Mark Macleod
Head, the Infirmary, University of Worcester
Worcester has played such a pivotal role in the health of the nation that it boasts two medical museums. The George Marshall collection features an alarming assortment of death masks of hanged criminals and an old operating theatre.
Across town, the old infirmary – now part of the city’s university – uses interactives to explain how, as the birthplace of the British Medical Association in the 19th century, it helped legitimise medical practice in the UK.
“Due to the 1858 General Medical Act, the quacks, barber-surgeons and bone-setters began to lose their power over people,” says Mark Macleod, who looks after a venue particularly popular among schoolchildren and medical students because of its have-a-go surgical fun and games.
“Some people may shiver at the thought of a medical exhibition,” he says. “As the building was still a hospital as recently as 2002, we must also remember that some visitors might have had treatment here or visited sickly relatives.
“That said, when students ran a ghost tour, it sold out within hours; there’s a macabre interest in what old hospitals and asylums do, although we tend to err towards a fact-based entertainment approach.”
That extends to inviting students of computer game design who study in the same university building to come up with new ideas for interactives.
“We’ve had shoot-em-ups killing cancer cells and apothecary adventurers in search of 18th-century potions,” says Macleod, who believes the Infirmary is in a healthy position due to the history of medicine being on the national curriculum for GCSEs.
“We can cover issues that teachers may not be comfortable with, through the handling of objects and dressing up, and we can explain to younger visitors the importance of looking after their own bodies. They are all potential doctors and nurses, after all.”
Stella Man
Museum development officer, Glenside Hospital Museum, Bristol
Stella Man, an artist and curator, has spent her career supporting people who rarely have their voices heard.
Man has worked on projects with many a marginalised group – from former community housing tenants to residents of a former mining community witnessing their old neighbourhood become a vast commuter village – so she was the perfect fit for a Heritage Lottery Fund-supported oral-history project at Glenside Hospital Museum, which ran from 2011 to 2013.
For most of the 130 years before its closure in 1994, Glenside – originally the Bristol Lunatic Asylum – was a mental health hospital. Between 1915 and 1919, the building was requisitioned as the Beaufort War Hospital, immortalised in the murals painted by the former orderly Stanley Spencer in the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Hampshire.
Five years on from the end of the oral-history project, Man carries out a variety of roles at the museum. “As all the work is by volunteers, there was a need to raise funds and develop the museum to ensure its future,” she says. “The place does important work in raising awareness and destigmatising mental illness.” The approach is non-confrontational to enable visitors to discuss a difficult subject, she adds.
“Everyone is greeted by a volunteer and encouraged to ask questions. We have a mock-up of a padded cell and objects ranging from a lobotomy instrument to electroconvulsive therapy machines.”
Among the exhibits is a Victorian strait-jacket made of blue-checked cloth embossed with the name of the asylum – a replica is available for people to try on.
Kristin Hussey
Curator, Royal College of Physicians, London
Kristin Hussey is frequently reminded about her first working day at the Royal College of Physicians (RCP). “I dropped in on an event for kids that involved sewing stitches into foam arms, which I thought was one of the most awful things I’d experienced,” she says.
“Unfortunately, a conservator found this hilarious and he now tries to scare me at every opportunity; during a meeting he once whispered, ‘Could you hold this for a second?’ before handing me a human ribcage.”
Hussey has acclimatised somewhat since that initial encounter and is leading the RCP’s 500th birthday celebrations with two landmark exhibitions and heritage trails around the extraordinary collection of objects, paintings and rare books that tell the story of half a millennium of doctoring.
“The challenge for the RCP is that it is not only a museum but also a membership body that was set up in 1518, and it can be intimidating for people to come into a building that feels like it’s for doctors,” she says.
“It’s all about encouraging visitors to move around with confidence – to look, for example, at the 17th-century anatomical tables and ask: ‘Where did the bodies come from?’”
One of Hussey’s favourite objects is a cup dating from the same period. “It’s made from antimony, a poisonous metal that when infused with wine left in the vessel overnight produces a violent emetic [causing vomiting],” she says. “It was a kill-or-cure treatment from a time when it was believed that if you were ill it was because of an internal imbalance that could only be corrected by purging your whole system.
