The Old Operating Theatre and Herb Garret – 23rd February 2007 – By Megan Claridge
The building was used in Victorian times and inside we saw an operating theatre for women. Operations were only done on Thursdays. You did not have to pay to get in as the surgeon just wanted to help. There was a Latin sign saying “FOR COMPASSION NOT FOR GAIN”. Women were wheeled in through the corridors from St. Thomas’ Hospital.The viewing gallery was in the shape of a semi-circle with rails, and in between the rails there was room for standing so students could watch and learn. It was also very smelly because there were no windows and every thing was unclean. Anyone could touch the bandages. Everything was dirty. Even surgeons did not wash their hands. The lady picked me to be a patient with a horrible broken leg. In those days you couldn’t mend it. If the bone was sticking out it had to be amputated. If it had to be amputated you had to lie on a wooden board with slits so that the blood could drain through into a box of sawdust. There were lots of assistants to hold down the patient so they couldn’t stop the surgeon. The surgeon would give the patient a mouth wedge to bite down on.Ether would be given as some anaesthetic. You had to be careful because if you give the patient too much Ether the might not wake up again, but if you didn’t give enough, they might wake up during the operation. The surgeon tied a strap around the broken leg. Then the surgeon had to get out a knife and put it around the leg. In three slices the knife should be down to the bone. The surgeon then puts away the knife and gets out a saw. He then saws the bone. When the leg is off it falls into the box of sawdust. The surgeon then folds the skin over so no bone is sticking out and gets a wooden leg fitted. The patient would be wheeled back to the ward and she would be given some beer. Beer was safer to drink than water because the water would have been dirty.The nurses were often drunk and didn’t give the patient much care. Some of the beds were unclean so wounds often got infected. Seventy percent of women died either of shock during the operation, or because of all the germs. If you survived you would stay in hospital for six weeks.
Next we saw the Herb Garret. An Herb Garret is an attic to store herbs. In there we saw different types of herbs including, Juniper berries, Cinnamon, leaves, Black pepper, Liquorice root and Fennel. The apothecary and his assistants would grind the herbs in a big pot and then again in a pestle and mortar. The herbs were then sifted and made into a type of dough. Henry got a chance to make the dough into the pills with the pill maker. He had to roll the dough into a sausage shape and put it into the pill maker, which had ridges so when he put the dough on top of the ridges and put the lid down and moved his hand back and forth, it made pills. To make them smooth he had to put them on the table and put a wooden circular lid over the top and move it gently using a figure of eight. If you were making pills for a rich person, you would have dipped it in silver colouring.
We also saw types of medical equipment at the museum. There were knives that were used in the operations, as well as the saws! On display there were forceps to get babies out if they were stuck. We saw face masks for chloroform. The masks are horrible. They were put over the lower face so that you couldn’t breathe air. They didn’t get taken off until your face turned blue. We saw wee-ing bottles for men and women so they didn’t have to get out of their bed. There were some babies’ bottles from Boots the chemist. We saw a nipple shield for a woman so when she was breast feeding it didn’t hurt. There were blood letting tools such as knives and a machine that made five gashes in one go. There were also some leeches to help. Leeches are helpful because they suck your blood. We saw some leeches in a bowl of water.
In the museum there were lots of body parts. They were all preserved in Formaldehyde. We saw half a brain and a cross-section of kidneys. There was also a cross-section of a lung. It was black because if you lived in the town your lungs would be black or grey because of pollution. If you lived in the country your lungs were more likely to be pink. There was part of the intestine showing the appendix. Some people say that the appendix is where a tail used to be, but that today it is unused. We saw inside a Femur, which is a leg bone. There were some skulls in the museum. Skulls don’t have a nose because the nose is not made of bone: It is cartilage.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Old Operating Theatre and Herb Garret – 23rd February 2007 – By Henry Scott
The Old Operating Theatre was Victorian, and this one was for women. Operations were only on Thursdays. The operation was for free. The women were wheeled in from St Thomas’ Hospital. Students watched from the gallery.Megan got to pretend that she had a broken leg, and Christy was the assistant who had to hold her down. The doctor tied a belt around her leg and pretended to cut her leg off with a knife and a saw. There was a box full of sawdust to catch the leg. They fitted a wooden leg after folding the skin over. A lady would have been given beer when she got back to the ward. Seventy percent of women died either during or after the operation.
