Surgical spirit
Medical museums are putting the experience of patients at the heart of their stories
At the newly revamped Surgeons’ Hall Museums in Edinburgh, the skeleton of a young woman, her bones distorted by rickets, is on permanent display.
She had six children, all of whom died at birth. She herself died on the operating table during her seventh pregnancy, but the baby’s life was saved by the first successful Caesarean section performed in Scotland by the surgeon John Bell.
Surgeons’ Hall charts the history of surgery from the 1500s, but where it had previously been explained from a clinical perspective, a key element of the £4m refurbishment has been to tell human stories, such as that of the woman with rickets.
“Until now, the story had been told through a list of the great and the good who had performed successful things, but the character of the patient was missing,” says Tom Elliott, the head of learning and interpretation at Surgeons’ Hall, which is part of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh.
“For example, the skeleton had been on display before, but in a less prominent position with a standard object label. The description now focuses on the woman’s story rather than surgical technicalities.”
The new displays include a reconstructed dissection theatre in which a 3D cadaver comes to life to talk the audience through the seven stages of dissection as well as training film clips of real operations, says Elliott.
“It used to be a medical museum where the interpretation was made by medics for medics. But the new interpretation has been written for a lay audience, making a techni- cal subject as accessible as possible to general visitors, most of whom are from non- medical backgrounds.
“Although it is a specialist museum, the human body is universal – we wanted to get that across to visitors by asking questions such as how did we get to a stage where we could do something so incredible surgically like replacing a dodgy knee?” he adds.
There are about 60 medical museums in the UK, many of them allied to a professional body, such as the Royal College of Surgeons or a university medical department or health trust.
There are broadly two types of collection: the biological, featuring specimens, often including human remains; and the technical, focusing on instruments and practices, though some museums hold both, as well as artworks and archives.
Patients’ memories
Like Surgeons’ Hall, more and more medi- cal museums are seeking to incorporate the patient experience of health and medicine in their displays.
The Infirmary Museum, which opened in 2002 and is attached to the University of Worcester, is also using personal stories to illuminate its technical and biological collections.
Visitors are predominantly people who knew the building as patients, doctors and nurses. As they walk around the galleries, they are encouraged to jot down their memories.
Mark Macleod, the head of the museum, says that as well as sharing their thoughts, visitors’ reminiscences help shed light on topics such as how hospital practices have changed, as well as on contemporary de- bates about drugs.
“One visitor who now volunteers here remembers staying in the hospital in the 1970s as a child with a broken arm and being made to serve tea and coffee to other patients as a ‘special privilege’,” Macleod says.
“We also have visitors commenting on challenging topics such as the NHS deciding not to fund some cancer drugs. Some say things like ‘This drug saved my life... cost doesn’t matter if it’s someone’s life’. Personal stories are told to make the argument.”
Housed within the Royal College of Surgeons of England is the Hunterian Museum, which hosted the War, Art and Surgery exhibition in 2014.
Combining patients’ and professionals’ stories to explore the process of rehabilitation for ex-servicemen, the show included pastels by surgeon and artist Henry Tonks (1862-1937) depicting grue- some facial injuries of servicemen in world war one that the artist felt were too ghastly to go on display at the time.
Tonks’s works were juxtaposed with portraits of men disa- bled in 21st-century conflicts by reportage artist Julia Midgley.
“There was a lot of focus on the moment of injury, on the returning heroes and those who were killed, and far less on the long process of rehabilitation,” says Sam Alberti, the director of museums and archives at the Royal College of Surgeons of England.
“We thought carefully about showing the Tonks pictures but felt the context was important. It’s not just about the death and initial heal- ing, but the long process afterwards.”
The Science Museum’s new Medicine Galleries – opening in 2019 – will also give more prominence to personal experiences as a way of looking at the future of medicine as well as its history.
The plans include three narrative galleries exploring what science has revealed about the body, different kinds of treat- ments and how medicine is practised at community, national and global levels.
“The displays that have been here since the 1980s are practitioner-dominated; they are very technical,” says Emily Scott-Dearing, the curator of the gallery.
“The museum’s current Who Am I gallery is about ambitious genetics and complex brain science, explained in terms of their impact on identity and what makes each human being unique. This approach has been powerful and has made what could be remote, clinical science feel relevant to our visitors.
“Similarly, our current Cravings exhibition is about how food controls you and what controls your appetite. Again, it’s sophisticated science about hormones brains and guts, but it’s related back to our everyday experiences,” she adds.
“You could easily tell the same story by looking at outliers and cover the more ghoulish, obesity epidemic by looking at a particular group of ‘other’ people, but we’ve made it about everyone.”