“It illustrates an issue that all medical museums struggle with – the perception that doctors in the past were often cruel people,” Hussey says. “You have to understand the knowledge of the time that made these things seem sensible.”
The RCP’s Ceaseless Motion: William Harvey’s Experiments in Circulation exhibition (until 26 July) celebrates the 400th anniversary of the physician’s discovery that the heart pumps blood around the vascular system. It will be followed later this year by This Vexed Question, which will explore the role of women in medicine (from 19 September 2018 to 18 January 2019).
“This Vexed Question will examine why and how certain areas of medicine were deemed to be suitable for women to work in and will include this college’s not-so-glorious role in that history,” says Hussey.
Kate Jarman
Archivist, St Bartholomew’s Hospital and Royal London Hospital museums, London
Kate Jarman is the custodian of some remarkable medical records. She looks after two museums and the archives of around 25 current and former hospitals, which not only tell the stories of the staff who worked – and the patients who were treated – in them, but also paint a vivid picture of how Londoners lived and died over many centuries.
The rich history of St Bartholomew’s Hospital itself can be traced via an impressive collection of medieval deeds, she says. “Like most religious institutions of the time, the hospital was sustained through income from gifts of property that it rented out. Many of those early parchments, complete with seals, have survived because they have remained on the same site for 900 years.”
Founded as a priory in 1123, Barts would originally have been a place of rest and prayer. Following the dissolution of the monasteries in the early 16th century, Barts was refounded as a hospital in 1547. It was a big leap forward, and records provide clues to early treatments offered there.
“Some of the ingredients listed are still used in pharmaceuticals today, but others feature unpleasant bits of animals,” says Jarman. “We see physicians being appointed for the first time, including one to perform lithotomies – the removal of bladder and kidney stones – before anaesthesia or antiseptics, of course. Then in 1785, England’s first medical college was founded at the Royal London Hospital and we start to see increasing numbers of case notes and more evidence-based medicine.”
It’s that kind of detail that sets Barts apart from the other archives Jarman has supervised in her career.
“While a lot of the general administrative detail can be the same, the medical collection contains sensitive material and personal information that needs to be kept restricted under the Data Protection Act,” she says.
And there is no shortage of other insights into the grim areas of historical hospital life: Jarman has a soft spot for a bill of £2 for “night soil collection” by “John Hunt – nightman and rubbish carter” dating from 1750. “The hospital had cesspits and a bog house that had to be emptied. This was the charge to remove 100 tonnes of sewage, which would have been taken to the town ditch or dumped in the Thames.”
Natasha McEnroe
Keeper of medicine, Science Museum, London
It was the life of a different sort of doctor that set Natasha McEnroe on a course of medical history. When she was curator of Dr Johnson’s House in London, McEnroe was astonished by the number of visitors who loved the 18th-century vibe so much that they longed to be part of the witty world of Johnson, the author of the 1755 A Dictionary of the English Language, and his cohort.
“I thought they surely couldn’t yearn for the age before anaesthesia, antisepsis and penicillin – just think about the dentistry alone,” she says. “That led me into serious research about the health of Johnson who, it appears, contracted scrofula – probably from infected meat – had terrible eyesight, hearing and mobility issues, suffered a series of strokes and had to deal with considerable water retention.”
McEnroe subsequently followed the trails of two more eminent practitioners – Francis Galton, the controversial polymath and “father of eugenics”, whose collection she managed at the Grant Museum of Zoology at University College London before she became the director of the Florence Nightingale Museum in 2011.
“They were complex characters and the appeal was placing them in the context of the times they lived in,” she says. “Collections closely linked to an individual can, through their fame, often shed light on the lives of others.”
New galleries at the Science Museum showcasing the collections it shares with the Wellcome Trust are due to open in the autumn of 2019. Of all the objects in her care, McEnroe is both impressed and slightly unnerved by an enormous 1940s iron lung.
“It’s like a giant metal box into which the patient was pushed like a loaf into an oven, sealed airtight at the neck with a pump producing negative pressure, forcing the poor individual to breathe,” she says.
“A child’s fear of it would be the stuff of nightmares, yet it’s equally a marker for the discovery of the polio vaccine in 1955, which sparked an international frenzy.”
