At one time there was something decidedly sinister about medical museums. Hidden away in some dark corner of a university campus – entry by written request – most of their contents looked as if they ought to have been given a decent burial several centuries ago. All those specimen jars had a despondent feel to them, and there was something voyeuristic about the whole experience.
Even today the museum of medicine is a problematic creation. Hospitals are reluctant to invite tourists onto their already crowded car parks, or to remind their patients what implements matron has at her disposal.
Yet health care is a part of all our lives, and its history has a fascination, even if it ends with the heartfelt gratitude that one was born in the 20th century.
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If there is one place that demonstrates that there is more to the history of medicine than the halloween science lab it is Worcester. The city of Worcester contains, not one, but two such museums, both of them light, modern and engaging. The only thing I saw in a jar was a leech.
Clearly Worcester has plenty of credentials as a location for medical history. It possessed an infirmary from 1746, and enough important medical connections – Charles Hastings, the founder of the BMA, spent most of his working life in the city – to fill plenty of exhibition cases.
But the starting-point for Worcester’s engagement with the subject is really George Marshall. Marshall came to Worcester from Scotland in 1931 to work as a GP. At the creation of the NHS in 1948 he became a consultant surgeon to the Infirmary, and remained in general practice in the city until 1950.
But alongside his day-to-day work, Marshall also became an enthusiastic collector of old medical and surgical equipment, and by his retirement had accumulated a vast array of several thousand objects. In the 1970s George Marshall gave his collection to the Postgraduate Education Centre at Ronkswood.
In 2002 the collection was moved to a new home – the Charles Hastings Education Centre - at the Worcester Royal Hospital site in Newtown Road. If you get bored waiting in A&E, it’s well worth a stroll to track it down.
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Indeed, it’s worth a visit, even if you’re in good health. Take a ball of string with you, though; large hospital complexes are labyrinthine, to say the least, even if there is no minotaur at the end of the corridor.
Since the George Marshall Museum opened its doors in 2002, an even more tempting opportunity offered itself. When the Worcester Royal Infirmary in Castle Street finally closed, the University of Worcester took over the former buildings – mostly Georgian and Victorian – to form the heart of its city campus. The new centre opened in 2010 with offices, teaching rooms, gymnasium, café, and the former infirmary chapel, dedicated to Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale”, who lived out her final years in nearby Malvern.
Here was a chance to dig deeper into George Marshall’s bottomless collection, and to explore the history of medical treatment, in a setting where it was actually delivered. It was in the boardroom of the old infirmary that the British Medical Association was born in 1832, and many of the former wards were still occupied until the late 20th century.
And thus the infirmary museum was born, courtesy of a £530,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, and one of the former wards has retained its medical credentials, albeit now as a place of education.
The infirmary is the more interactive of the two museums, and the one more focused on people in the medical profession itself: a Boer War surgeon and his travelling amputation kit, and former staff of the hospital. There is also a display relating to the Worcestershire County Lunatic Asylum at Powick, now converted into plush apartments.
I was particularly taken with the gas-fired cigarette lighter for the staff, presumably installed to discourage them from bringing their own lighters into such a vulnerable place of work.
To continue the story, it’s necessary to take oneself to the other side of Worcester, and find the Royal Hospital. The museum here is more “object rich”, and themed, not so much chronologically, as by aspects of medical practice: obstetrics, surgery, pharmacology, anaesthetics, dentistry and so on. Not for the squeamish, decidedly.
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It’s not possible, you’ll be relieved to know, to see a real amputation, but its grisly Victorian process is demonstrated on an adjustable table, once used for real in the infirmary.
Undoubtedly the headline act – in a literal sense – of the George Marshall are the 10 surviving death masks, cast from the heads of prisoners executed at the county gaol, which was once a stone’s throw from the infirmary.
The casts were part of a misguided medical experiment to determine the facial characteristics of the criminal, an example (as with the dissection of murderers) of surgeon working hand-in-glove with criminologist. Had it been successful, it would have saved the county police and the judiciary so much wasted time.
And, having explored medicine’s long and painful past, you’ll be glad to be alive in 2014, and ready, perhaps, to re-join the queue at A&E. It probably hasn’t moved much.