Blood and gore
Museums have long had to walk the line between sensation and education, strug- gling to avoid pandering to the public appetite for CSI-style blood and gore without masking the sometimes grisly truth of medical history.
“We know that if we went all out for a Halloween event, such as how to pickle a body for Valentine’s Day, we could have queues around the block for that kind of ‘dark tourism’,” Alberti says.
“Nineteenth- century hospital museums were trying to distance themselves from Joseph Kahn’s infamous Anatomical and Pathological Museum, and quack theories and remedies of the time. Today, we are trying to put a bit of cultural space between ourselves and Gunther von Hagen’s Body Worlds exhibit.
“Recently, there was an article in the press on the top 10 gruesome museums in the world and I was delighted we were not on it,” he adds.
Other museums are comfortable embracing a more colourful approach to medical history if it has an overriding educational point. At the Thackray Medical Museum in Leeds, a horror film night, with a cocktail bar designed to attract a younger audience, also included a handling session.
“People loved the combination of medical history with the scary film they had just seen,” says the museum’s curator, Lauren Ryall-Stockton. “It gave them a lot to talk about and provoked conversations about how medical instruments are used.”
The animal heart dissection the museum mounted for Valentine’s Day was also a conversation-starter, Ryall-Stockton adds.
“Schools aren’t doing dissections as much as they used to. Parents bring kids and love it because it gives a good idea of the kind of work you could go into in science.”
Medical advances
Museums can often struggle to keep up with medical advances. But at Surgeons’ Hall, for instance, the new displays incorporate regu- larly updated surgical stories featured in the media.
And the Royal College of Physicians and the Thackray maintain close links with the medical profession and equipment sup- pliers to reflect the latest practice through state-of-the art collections.
“We have a lot of visitors who are about to have a hip operation and want to see what it entails,” Ryall-Stockton says.
“Many doctors and surgeons have said they would love to have our anatomical models in their practices to help patients feel more relaxed about such processes. The more we talk to people in the NHS, the more ways we will find to use our objects for real health benefits.”
No exploration of the human condition – and what can go wrong with it – can be com- plete without a little black humour, that spoonful of sugar that helps often distressing medicine go down.
Alberti recalls walking into his museum laboratory to find colleagues clustered around a Dulux colour chart, intently study- ing the 50 shades of grey on it. “I immediately thought we must be re-decorating, but they said they were looking for ‘brain’,” he says.
“They were building a training model that, inside a rubbery skin, contains a blancmange-like substance on which neurosurgeons can train. It gives the right kind of resistance when you put a knife in and also looks the right colour when you open it up.
“I’m proud of the fact we have training models like that – as a potential patient, I’m glad to know that a surgeon will have trained a great deal before going anywhere near my head.”
It can be dangerous, however, to become desensitised to body-part specimens, so much so that you forget you are dealing with what were once living people.
“William Hunter, who founded the Glasgow collections, talked about ‘the necessary inhumanity’ doctors need to be able to chop people up dead and alive,” Alberti says.
“My take is that when I discard the fact these remains were once people, that will be the point I will have been in the industry too long.”
There are clear displays guidelines governing what can be displayed in museums and galleries in terms of human remains, with codes of practice set by the Human Tissue Authority, as well as guidance on ethics from the Museums Association.
Context is everything, says Emma Shepley, the chairwoman of the London’s Museums of Health and Medicine group and the senior curator at the Royal College of Physicians, London, where visitors will probably have a good idea of what to expect from an institution that was founded on medical research and practice.
“We have some anatomical tables in our collections with 17th-century human veins, nerves and arteries,” Shepley says.
“They have been varnished and put on huge panels for display. If you have no idea what they are, they look like spectacular modern art. “When people realise they are human remains, they have to change focus and think about whose bodies they were and why
they were preserved,” Shepley continues.
“It’s the sense of the fantastical, the mysterious and the odd, but placing that within an ethical, professional context to give people genuine historical understanding.”
In 2011, Sam Alberti, the director of museums and archives at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, rejected calls from medical ethics experts to remove the 7ft 7in skeleton of Charles Byrne from display at the Hunterian Museum, which is part of the college in London’s Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Byrne suffered from acromegaly (excessive growth), and studies of his body have helped improve diagnosis and treatment of the condition in subsequent generations.
“Our argument is that Byrne’s remains can benefit patients through clinical research, raising public awareness and education,” Alberti says.
“But we rethink things constantly, as ethical frameworks and public tastes change.
“As long as the clinicians, the people who live with the condition and those genetically connected to Byrne applaud the retention of the remains, then we’ll support them,” adds Alberti, who highlights the case of Chris Morton, who was successfully treated
for the same condition, living into his 80s.