Joanne Bartholomew
Chief executive, Thackray Medical Museum, Leeds
The Thackray Medical Museum is showing its age and is due to have a facelift. It’s just 21 years since the museum – based on a collection of medical supplies and equipment from a family-run chemist shop – opened in 1997 in the magnificent 19th-century former city workhouse.
“Peoples’ expectations have changed, so the original linear route through the building now seems like a tick-box exercise,” says Joanne Bartholomew. “There’s going to be a more thematic approach to the medical innovation that’s transforming lives and responding to crises to connect us to contemporary topics.”
The museum is looking to relaunch in spring 2020, with minimal closures during the redevelopment.
Bartholomew says recording and interpreting patients’ experiences who were subject to the tools of the surgical trade can be a challenge.
“Instruments are grisly things and that side of the story is quite visceral; people are horrified and compelled in equal measure, just like when they watch medical documentaries on television,” she says. “It’s not necessarily what you want to think about when you’re in a museum on a Saturday afternoon so there’s a balancing act in terms of engaging visitors with the content.”
Similarly, the museum’s strong key stage two and GCSE student audiences have to be considered, adds Bartholomew, who believes the future lies in the interpretation and storytelling of objects, such as a 17th-century corrective orthopaedic frame.
“It looks like a suit of armour but it’s a set of devices that attach to each other. It speaks of the roots of the medical industry when a surgeon visited a metalworker or blacksmith to make bespoke equipment, and there’s something about the hardness of metal adapted to fit soft human tissue.”
Another talking point is Hannah Dyson’s Ordeal, a graphic audiovisual depiction of Victorian surgery based on the true story of an 11-year-old girl who needed treatment for a leg injury sustained at the mill where she worked. “As a visitor, I wouldn’t go anywhere near the film but, after applying for a post here, I felt I had to see it to make sure that I could do the job,” says Bartholomew. “I ended up working in an office directly above it for six years, listening to poor Hannah scream the place down every few hours. It’s better to concentrate on the positive life-saving aspect of what we show here – that’s probably how medics cope with it all.
Head, the Infirmary, University of Worcester
Worcester has played such a pivotal role in the health of the nation that it boasts two medical museums. The George Marshall collection features an alarming assortment of death masks of hanged criminals and an old operating theatre.
Across town, the old infirmary – now part of the city’s university – uses interactives to explain how, as the birthplace of the British Medical Association in the 19th century, it helped legitimise medical practice in the UK.
“Due to the 1858 General Medical Act, the quacks, barber-surgeons and bone-setters began to lose their power over people,” says Mark Macleod, who looks after a venue particularly popular among schoolchildren and medical students because of its have-a-go surgical fun and games.
“Some people may shiver at the thought of a medical exhibition,” he says. “As the building was still a hospital as recently as 2002, we must also remember that some visitors might have had treatment here or visited sickly relatives.
“That said, when students ran a ghost tour, it sold out within hours; there’s a macabre interest in what old hospitals and asylums do, although we tend to err towards a fact-based entertainment approach.”
That extends to inviting students of computer game design who study in the same university building to come up with new ideas for interactives.
“We’ve had shoot-em-ups killing cancer cells and apothecary adventurers in search of 18th-century potions,” says Macleod, who believes the Infirmary is in a healthy position due to the history of medicine being on the national curriculum for GCSEs.
“We can cover issues that teachers may not be comfortable with, through the handling of objects and dressing up, and we can explain to younger visitors the importance of looking after their own bodies. They are all potential doctors and nurses, after all.”
Stella Man
Museum development officer, Glenside Hospital Museum, Bristol
Stella Man, an artist and curator, has spent her career supporting people who rarely have their voices heard.
Man has worked on projects with many a marginalised group – from former community housing tenants to residents of a former mining community witnessing their old neighbourhood become a vast commuter village – so she was the perfect fit for a Heritage Lottery Fund-supported oral-history project at Glenside Hospital Museum, which ran from 2011 to 2013.
For most of the 130 years before its closure in 1994, Glenside – originally the Bristol Lunatic Asylum – was a mental health hospital. Between 1915 and 1919, the building was requisitioned as the Beaufort War Hospital, immortalised in the murals painted by the former orderly Stanley Spencer in the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Hampshire.
