Medical Walking Tour

Walking Tour with Sue

This walking tour was exhausting. I have no idea how Sue, our tour guide, was able to walk as much as she did without being tired. I thought it was funny that most of us are around 20 and she was probably in her 70s and she had more energy than we did. Having said that, I really enjoyed myself and got a lot out of the tour and would recommend it to anybody interested in Victorian medicine because it is so much more interesting to actually see where things happened.

After visiting Guy’s hospital, we walked to an operation theater. One interesting note about Guy’s is that it accepted any person even if they had infectious disease unlike St. Thomas. The operation theater was a tiny, poorly ventilated room at the top of 32 winding stairs. In the Victorian era, medical students were required to watch a certain number of operations per year. A bell would ring signifying to the students who were working in Guy’s hospital that an operation was going to start soon and they would rush over to see what would happen. There were only about 12 of us in the room which could probably hold 30 or 40 students so I would not want to imagine how much hotter it would be in summer. Sue explained how doctors would amputate legs. I felt queasy when I found out that the surgeon had to use three saws for an amputation and could perform it complete with sewing the person back up in about one minute. Also knowing that there was no anesthesia until later in the period made everything worse. Obviously the horrific nature of surgeries pushed doctors to look for ways to make the patient more comfortable. I wonder how many doctors turned to chemistry to try to create better medicine or of they accepted the fainting and infections and part of the process.

The operation theater also had a reconstruction of an apothecary as well as other medical tools and devices. I think the most interesting medical tools were the obstetric and gynecology tools. Many of them looked like torture devices. Did doctors create devices that were designed from their understanding of women’s anatomy or from women’s needs? How useful were the devices? These tools were created by men for women so I wonder if they projected what they thought women needed and was proper for them to do as doctors.