“He left his remains to be retained by the museum and we have them in the collections. But I don’t see that as a vindication – we’re not trying to win an argument here, we’re trying to benefit patients.”
She had six children, all of whom died at birth. She herself died on the operating table during her seventh pregnancy, but the baby’s life was saved by the first successful Caesarean section performed in Scotland by the surgeon John Bell.
Surgeons’ Hall charts the history of surgery from the 1500s, but where it had previously been explained from a clinical perspective, a key element of the £4m refurbishment has been to tell human stories, such as that of the woman with rickets.
“Until now, the story had been told through a list of the great and the good who had performed successful things, but the character of the patient was missing,” says Tom Elliott, the head of learning and interpretation at Surgeons’ Hall, which is part of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh.
“For example, the skeleton had been on display before, but in a less prominent position with a standard object label. The description now focuses on the woman’s story rather than surgical technicalities.”
The new displays include a reconstructed dissection theatre in which a 3D cadaver comes to life to talk the audience through the seven stages of dissection as well as training film clips of real operations, says Elliott.
“It used to be a medical museum where the interpretation was made by medics for medics. But the new interpretation has been written for a lay audience, making a techni- cal subject as accessible as possible to general visitors, most of whom are from non- medical backgrounds.
“Although it is a specialist museum, the human body is universal – we wanted to get that across to visitors by asking questions such as how did we get to a stage where we could do something so incredible surgically like replacing a dodgy knee?” he adds.
There are about 60 medical museums in the UK, many of them allied to a professional body, such as the Royal College of Surgeons or a university medical department or health trust.
There are broadly two types of collection: the biological, featuring specimens, often including human remains; and the technical, focusing on instruments and practices, though some museums hold both, as well as artworks and archives.
Patients’ memories
Like Surgeons’ Hall, more and more medi- cal museums are seeking to incorporate the patient experience of health and medicine in their displays.
The Infirmary Museum, which opened in 2002 and is attached to the University of Worcester, is also using personal stories to illuminate its technical and biological collections.
Visitors are predominantly people who knew the building as patients, doctors and nurses. As they walk around the galleries, they are encouraged to jot down their memories.
Mark Macleod, the head of the museum, says that as well as sharing their thoughts, visitors’ reminiscences help shed light on topics such as how hospital practices have changed, as well as on contemporary de- bates about drugs.
“One visitor who now volunteers here remembers staying in the hospital in the 1970s as a child with a broken arm and being made to serve tea and coffee to other patients as a ‘special privilege’,” Macleod says.
“We also have visitors commenting on challenging topics such as the NHS deciding not to fund some cancer drugs. Some say things like ‘This drug saved my life... cost doesn’t matter if it’s someone’s life’. Personal stories are told to make the argument.”
Housed within the Royal College of Surgeons of England is the Hunterian Museum, which hosted the War, Art and Surgery exhibition in 2014.
Combining patients’ and professionals’ stories to explore the process of rehabilitation for ex-servicemen, the show included pastels by surgeon and artist Henry Tonks (1862-1937) depicting grue- some facial injuries of servicemen in world war one that the artist felt were too ghastly to go on display at the time.
Tonks’s works were juxtaposed with portraits of men disa- bled in 21st-century conflicts by reportage artist Julia Midgley.
“There was a lot of focus on the moment of injury, on the returning heroes and those who were killed, and far less on the long process of rehabilitation,” says Sam Alberti, the director of museums and archives at the Royal College of Surgeons of England.
“We thought carefully about showing the Tonks pictures but felt the context was important. It’s not just about the death and initial heal- ing, but the long process afterwards.”
The Science Museum’s new Medicine Galleries – opening in 2019 – will also give more prominence to personal experiences as a way of looking at the future of medicine as well as its history.
The plans include three narrative galleries exploring what science has revealed about the body, different kinds of treat- ments and how medicine is practised at community, national and global levels.
“The displays that have been here since the 1980s are practitioner-dominated; they are very technical,” says Emily Scott-Dearing, the curator of the gallery.
“The museum’s current Who Am I gallery is about ambitious genetics and complex brain science, explained in terms of their impact on identity and what makes each human being unique. This approach has been powerful and has made what could be remote, clinical science feel relevant to our visitors.
“Similarly, our current Cravings exhibition is about how food controls you and what controls your appetite. Again, it’s sophisticated science about hormones brains and guts, but it’s related back to our everyday experiences,” she adds.
“You could easily tell the same story by looking at outliers and cover the more ghoulish, obesity epidemic by looking at a particular group of ‘other’ people, but we’ve made it about everyone.”
Blood and gore
Museums have long had to walk the line between sensation and education, strug- gling to avoid pandering to the public appetite for CSI-style blood and gore without masking the sometimes grisly truth of medical history.
