Seven plump leeches happily suck on the walls of a glass container next to Monica Walker, 47, engagement manager of The Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret. “They’re like our pets,” she smiles, gesturing gently toward them, as she explains their bloodletting value in Victorian medicine.
The museum is a registered charity that uses the money it earns through its admissions and gift shop to maintain the historic building and its collection. Monica has just finished showing some visitors the creaking attic of the early 18th-century church of the Old St Thomas Hospital, telling stories about how medical professionals used to practice dissections here, discretely stealing corpses in the name of advancing medicine. The attic’s primary use, however, was for drying and storing the herbs used in patients’ medicines.
Juniper berries and lavender line the walls in wicker baskets and hang from the timber-framed ceiling. Menacingly pointy midwifery tools sit in one corner, while a shelf of preserved organs sits in another, the lungs blackened from Victorian-era pollution. Nearby, an entire skeleton hangs from a hook, beckoning you to come and study her.
“It’s curiosity about what it is that makes us tick,” says Monica about why people glue their eyes onto these morbid treasures. “At the end of the day, it’s about humans and one of the most fundamental aspects of being human – our health.”
“I want people to be uncomfortable when they come to the museum”
The next room along is one of the oldest surviving operating theatres in the world. Imprints of railings still mark the floor, where spectators watched dramatic operations, which were not softened by the lull of anaesthesia until January 1847. Where there is now a skylight, smoke from the observers’ tobacco pipes used to curl against the closed ceiling, lingering over open body cavities.
Looking down over the operating theatre are the Latin words “Miseratione Non Mercede,” meaning “for mercy, not for gain”. This served to remind medical professionals why they operated on the crowds of poor people who flocked to hospitals while the rich opted for at-home treatment and paid a much grander sum of money.
This sobering inequality makes this museum a thought-provoking visit, and one that some people may prefer to do alone.
“It’s a mix of gratitude and shame,” says Monica. “But I want people to be uncomfortable when they come to the museum. I think shying away or hiding it is a disservice to all the people who have come before us and allowed us to have the medical system that we have today.”
“It’s curiosity about what it is that makes us tick”
Many people have visited solo and felt that discomfort, sitting in the Old Operating Theatre and reflecting on their own lives. One man, in particular, left an impact on Monica, having visited alone on the eve of his own leg amputation. “He sat there for five hours and used that space to meditate upon what was going to happen to him the following day,” she says. “The fact that our museum exists as something between a church, a personal space and a medical space for people was meaningful.”
Anyone can come to The Old Operating Museum and Herb Garret, and once those preserved organs and glinting scalpels on display make you acutely aware of your own vulnerability, you are welcome to stay.
The Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret is open Thursday to Sunday 10:30am-5pm (last entry at 16:15). On October 3, the museum will launch a temporary exhibit called Anatomy and Beyond. Here, you can expect to see artists’ drawings of human anatomy and listen to discussions about past, present and future visions of anatomy. Look out for information soon to be on their website.