Dirt at the Wellcome Collection borrows its premise from the social anthropologist Mary Douglas: “There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder”. The analogy to beauty is fitting to this exhibition, which provides the usual Wellcome fare of anthropological curios and relics interspersed with intelligent contemporary artworks.

The exhibition case-studies modern endeavours to manage dirt in its various meanings and manifestations. Passing a sash window cast entirely from dirt, we enter the fastidiously clean seventeenth-century Delft interior, evidenced here by genre paintings, Delftware and souvenirs of van Leeuwenhoek, the so-called father of microbiology.

Next there are dirt-related tales from two Victorian cities. The investigation of London’s Broad Street cholera outbreak is illustrated by John Snow’s ‘ghost map’, and evoked by an ‘epidemic ambulance’ – something between a coffin and a pram. The dust mountains that ranged Gray’s Inn Road in those days were used as material for bricks (and, by Dickens, for books); today they inspire an artwork by Serena Korda – her medium is ‘donated’ dust. From Glasgow Royal Infirmary, there are watercolours of gangrenous flesh, and a flask of 1868 vintage urine. There’s a pleasant diorama of the Infirmary’s Lister Ward, whose namesake Joseph introduced a “controversial” antiseptic system to the hospital.

The exhibition visits Dresden’s Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, which was hijacked by the Nazis in 1933; their propaganda exploited the Teutonic predisposition to cleanliness by relating everyday dirt to genetic ‘impurity’. Exhibits include some thoroughly unsavoury propaganda posters.

Among exhibits related to contemporary India, there are Anthropometric Modules Made From Human Faeces – fortunately sterile. Through text and video installations, we learn that the residue of India’s caste system (and non-existent sewerage) obliges a million people to climb daily into public latrines to muck out with their hands. That is the filthy reality.

Until Aug 31

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