“We know that if we went all out for a Halloween event, such as how to pickle a body for Valentine’s Day, we could have queues around the block for that kind of ‘dark tourism’,” Alberti says.
“Nineteenth- century hospital museums were trying to distance themselves from Joseph Kahn’s infamous Anatomical and Pathological Museum, and quack theories and remedies of the time. Today, we are trying to put a bit of cultural space between ourselves and Gunther von Hagen’s Body Worlds exhibit.
“Recently, there was an article in the press on the top 10 gruesome museums in the world and I was delighted we were not on it,” he adds.
Other museums are comfortable embracing a more colourful approach to medical history if it has an overriding educational point. At the Thackray Medical Museum in Leeds, a horror film night, with a cocktail bar designed to attract a younger audience, also included a handling session.
“People loved the combination of medical history with the scary film they had just seen,” says the museum’s curator, Lauren Ryall-Stockton. “It gave them a lot to talk about and provoked conversations about how medical instruments are used.”
The animal heart dissection the museum mounted for Valentine’s Day was also a conversation-starter, Ryall-Stockton adds.
“Schools aren’t doing dissections as much as they used to. Parents bring kids and love it because it gives a good idea of the kind of work you could go into in science.”
Medical advances
Museums can often struggle to keep up with medical advances. But at Surgeons’ Hall, for instance, the new displays incorporate regu- larly updated surgical stories featured in the media.
And the Royal College of Physicians and the Thackray maintain close links with the medical profession and equipment sup- pliers to reflect the latest practice through state-of-the art collections.
“We have a lot of visitors who are about to have a hip operation and want to see what it entails,” Ryall-Stockton says.
“Many doctors and surgeons have said they would love to have our anatomical models in their practices to help patients feel more relaxed about such processes. The more we talk to people in the NHS, the more ways we will find to use our objects for real health benefits.”
No exploration of the human condition – and what can go wrong with it – can be com- plete without a little black humour, that spoonful of sugar that helps often distressing medicine go down.
Alberti recalls walking into his museum laboratory to find colleagues clustered around a Dulux colour chart, intently study- ing the 50 shades of grey on it. “I immediately thought we must be re-decorating, but they said they were looking for ‘brain’,” he says.
“They were building a training model that, inside a rubbery skin, contains a blancmange-like substance on which neurosurgeons can train. It gives the right kind of resistance when you put a knife in and also looks the right colour when you open it up.
“I’m proud of the fact we have training models like that – as a potential patient, I’m glad to know that a surgeon will have trained a great deal before going anywhere near my head.”
It can be dangerous, however, to become desensitised to body-part specimens, so much so that you forget you are dealing with what were once living people.
“William Hunter, who founded the Glasgow collections, talked about ‘the necessary inhumanity’ doctors need to be able to chop people up dead and alive,” Alberti says.
“My take is that when I discard the fact these remains were once people, that will be the point I will have been in the industry too long.”
Ethical Displays
There are clear displays guidelines governing what can be displayed in museums and galleries in terms of human remains, with codes of practice set by the Human Tissue Authority, as well as guidance on ethics from the Museums Association.
Context is everything, says Emma Shepley, the chairwoman of the London’s Museums of Health and Medicine group and the senior curator at the Royal College of Physicians, London, where visitors will probably have a good idea of what to expect from an institution that was founded on medical research and practice.
“We have some anatomical tables in our collections with 17th-century human veins, nerves and arteries,” Shepley says.
“They have been varnished and put on huge panels for display. If you have no idea what they are, they look like spectacular modern art. “When people realise they are human remains, they have to change focus and think about whose bodies they were and why
they were preserved,” Shepley continues.
“It’s the sense of the fantastical, the mysterious and the odd, but placing that within an ethical, professional context to give people genuine historical understanding.”
In 2011, Sam Alberti, the director of museums and archives at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, rejected calls from medical ethics experts to remove the 7ft 7in skeleton of Charles Byrne from display at the Hunterian Museum, which is part of the college in London’s Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Byrne suffered from acromegaly (excessive growth), and studies of his body have helped improve diagnosis and treatment of the condition in subsequent generations.
“Our argument is that Byrne’s remains can benefit patients through clinical research, raising public awareness and education,” Alberti says.
“But we rethink things constantly, as ethical frameworks and public tastes change.
“As long as the clinicians, the people who live with the condition and those genetically connected to Byrne applaud the retention of the remains, then we’ll support them,” adds Alberti, who highlights the case of Chris Morton, who was successfully treated
for the same condition, living into his 80s.
“He left his remains to be retained by the museum and we have them in the collections. But I don’t see that as a vindication – we’re not trying to win an argument here, we’re trying to benefit patients.”