Old Operating Theatre Museum

Britain's oldest surviving purpose-built operating theatre, the Old Operating Theatre Museum is situated in a herb garret in the roof of St Thomas's Church. Built in 1822 for poor women, the theatre has been restored with original furniture and equipment, including a nineteenth-century operating table, surgical instruments and pathological specimens. Visitors enter via a vertiginous wooden staircase to view a pre-anaesthetic operating theatre with tiered viewing seats for students; sanitised reenactments are sometimes held – just as gruesome as the operating tools that look like torture implements. Temporary exhibitions also take place, which often combine art with explorations of pathology.