Next, we went into the Herb Garret, which is where they kept the herbs in the attic. We saw leaves, Juniper berries, black peppercorns and cinnamon. I got to grind some herbs in a pestle and mortar and sieve them. I put herb dough in the pill maker and moved the roller backwards and forwards to make pills. Next, I put the pills under the lid and made a figure of eight movement to make them smooth. We saw medical tools in the Herb Garret. Some things we saw were forceps to get babies out and special bottles for men and women to wee in so that they didn’t have to get out of bed. If there was an infected wound they might put leeches on it to suck the poison out.
Also in the museum, we saw half a brain, a lung, a cross-section of a kidney and a human skeleton.
Information taken from the website: www.thegarret.org.uk
Hidden for almost a century in the garret of St Thomas's Church, Britain’s only surviving 19th Century Operating Theatre was rediscovered in 1956.
St Thomas’s hospital and church were originally named after Thomas Becket (a Catholic martyr) who died in 1170, but following the reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries after Henry V111’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon and the birth of the Protestant Church, it was re-dedicated to the apostle Thomas instead. (Henry also shut the hospital in 1540 most probably because it treated prostitutes. It was re-opened by Edward V1 twelve years later.) The hospital was probably originally part of the Monastery of St Mary Overie which was founded in 1100, so it may have been built then which would make it the oldest hospital in London despite St. Bartholomew’s Hospital which was built in 1123 being known as the oldest hospital. We do know St Thomas’s was described as ancient in 1215.
St. Thomas's Church probably originated as a chapel of the medieval hospital, but it is not known when it was first built on the present site. There was certainly a medieval church there though. It was rebuilt by Thomas Cartwright (Master Mason to Sir Christopher Wren) in 1703 with an unusually large Garret in the roof space. This was used by the St Thomas's Apothecary to store and cure herbs. His main offices and shop were a short distance away along St Thomas's St. Storage areas in the hospital were available in basements and attics but for herbs, attics were preferable because they were less vulnerable to rats and the massive timbers of the Garret absorbed excess moisture. When the Museum was being restored, 4 poppies were found in the rafters. Poppies are used to prepare opium which was a very important medicinal plant.
Placing the Theatre in the Herb Garret of the Church in 1822 provided a separation from the ward. It gave a separate entrance for students, and afforded a measure of sound proofing. It was also approximately at the same level as the women's surgical ward (named, Dorcas) which aided the transport of patients to the theatre through what is now the fire escape to the Herb Garret. The Theatre was purpose built to maximise the light from above, with a large skylight. Although not heated or ventilated, it provided an ideal, albeit small, area for demonstrating surgical skills. The wards of the South Wing had been built around the Church and prior to 1822 the women would have been operated on in the ward.
Surgeons did not have access to anaesthetics before 1847. There have been anaesthetics around since the Romans, but until people like Farady conducted experiments on the dose required, it was not used as the surgeons guess work often killed the patient! Prior to 1847 the surgeons therefore relied on doing the operations as quickly as possible (amputations would take less than a minute) or alcohol / opium to dull the patient’s senses. After 1847, they used Chloroform or Ether. Antiseptic surgery was not invented until after The Operating Theatre had closed down, so most operations were amputations. It was far too dangerous to carry out internal operations before the invention of antiseptics.
It was in the grounds of St Thomas’s Hospital in Southwark that the first complete translation of the bible into English was made.In 1533, Thomas Cromwell and Sir Thomas More suggested that the Scriptures should be translated into ‘the vulgar tongue'. In 1859, Florence Nightingale became involved with St Thomas's, setting up on this site her famous nursing school. It was on her advice that the Hospital agreed to move to a new site - its current location in Lambeth