Lifetime of pills

This astonishing new work of art shows the estimated number of prescribed pills taken by a couple during their lifetime - all 28,000 of them.

Cradle To The Grave is a 13-metre long, 1.5-metre-wide landscape of everything from Vitamin K to Viagra. It will be the star exhibit in the British Museum's new Wellcome gallery, opening next week.

Artists Susie Freeman and David Critchley have collaborated with a GP to tell two life stories, of a man and a woman, with the pills they consume throughout their lives.

GP Liz Lee draws on the medical records of her own patients and brings them together to create an "everyman" and "everywoman". Both start their life of drugs with the inoculations, vitamin injections and Calpol endured by most infants.

During the man's 76-year life he tries to kick smoking with Nicorette gum, and takes Bendrofluazide and Beta Blockers for his blood pressure. In his sixties he uses Viagra. He suffers a heart attack at 75 and, for his final year of life, takes aspirin and a cholesterol-lowering drug.

The woman takes far more tablets - many of them contraceptive pills and drugs to assuage period pains. She also takes anti-malarial tablets while travelling in her teenage years.

Eventually she stops taking the pill but, after her first child, she is treated with Prozac for post-natal depression. Later, she takes Hormone Replacement medication and a brush with breast cancer sees her embark on a five-year treatment of the cancer drug Tamoxifen. "Everywoman" lives to 82.

The number of pills per person per lifetime does not include over-the-counter remedies and recreational drugs - if it did the number of pills would leap to around 40,000.