alcohol and pork, both forbidden under Islam. Pork-based charcuterie is a staple of Lyon's traditional gastronomy, while wine is crucial to French dining.

Dubai, unlike many places in the Muslim Middle East, has a relatively open attitude on this, although there are serious restrictions during the holy month of Ramadan. Pork is sold in ''Western oriented'' supermarket chains and in special sections of butchers' markets, and is served in certain restaurants.

As for wine? ''It is completely possible to achieve refined cuisine without alcohol,'' Mr. Bocuse said in an e-mail message, adding that many fine recipes ''are elaborated with a base of cream and butter.''

For Mr. Ghandi, there should be no gastronomic or alcoholic censure. ''It's not an issue,'' he said. ''We are an international city in Dubai. You give people the freedom to do what they like to do.''

Certainly the project is expected to be a windfall for Lyon. France's $1.3 billion deal last year to rent the name of the Louvre and lend some of its works to Abu Dhabi, the capital of the Emirates, is clearly on the minds of officials here.

Mayor Collomb hopes the project will work as a vehicle to attract wealthy investors from Dubai. He dreams of turning the crumbling 375,000-square-foot Hotel-Dieu, a hospital with a glorious 18th-century facade, into a luxury hotel. ''Its dome is majestic,'' he said. ''Maybe we'll seal a deal the next visit.''

He notes that Lyon is among the world's top 30 convention cities, ahead of Chicago. Reader's Digest last year named Lyon the ''seventh most livable city'' in the world.

Not everyone in Lyon is convinced of the wisdom of the project, though.

''It's hard for me to imagine how you can capture the soul of the city,'' said Jacques Lasfargues, an archaeologist and the chief curator at the Museum of Gallic-Roman Civilization. ''The color of the light here is tender, soft, sweet, like a painting of Turner. In the desert, the light is hard, brutal. The rivers -- they are part of our soul. I prefer the ambience of Las Vegas. At least there's sincerity. One knows clearly what it is.''

Mayor Collomb will not be deterred. ''Dubai already has built ski slopes and islands,'' he said. ''And if you can do that, you can make rivers.''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: RESTAURANTS (90%); MUSEUMS & GALLERIES (89%); MAYORS (87%); HOTELS & MOTELS (77%); INTERVIEWS (75%); HISTORIC SITES (74%); HISTORY (74%); ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT (72%); SOCCER (50%)
GEOGRAPHIC: LYON, FRANCE (93%); DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES (93%); BEIRUT, LEBANON (79%) DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES (94%); RHONE-ALPES, FRANCE (88%) UNITED ARAB EMIRATES (99%); FRANCE (93%); LEBANON (79%)

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