Old Operating Theatre Museum, London

The Old Operating Theatre Museum preserves a surgical theatre inside the garret of St Thomas’s Church, on the original site of St Thomas’ Hospital. Its most striking story is that this cramped space began as a place for storing medicinal herbs before part of it became an operating room in 1822. It is among the oldest surviving operating theatres, and the patients treated here were women, mainly people who could not afford private care.

Until 1847, surgeons worked without anaesthetics; amputations could be completed in a minute or less, while alcohol or opiates dulled the patient’s senses. Antiseptic surgery had not yet been developed when the theatre closed. After a century out of use, the garret and theatre opened to visitors in 1962, with instruments that reveal practices such as bleeding, cupping, trepanning, and childbirth care.