The Old Operating Theatre-London - London - Places of Interest

If you’re ever unfortunate enough to have to under go a major operation at least be thankful its going to be in the 21st century and that medical techniques are well advanced. There’s a museum in London that provides a look back at the way our ancestors had to deal with surgery when chances of surviving where very much 50/50.

The Old Operating Theatre and Herb Garret are in St Thomas’s church, the chapel of the medieval St Thomas’s hospital founded in the early 11th century and described as ‘ancient’ even in 1215. Its in the area just south of London Bridge although the actual St Thomas’s hospital moved in 1862 to Lambeth, currently on the south bank of the Thames opposite the Houses of Parliament. The first translation and printing of the Bible into English took place in the original hospital grounds in 1533.

St Thomas’s church was rebuilt in 1703, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, and the large garret or attic room was used to store medicinal herbs as the location was dry and kept the herbs away from rats. The chapel was adjacent to the women’s ward of the hospital and in 1822 the garret was converted into an operating theatre for the women patients, because it was on the same level as the ward, gave medical students a seperate entrance and the thick wooden beams muffled the sounds of operations taking place without anaesthetics.

Before the use of gases was pioneered anaesthetics were unpredictable and might just as well kill the patient during an operation. Doctors decided is was safer to carry out surgery without them. Many patients also died from infections picked up during operations because bacteria weren’t discovered to be the cause until the mid 19th century, also unlike physicians, surgeons weren’t university trained but served an apprenticeship similar to butchers.

It became a museum after being rediscovered in 1956, almost a hundred years after the hospital moved locations. Nowadays it has a regular programme of events for visitors to experience how medicine and surgery were practiced in the past.

This April those events include Victorian Surgery, on every Saturday at 2pm, a lecture taking place in the operating theatre that demonstrates ‘the ordeal of Victorian surgery, when a patient’s only relief from agony was the speed of the surgeon’s knife.’ On the 12th April at 2pm there’s Hands On:The Power of Blood, a hands on session with medical instruments, old and new.

From 10-28 April there is a double-bill of plays under the title A Bloodless Field starting each night at 7.45pm in the operating theatre produced by theatre company Metal and Bone. The plays are The Body Snatcher, a chilling Victorian tale about an ambitious medical student who finds his conscience compromised when his anatomy class needs more bodies and The Gift a modern day story about a transplant surgeon who’s forced to question his talent. Tickets for A Bloodless Field cost £13.

The Old Operating Theatre is open daily from 10.30am-5pm and admission is £5.25 and each month there are a changing programme of events happening. Its located on St Thomas’s Street, two minutes walk from London Bridge Underground station.