Best Museum Ever?

Well maybe not, that is a big call after all, but we went to a museum on Saturday that has to be up there as one of the better ones I've visited.  It is rated #24 of #1270 attractions in London on tripadvisor, so surely that's got to count for something, though number one is the Olympic Stadium, so perhaps take that with a grain of salt.  On a side note, really I don't know who reviews things on tripadvisor because come on, a stadium, that's the best London has to offer??

Anyway the museum is housed in the Royal College of Surgeons, the building is still in use, but the museum is across 2 floors in a section of the building.  It is named after John Hunter, the man who started the collection, he came to London in 1748 from a town near Glasgow.  At that time surgeons didn't have to go to university, unlike physicians, which is why surgeons are called Mr/Miss/Mrs/Ms.  It sounded like John Hunter was basically a body snatcher, who used the corpses to study anatomy and various things.  It seemed that he started the museum and had people in one day a week partly so that they would see that he wasn't trying to create some sort of Frankenstein monster.  I'm guessing because the collection is so old it contains things that perhaps couldn't be exhibited/collected nowadays.

They had the skeleton of an "Irish giant", Charles Byrne, who was 2.31m tall.  His express wish was that his skeleton not be displayed after death, and for that reason he wanted to be buried at sea, but John Hunter paid £500 after he died to get his hands on the body.  It's nice to see that the museum is following the British tradition of ignoring the wishes of those people most affected by the exhibits.

What the museum was mainly full of though was just bits of bodies, animal or human.  It was kind of cool to see the affect different diseases had on the bones.  So with rickets you could see the bones were all twisted.  There were also an awful lot of syphilitic bones in there, it looked like syphilis was pretty prevalent back then.  You could see the affect of the lesions on the skull, I guess it's no surprise people went crazy, looking at it's affect on the skull.  The fractures were pretty cool too, you could see where the bone had desperately tried to fuse together, but you're looking at it wondering how painful that must have been to use.

It wasn't just bones though, there was also a lot of jars containing soft tissue too, and I won't get too graphic but there were definitely a number of foetuses, as you would hope for in such a place.

There was also a great section on the history of surgery, how in the past good surgeons could do leg amputations in under a minute, no anaesthetic after all.  Then it moved into the era where people started to realise about germs and keeping wounds clean.  It then moved into another really graphic era around the first world war, where cosmetic surgery really started to get going.  The reason this was the dawn of this branch of surgery is that the soldiers fighting in the wars around that time started to suffer from horrific facial injuries, we're talking no face.  And yes there were 3D pictures.  They need to put those pictures up next to the cool tanks when recruiting kids to the army, because seriously if you were 18 and someone showed you a 3D picture of a guy without a face, and said that could be you, I'm wondering if we would turn into a nation of pacifists overnight.

The final, awesome, part of the museum was that they had a couple of videos on various surgeries.  We got to see heart bypass surgery, it starts and the chest has already been cut open, and you just see the heart beating.  It was unbelievable, the doctor is literally holding this persons beating heart.  I would go back to the museum just to watch the rest of the movies.  There was one on brain surgery that we didn't get to see.

If slightly macabre, but incredibly interesting things are what you like then definitely pay this place a visit, and even better is that it's free.  I love London museums.