Medical monstrosities on display

The Science Museum in London, England has a new Web site. Brought To Life: Exploring The History Of Medicine catalogs the progression of the medical sciences (and pre-sciences) over human history. It has some pretty fascinating exhibits, such as this amputation set:




The Museum describes it as follows:

Carried in a mahogany chest, this set contains a range of instruments needed by a surgeon to carry out a limb amputation. It includes an amputation saw, four Liston knives, a finger saw, three scalpels, artery forceps, bone forceps, a tenaculum (a hook-like instrument to move arteries and blood vessels out of the way). Also, a tourniquet and silk ligatures to sew up and close wounds. Liston knives are named after their inventor, Robert Liston (1794-1847), a Scottish surgeon renowned for his speed and skill in amputation. Liston performed the first operation in Britain under anaesthetic, taking just 25 seconds. The set was made by John Weiss, a leading surgical instrument maker based in London.

An article about the new Web site gives additional details.

Glass eyes, Victorian tattoos, and even Napoleon's toothbrush are among the medical oddities revealed on an amazing new Science Museum website.




The £1 million online resource explores some of the weird byways taken by medicine through the ages.

Other curiosities include early antibiotics, wartime first aid field equipment and Roman pottery penises.

Brought To Life: Exploring The History Of Medicine features 2,500 items from the museum's Wellcome Trust collection but over the next two years a further 1,500 will be added.

They were gathered by pharmacist, entrepreneur and collector Sir Henry Wellcome, who died in 1936.

Travel medicine chests include ones used for Antarctic explorations including Scott's 1910 ill-fated expedition to the South Pole.

Among other items are pedoscopes - which measured feet using X-rays - 'Jedi helmets' for scanning children's brains, laboratory mice and an artificial leg made in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp out of parts of a crashed aeroplane.




Some of the objects are not on public display at the museum, with many of the thousands of medicine samples, surgical instruments, body parts and machinery from around the world preserved in store at Blythe House, West London.

The website - funded by £725,000 from the Wellcome Trust and more than £300,000 from the Science Museum - also reveals how amputations used to be carried out before anaesthetic and antibiotics, as well as examining the impact of the plague and old treatments for toothache.

It tells how experiments were carried out on convicted criminals in Ancient Greece and how Queen Victoria promoted the use of anaesthetic in childbirth.

More at the link.

The new Web site is a fascinating place to spend an hour or two browsing through what our ancestors did to themselves in the name of health and healing. Sadly, prior to the advent of modern scientific studies and experimentation, many of the remedies they applied or used may have shortened rather more lives than they saved!

Peter