Five years on from the end of the oral-history project, Man carries out a variety of roles at the museum. “As all the work is by volunteers, there was a need to raise funds and develop the museum to ensure its future,” she says. “The place does important work in raising awareness and destigmatising mental illness.” The approach is non-confrontational to enable visitors to discuss a difficult subject, she adds.
“Everyone is greeted by a volunteer and encouraged to ask questions. We have a mock-up of a padded cell and objects ranging from a lobotomy instrument to electroconvulsive therapy machines.”
Among the exhibits is a Victorian strait-jacket made of blue-checked cloth embossed with the name of the asylum – a replica is available for people to try on.
Kristin Hussey
Curator, Royal College of Physicians, London
Kristin Hussey is frequently reminded about her first working day at the Royal College of Physicians (RCP). “I dropped in on an event for kids that involved sewing stitches into foam arms, which I thought was one of the most awful things I’d experienced,” she says.
“Unfortunately, a conservator found this hilarious and he now tries to scare me at every opportunity; during a meeting he once whispered, ‘Could you hold this for a second?’ before handing me a human ribcage.”
Hussey has acclimatised somewhat since that initial encounter and is leading the RCP’s 500th birthday celebrations with two landmark exhibitions and heritage trails around the extraordinary collection of objects, paintings and rare books that tell the story of half a millennium of doctoring.
“The challenge for the RCP is that it is not only a museum but also a membership body that was set up in 1518, and it can be intimidating for people to come into a building that feels like it’s for doctors,” she says.
“It’s all about encouraging visitors to move around with confidence – to look, for example, at the 17th-century anatomical tables and ask: ‘Where did the bodies come from?’”
One of Hussey’s favourite objects is a cup dating from the same period. “It’s made from antimony, a poisonous metal that when infused with wine left in the vessel overnight produces a violent emetic [causing vomiting],” she says. “It was a kill-or-cure treatment from a time when it was believed that if you were ill it was because of an internal imbalance that could only be corrected by purging your whole system.
“It illustrates an issue that all medical museums struggle with – the perception that doctors in the past were often cruel people,” Hussey says. “You have to understand the knowledge of the time that made these things seem sensible.”
The RCP’s Ceaseless Motion: William Harvey’s Experiments in Circulation exhibition (until 26 July) celebrates the 400th anniversary of the physician’s discovery that the heart pumps blood around the vascular system. It will be followed later this year by This Vexed Question, which will explore the role of women in medicine (from 19 September 2018 to 18 January 2019).
“This Vexed Question will examine why and how certain areas of medicine were deemed to be suitable for women to work in and will include this college’s not-so-glorious role in that history,” says Hussey.
Kate Jarman
Archivist, St Bartholomew’s Hospital and Royal London Hospital museums, London
Kate Jarman is the custodian of some remarkable medical records. She looks after two museums and the archives of around 25 current and former hospitals, which not only tell the stories of the staff who worked – and the patients who were treated – in them, but also paint a vivid picture of how Londoners lived and died over many centuries.
The rich history of St Bartholomew’s Hospital itself can be traced via an impressive collection of medieval deeds, she says. “Like most religious institutions of the time, the hospital was sustained through income from gifts of property that it rented out. Many of those early parchments, complete with seals, have survived because they have remained on the same site for 900 years.”
Founded as a priory in 1123, Barts would originally have been a place of rest and prayer. Following the dissolution of the monasteries in the early 16th century, Barts was refounded as a hospital in 1547. It was a big leap forward, and records provide clues to early treatments offered there.
“Some of the ingredients listed are still used in pharmaceuticals today, but others feature unpleasant bits of animals,” says Jarman. “We see physicians being appointed for the first time, including one to perform lithotomies – the removal of bladder and kidney stones – before anaesthesia or antiseptics, of course. Then in 1785, England’s first medical college was founded at the Royal London Hospital and we start to see increasing numbers of case notes and more evidence-based medicine.”
It’s that kind of detail that sets Barts apart from the other archives Jarman has supervised in her career.
