Wincing at medical history in an offbeat London museum

By Kristin Jackson
Seattle Times travel staff

KRISTIN JACKSON / THE SEATTLE TIMES Surgery was performed on a bare wooden table in this 19th-century operating room, preserved in London's Old Operating Theatre museum.

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LONDON — Karen Howell spends her days in the garret of St. Thomas church, in a centuries-old hideaway of oak beams and dormer windows.

In the attic rooms, reached by a creaky spiral staircase, curator Howell presides over one of London's smallest and most unusual museums, the Old Operating Theatre.

The museum preserves an early 19th-century operating theater (as an operating room is called in Britain) that's the oldest in the country, along with dimly lit attic rooms where medicinal herbs were cured and stored.

For visitors, this and other small medical museums scattered throughout London — from the laboratory where penicillin was discovered to a museum honoring the pioneering nurse Florence Nightingale — showcase a centurieslong fight against disease. It's a fascinating, and sometimes grisly, history.

At the Old Operating Theatre, bundles of herbs hang from wood beams above 18th- and 19th-century surgical tools. Heavy saws, used for amputations, and footlong iron forceps, used in childbirth, look more like instruments of torture than medical tools.

"I don't even want to think about that," sighed a young mother visiting the museum, wincing at the forceps and clutching her baby.

Visiting the museum Where The Old Operating Theatre is at 9a St. Thomas Street, London, SE1 9RY. The museum is in the Southwark neighborhood of South London, near the London Bridge Underground station. Telephone 20-7188-2679 or see www.thegarret.org.uk/ Hours The museum is open daily from 10.30 a.m. to 5 p.m., but is closed for a winter break from Dec. 15 to Jan 5. Admission is about $7.70 (£4.25) for an adult, $4.60 (£2.50) for a child or $20 (£11) for a family. Traveler's tip One of London's major hospitals, Guy's Hospital, is across the street from the museum. Walk into its courtyard to see an 18th-century stone bench/alcove from London Bridge, the rebuilt-through-the-centuries span on the nearby Thames River. The hospital's serene chapel adjoins the courtyard; it contains the tomb of 18th-century philanthropist and medical visionary Sir Thomas Guy, who founded the hospital.

The museum collection also includes old medical texts and medicine chests; herbal medicine displays; and photos of stern 19th-century nurses in starched white caps. But the heart of the three-room museum is its old-fashioned operating room, used from 1822 to the early 1860s.

In the room's center is a plain wood table where surgeons operated on patients, without anesthetics or antiseptics. Medical students would crowd onto wood risers surrounding the operating table to watch and learn, clamoring for a better view. A box of sawdust under the table soaked up patients' blood.

Amputations were the most common operation in those early days of surgery, and most of the patients were poor women from the surrounding Southwark neighborhood of South London. Richer patients would opt for surgery in the cleaner and quieter surroundings of their homes.

A church garret is a puzzling location for an operating room, yet it made sense, thanks to some architectural quirks.

The 300-year-old church shared a common wall with St. Thomas hospital, which grew out of a medieval monastery that ministered to the sick.

As the hospital grew busier and surgery developed in the early 1800s, a passageway was opened through the wall from an upper-story hospital ward into the unusually high-ceilinged church attic so the operating room could be built there. It was, for those times, a state-of-the-art surgical and teaching facility, and meant operations no longer had to be carried out in a curtained-off section of the ward.

However, sanitary conditions left much to be desired. Contemporary descriptions of operations say the doctors' clothing was "stiff and stinking with puss and blood." After St. Thomas hospital moved to another area of London in the 1860s, the operating room was closed and forgotten for decades, with its entrance bricked up. Rediscovered in 1956 by a church historian, the operating room has been carefully reconstructed.

The museum draws about 25,000 visitors a year, said Howell, enticing them with its glimpses of early medicine and with exhibits and talks on everything from public health and herbal medicine to the history of the neighborhood.

The old ward entrance remains closed. Museumgoers now enter the Old Operating Theatre in an even more atmospheric way, climbing dozens of narrow wood steps that spiral up inside the church's bell tower.

At the top, an old plank door swings open into the museum, ushering visitors into medical history tucked under the eaves.

Kristin Jackson: 206-464-2271 or kjackson@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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