Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
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This walk is a pick-and-choose collection of sights. If you're interested in visiting the
Old Operating Theatre Museum and Borough High Street inns, described next, see those
sights first before heading west: Exiting Southwark Cathedral, turn left to the end of the
churchyard and go up the stairs to the busy Borough High Street (the one that crosses the
bridge). Turn right and hike 100 yards south (along the left-hand side of this busy thor-
oughfare) to the Old Operating Theatre Museum (turn left on St. Thomas Street) and The
George Inn.
Back when the common cold was treated with a refreshing bloodletting, the Old Operating
Theatre—a surgical operating room from the 1800s—was a shining example of “modern”
medicine. Today a museum, this is a quirky, sometimes gross, look at that painful transition
from folk remedy to clinical health care. Originally part of a larger hospital complex, the
Old Operating Theatre was boarded up when the hospital relocated, lying untouched for
100 years until its chance discovery in 1956. The location alone—in a long-forgotten attic
above a church, reached by a steep spiral staircase—makes this odd place worth a visit.
After buying your ticket, climb a few more stairs into a big room under heavy tim-
bers—the Herb Garret, which was used to dry herbs for the former hospital. Today, it dis-
plays healing plants used for millennia—different ones for each of the traditional four ail-
ments (melancholic, choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic), supposedly caused by an imbalance
in the body's traditional four substances, or “humours” (black bile, yellow bile, blood,
and phlegm), corresponding to the earth's traditional four elements (earth, wind, fire, and
Ringo). Florence Nightingale, the nurse famed for saving so many Crimean War soldiers
wounded in Russia, worked here to improve sanitation and to turn nurses from low-paid
domestics into trained doctors' assistants.
The small hallway leading to the theater displays crude anesthetics (ether, chloroform,
three pints of ale), surgical instruments by Black & Decker (knives, saws, drills), and a
glaring lack of antiseptics—that is, until young Dr. Joseph Lister discovered carbolic acid,
which reduced the high rates of mortality (and halitosis).
Up the stairs, the Old Operating Theatre is the highlight—a semicircular room sur-
rounded by railings for 150 spectators (truly a “theater”), where doctors operated on pa-
tients while med students observed.
