Operating Theatre Museum - London, Great Britain.
N 51° 30.298 W 000° 05.322
30U E 702039 N 5710000
The Old Operating Theatre Museum & Herb Garret is a museum of surgical history and one of the oldest surviving operating theatres. It is located in the garret of St Thomas's Church, Southwark, in the City of London, UK.
Waymark Code: WMRJYT
Location: London, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 07/01/2016
Views: 4
Oddball is not the word I thought of when I stumbled across this Museum.
This must be strangest way out Oddball museum, I think it beats the Barbed Wire Museum, my previous favourite waymark in this category.
Even the entrance is unique, a spiral staircase, with a rope handrail!
The museum consists of:
"The oldest surviving operating theatre in the UK (dating from 1822), used in the days before anaesthetics and antiseptic surgery.
The herb garret used by the hospital’s apothecary to store and cure herbs used in healing.
A collection of artefacts revealing the horrors of medicine before the age of science. Includes instruments for cupping, bleeding, trepanning, and childbirth.
Displays on medieval monastic health care, the history of St Thomas’s, Guy's Hospital and Evelina Children's Hospital, Florence Nightingale and nursing, medical and herbal medicine.
There is little information about operating theatres at Old St Thomas from its foundation till the 18th century. The church that contains the Old Operating Theatre Museum was built at the end of the 17th century, when the hospital and church were largely rebuilt by Sir Robert Clayton, president of the hospital and a former Lord Mayor of the City of London. He employed Thomas Cartwright as architect. (Cartwright was master mason to Christopher Wren at St Mary-Le-Bow). The new church was fitted out with a large garret constructed in the 'aisled-barn' tradition. Very little information exists about the Garret except that it was fitted with wooden storage racks, and was described as "the herb garret" in 1821. Dried heads of opium plants were found in the rafters. It is likely that the garret was used by the hospital's resident apothecary to store and cure medicinal herbs.
In 1822 part of the herb garret was converted into a purpose-built operating theatre. This strange situation resulted from the fact that the female surgical ward abutted the garret. Previously operations took place on the ward. Windows were also provided for the Garret at the same time, suggesting that its function changed from storage to a working environment. It may have been used as a recovery ward.
In 1859, Florence Nightingale became involved with St Thomas's, setting up on this site her famous nursing school. It was on her advice that the Hospital agreed to move to a new site when the Charing Cross Railway Company offered to buy the hospital’s land. In 1862, the hospital began the move to its present site at Lambeth and the operating theatre was closed. The theatre lay undiscovered until 1957." Text Source: (
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