Museum & Herb Garret
Tales from Old St Thomas’ Hospital Wards: Sailors & Syphilis
Posted: July 18, 2024
Content Warning The following blog includes a discussion on sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Syphilis is a sexually transmitted infection that can remain latent in the bloodstream for decades if left…
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Featured Object: Leech Jar
Posted: October 31, 2022
What was the 19th-century leech craze? Why did St Thomas’ Hospital use over 50,000 leeches in 1822? Want to learn more? Read the full blog. See our Featured Objects playlist on YouTube…
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For the Good of the Living: Dissection and Medical Education in the 19th Century
Posted: December 16, 2021
Content warning: This piece contains detailed discussion about dissection of human bodies and mentions unauthorised use of human bodies in history. Much of our knowledge of the organs inside the…
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Leeches: An Early Nineteenth-century Obsession
Posted: December 9, 2021
In 1822 St. Thomas’ Hospital used over 50,000 leeches for medical bloodletting, over 31 times more than just four years previously. It is a remarkable increase in use, and one…
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“Doctors Get Ill Too”
Posted: February 26, 2021
We often focus on treatments offered by medical professionals in the past, but what of the occupational health of the practitioners themselves? Italian physician Bernardino Ramazzini (1633-1714) spent most of…
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Explore the Cabinet of Curiosities
Posted: October 3, 2020
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Diagnoses and Treatment
Posted: July 4, 2020
This section uses a variety of source material to show the different ways doctors and their patients understood sickness and the various methods used as treatment.
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Cholera
Posted: July 4, 2020
This section examines why the cholera outbreaks in 19th century Britain were a crucial element in the development of public health.
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Venetian Plague Mask Sliding Puzzle
Posted: July 1, 2020
Venetian Plague Doctor Mask Sliding Puzzle » Sliding puzzle by ProProfs
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The Scourge of the Nineteenth Century: Cholera in England (Part II)
Posted: June 23, 2020
The ‘Land of Death’ in which we dwelt was Newington, hemmed in by Lambeth, Southwark, Walworth, Bermondsey, and other gloomy parishes, through which the pestilence stalked like a destroying angelin…
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The Scourge of the Nineteenth Century: Cholera in England (Part I)
Posted: June 1, 2020
Between 1831 and 1866, four Asiatic cholera outbreaks struck England, as part of pandemic outbreaks that affected the whole world. Cholera is caused by a bacterium spread through infected water,…
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‘Pain has an element of blank’
Posted: August 1, 2019
We assume that our ancestors felt pain in much the same way as we do today. But perhaps this ‘common-sense’ assumption is incorrect. The way individuals relate to the world,…
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The Natural Ordure of Things
Posted: August 1, 2019
“Why, what I may think after dinner is one thing, and what I may think before dinner is another.” Mr Jopling, ‘Bleak House’. It’s a fair assumption that not many of…
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Polyps: A Real Life Hydra in Miniature
Posted: August 1, 2019
Previously, I wrote a blog about the reintroduction of Rhinoplasty to European surgery in the early 19th century by Joseph Constantine Carpue. The idea of transplanting tissue had been neglected for such…
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Precious Objects as Materia Medica
Posted: August 1, 2019
Coral & Pearl In the Secrets of Maister Alexis, translated into English by William Warde in 1558 we find on folio 69 a recipe for a distilled water which “is very…
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The Fear of Female Physicians (Cunning-Women) in Anglo-Saxon England
Posted: August 1, 2019
‘Woman is the gate of the devil, the path of wickedness, the sting of the serpent, in a word, a perilous object.’ Saint Jerome, 4th century. In the small Cotswold village…
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Seeing is Believing: Spiritualism in the Victorian Era-Part 4
Posted: August 1, 2019
The Society of Psychical Research was one of a number of organisations established in Britain in the latter part of the 19th century. It was founded in 1882 by a…
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Seeing is Believing: Spiritualism in the Victorian Era-Part 3
Posted: August 1, 2019
In the dawn of modern spiritualism the general means of communication employed by the spirits were “raps” or “alphabet rapping”, where a medium could relay messages from the deceased by…
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Seeing is Believing: Spiritualism in the Victorian Era-Part 2
Posted: August 1, 2019
In mid-Victorian London the early spiritualist movement was relatively small and mainly dominated by the upper circles of society. A varied grouping of middle-class intellectuals and professionals became the early…
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Seeing is Believing: Spiritualism in the Victorian Era-Part 1
Posted: August 1, 2019
“There exists… a Higher science, which is also religion in the truest sense, which deals with hidden forces in nature at which Physical science stops short, but which are more…
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The Humoral Management of Blood: Cupping, Bloodletting and Staunching PART 3
Posted: July 25, 2019
The ‘Governor’ – The King of Cups In 1853 within the Lancet* St Thomas’ trained surgeon Thomas Wakley (1795-1862) wrote a substantial obituary of Monson Hills Senior (1792-1853) the long serving Cupper…
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The Humoral Management of Blood: Cupping, Bloodletting and Staunching PART 2
Posted: July 25, 2019
Scarification, Venesection V Leeching The scarificator was introduced to the process of bloodletting in the early nineteenth century and was known as the new ‘mechanical leech’. The small box-like machine…
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The Humoral Management of Blood: Cupping, Bloodletting and Staunching PART 1
Posted: July 25, 2019
Blood and heart health is a central aspect of the normal monitoring and maintenance of our body function. Via medical analysis we know that a unit of blood is taken…
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