Situated in a herb garret in the roof of St Thomas’s Church in Southwark, the Old Operating Theatre Museum is Britain’s oldest surviving purpose-built operating theatre. Built in 1822 as part of the women’s ward for St Thomas’s Hospital, it predates both anaesthetics and antiseptics, and offers a unique (and often grisly) insight into the history of medicine and surgery.
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 spiral staircase to view a semicircular operating theatre with tiered viewing seats for up to 150 medical students.
Sanitised reenactments are sometimes held – just as gruesome as the operating tools that look like torture implements – alongside more light-hearted events ranging from craft workshops to comedy nights, while the venue’s programme of temporary exhibitions often combine art with explorations of pathology.
