Some excellent medicine! (From Advertiser Series)

Some excellent medicine!

8:00am Monday 22nd June 2009

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The Thackray Museum, alongside St James’s Hospital in Leeds, is full of questions and answers and hands-on ways of learning about the human body, and the progress which has been made in ways of keeping it healthy.

You can dip into a tray and pull out an X-ray. Push it deftly under the clips at the top of an illuminated screen, the way they do in Casualty or Holby City, and there it is before you: a hip bone with a pin in it, perhaps, or a fractured leg with the two snapped ends inches apart, or a lung with a dodgy-looking shadow on it.

Or lift the lid on a box which carries the question, “Why do I trump?” to be greeted with the sound of one and, under the lid, an explanation of why and how gases build up in the gut and demand to be let out.

In one section dealing with antiseptics, the couplet penned by Georg F L Stromeyer, German administrator of Joseph Lister’s method of killing germs during operations with the use of a mist of carbolic acid, is prominently displayed: “And Death must often go amiss By smelling antiseptic bliss.”

In another you can handle a piece of carbolic soap and experience that famous “hospital smell” that people used to hate so much but which kept germs at bay.

The Thackray Museum is a fascinating place to visit. It’s free to the under-fives, but it’s not for the faint-hearted. If you faint at the sight of a spot of blood, then give this museum a miss. Even young children who are really into all things gruesome might well be taken aback by some of it. But it is immensely informative, and hugely entertaining. There are nine galleries telling the story of medicine, from the 1842 street complete with smells and sounds to the interactive Life Zone! where you can find out fascinating facts about how your body works and how to keep it healthy. There really is something for everyone.

The journey begins in 1842, when Leeds was a festering mess. The place stank, as any place without sewerage and drainage would, and that recreated smell hits you as soon as you walk in to this section of the museum.

There are street cries and coarse conversations as you investigate the various hovels, taverns, lodging houses with their straw mattresses and fly-infested butcher’s shops.

Dr Baker’s report discovered the obvious: that if you have people living in filthy conditions, including drawing their drinking water from the River Aire into which sewage flowed, they became vulnerable to disease. His recommendation? “Remove the filth and you remove the disease”.

It helped to trigger a vast improvement in living conditions which, by the end of the Victorian era, had transformed the lot of most ordinary people.

If they became ill, though, they were faced with a wide range of options for treatment. There was the orthodox one that doctors could provide. But there were quack remedies and old wives’ tales too. One stated, “A home remedy for whooping cough is to pass the baby under a donkey seven times”. If you had asthma you might “dry and powder a toad, make into pills and take one every hour.” Then it’s on to a room relating to the present where you can check out the X-rays, or peer into the back of an eye, or look into a stomach through a gastroscope. You can try on an “empty belly” to see what it feels like to be pregnant.

And you can move on, finally, to the most child-friendly section of the museum, the one which shows how the body works.

Next weekend there’s an added attraction, as famous ambulances past and present visit the museum for a fun-filled day where youngsters can scare their friends with some gruesome face painting using special effects from film and TV, join in the trails around the museum, meet Florence Nightingale and make a Victorian toy to take home.

Using period uniforms, weapons and other wartime equipment, the East Yorkshire Regiment Living History Group – one of the UK’s longest-serving infantry re-enactment groups – will be adding colour and character.

The event is free, with usual admission charges, and activities run from 10am to 4pm each day.

Some museums struggle to get people through the door, but the Thackray is a real success story, welcoming 75,000 visitors each year into what was a Grade Two listed former workhouse.

Factfile

The Thackray Museum, Beckett Street, Leeds LS9 7LN (next to St James’s Hospital). Tel: 0113 245 7084.

To get there, take the 49, 50 or 50A bus from in front of the West Yorkshire Playhouse next to the main bus station (every ten minutes). By car, from the M621, follow the signs for York (A64), then follow the brown tourist signs.

Open daily, 10am-5pm, adults £5.40, children five-16 £3.90, under-fives free, senior citizens and students £4.40, family (two adults and up to three children) £17.50.

The museum has a private car park which costs £1.

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