“While a lot of the general administrative detail can be the same, the medical collection contains sensitive material and personal information that needs to be kept restricted under the Data Protection Act,” she says.
And there is no shortage of other insights into the grim areas of historical hospital life: Jarman has a soft spot for a bill of £2 for “night soil collection” by “John Hunt – nightman and rubbish carter” dating from 1750. “The hospital had cesspits and a bog house that had to be emptied. This was the charge to remove 100 tonnes of sewage, which would have been taken to the town ditch or dumped in the Thames.”
Natasha McEnroe
Keeper of medicine, Science Museum, London
It was the life of a different sort of doctor that set Natasha McEnroe on a course of medical history. When she was curator of Dr Johnson’s House in London, McEnroe was astonished by the number of visitors who loved the 18th-century vibe so much that they longed to be part of the witty world of Johnson, the author of the 1755 A Dictionary of the English Language, and his cohort.
“I thought they surely couldn’t yearn for the age before anaesthesia, antisepsis and penicillin – just think about the dentistry alone,” she says. “That led me into serious research about the health of Johnson who, it appears, contracted scrofula – probably from infected meat – had terrible eyesight, hearing and mobility issues, suffered a series of strokes and had to deal with considerable water retention.”
McEnroe subsequently followed the trails of two more eminent practitioners – Francis Galton, the controversial polymath and “father of eugenics”, whose collection she managed at the Grant Museum of Zoology at University College London before she became the director of the Florence Nightingale Museum in 2011.
“They were complex characters and the appeal was placing them in the context of the times they lived in,” she says. “Collections closely linked to an individual can, through their fame, often shed light on the lives of others.”
New galleries at the Science Museum showcasing the collections it shares with the Wellcome Trust are due to open in the autumn of 2019. Of all the objects in her care, McEnroe is both impressed and slightly unnerved by an enormous 1940s iron lung.
“It’s like a giant metal box into which the patient was pushed like a loaf into an oven, sealed airtight at the neck with a pump producing negative pressure, forcing the poor individual to breathe,” she says.
“A child’s fear of it would be the stuff of nightmares, yet it’s equally a marker for the discovery of the polio vaccine in 1955, which sparked an international frenzy.”
Joanne Bartholomew
Chief executive, Thackray Medical Museum, Leeds
The Thackray Medical Museum is showing its age and is due to have a facelift. It’s just 21 years since the museum – based on a collection of medical supplies and equipment from a family-run chemist shop – opened in 1997 in the magnificent 19th-century former city workhouse.
“Peoples’ expectations have changed, so the original linear route through the building now seems like a tick-box exercise,” says Joanne Bartholomew. “There’s going to be a more thematic approach to the medical innovation that’s transforming lives and responding to crises to connect us to contemporary topics.”
The museum is looking to relaunch in spring 2020, with minimal closures during the redevelopment.
Bartholomew says recording and interpreting patients’ experiences who were subject to the tools of the surgical trade can be a challenge.
“Instruments are grisly things and that side of the story is quite visceral; people are horrified and compelled in equal measure, just like when they watch medical documentaries on television,” she says. “It’s not necessarily what you want to think about when you’re in a museum on a Saturday afternoon so there’s a balancing act in terms of engaging visitors with the content.”
Similarly, the museum’s strong key stage two and GCSE student audiences have to be considered, adds Bartholomew, who believes the future lies in the interpretation and storytelling of objects, such as a 17th-century corrective orthopaedic frame.
“It looks like a suit of armour but it’s a set of devices that attach to each other. It speaks of the roots of the medical industry when a surgeon visited a metalworker or blacksmith to make bespoke equipment, and there’s something about the hardness of metal adapted to fit soft human tissue.”
Another talking point is Hannah Dyson’s Ordeal, a graphic audiovisual depiction of Victorian surgery based on the true story of an 11-year-old girl who needed treatment for a leg injury sustained at the mill where she worked. “As a visitor, I wouldn’t go anywhere near the film but, after applying for a post here, I felt I had to see it to make sure that I could do the job,” says Bartholomew. “I ended up working in an office directly above it for six years, listening to poor Hannah scream the place down every few hours. It’s better to concentrate on the positive life-saving aspect of what we show here – that’s probably how medics cope with it all.