This is a strange old place. It’s a very modern street outside, but as soon as you step through the door it’s straight up some winding wooden stairs to a creaky-old cottage in the rafters – the kind of place that birds and bats might roost. There are two sections to it: a doctor’s apothecary and an old operating theatre that has survived from the 19th-century.
The doctor’s apothecary
But it’s the apothecary that really fires the imagination because they’ve dressed it with dry, wispy plants and wicker baskets of berries and nuts. There are little glass jars all over the desks and a wonky wooden table full of dusty old bottles and trays of snuff, seeds, weeds and leaves.
Half of their medicines you can probably find down the spice aisle at Sainsbury’s: cinnamon and cloves, peppermint and pepper… that’s what passed for medicine in those days. They’ve got a cabinet full of pickled brains, sliced up kidneys, chopped up livers, skeletons, skulls, bones and an armoury of blades, saws, hacksaws, forceps, funnels and pointed pipes to stick in people’s private places. If you’ve ever had cause to complain about your local GP then come and see what they had to put up with 150 years ago and you’ll never complain again.
St Thomas’s Hospital’s operating theatre
The second room is also the last room (there are only two real rooms) – the old operating theatre itself. It was boarded up and forgotten when St. Thomas’s Hospital moved out and only rediscovered in 1956. It’s like an amphitheatre made of wood, and the poor patient would have been lying on a flat slab in the middle whilst the students and spectators stood on tiered balconies around the sides.
Try and imagine what it must have been like to lay naked on that table, writhing around in pain whilst two hundred people stood and stared at your bare body. They hadn’t discovered anaesthetic yet so you would have been wide awake whilst a semi-circle wall of ghouls chewed on their pencils and took notes.
The patients got held down tight so they couldn’t jump about whilst the doctor was slicing them up and slipping and sliding on a wooden floor awash with his clotting blood, whilst simultaneously trying to teach his new recruits some science. Keep still, man! Stop moving about for chrissakes! I’m trying to teach some students here!
So is it worth a visit? Well… hmm… I’m glad that I saw it because there’s nothing quite like it, but unless you have a particular interest in medicine then I wouldn’t bother. The price is a bit silly just for two rooms, and you’ll be out of the door in forty-five minutes.
If you enjoy this then try Fleming Museum (travel from London Bridge to Paddington via tube); Florence Nightingale Museum (walk it in 28 mins or travel from London Bridge to Waterloo by tube) and Wellcome Collection (travel from London Bridge to Euston by tube)
