Herb Garret and Operating Theatre

Not far from Kings Cross Station, in the shadow of the Shard of Glass, lies a small museum of sorts that was hidden from the passage of time for many generations.  Part of my enjoyment of this city has been finding such places, things that lie outside the public consciousness to some degree, places of history and meaning that have fallen through the cracks or by the wayside only to be discovered again by chance.  Many places, no doubt, still lie hidden and their secrets might be kept in some pub basement  or musty attic until well after I am dead.  I find that an intriging prospect.

Undiscovered for nearly a century in the roof of St Thomas's Church, Southwark, an intrepid researcher, Raymond Russel worked his way into the crawlspace in 1957, revealing a near perfectly 19th century operating theatre.

The church's garret, built in 1703, was originially an apocethary store, designed to dry and store medicinal herbs, in the process of restoration the remains of dessicated remains poppies were found in amongst the rafters.  In 1822 the garret was repurposed into the operating theatre we saw, primarily for the female patients of the adjacent Dorcas Ward.  Thirty-seven years later, St Thomas's would become home to the famous nursing school of none other than Florence Nightingale.  That's right Flo-No herself, the one and only.

The Apothecary's Act of 1815, which required apprentice medical practitioners to attend public hospitals and surgeries, meant that the operating theatres galleries, in their time, would have been filled by the youth of the age, eager to learn more about the medical advances of the time.  They came slowly, with blood and pain, and without aenesthetic.*  The cutting marks still visible on the table in the rooms centre attest to the ghoulish reality of 19th century medical practice.





But interestingly, all patients that would have come through St Thomas's surgery, had something in common.  They were women, and whilst poor for the most part, they nevertheless received medical assistance that is not altogether so removed from the modern age.  Amputations and Lithotomys, using practices that are not so different from what might be delivered in a 21st century hospital.**

The heat in the room on this day was stifling, and the collusion of stale air with the scent of herbs, brought with them a palpable sense of the pressures that both doctors and patients would have labored under not so long ago that it should stray from our collective memory.

The world in which we live today, with the advance of medicine and treatment for the panoply of illness and injury that plagues mankind, is in no small way due in part the sacrifices and pain borne by the women who went through this place.  That infection, shattered limbs, disease and cancers are no longer a sentence of guaranteed death under the weight of pain and suffering, is the gift of the poor who in many ways were left with little choice but to accept the terrors of early surgery.

Eating Ice-Cream under the shade of the old archway of the church (now the entry to a school of design)  I looked up at the London Shard.  Michael and I were both blissfully unaware that it was at that very moment being scaled by feminist activists in response to the inequality of gender that we still coexist with in western society as a whole.  Although we learned this in hindsight, it is still striking in its appropriateness.

There are still changes to be made, orders to be defied, and dangers to be overcome to face the new dawn.  But in the eaves of that ancient theatre, once stained with blood, I was reminded silently, that it should not be so daunting for us to make further progress today.

*Ether and chloroform becoming available until at least 1846, and even then not adopted fully until 1865.

**With the added perk of unconsciousness, of course.