Review of the Thackray Medical
Museum in Leeds

By Helen Gavaghan, Leeds, UK, 15th August, 2016

The story of Mary Bateman, convicted of murder at York Assizes in 1809, is told on the second floor of The Thackray Museum, right after a short film of an amputation - without anaesthetic - in 1824. Mary's is a disturbing tale, because it seems from the exhibit her skeleton might still be somewhere in the University of Leeds, or its medical school. Whether the conviction was sound, or, rather than commit murder she had overstepped the mark of her competence, is hard to say without sight of the trial transcript, but, having been hung, the surgeons, after the fashion of the time, dissected her body publicly, and charged the audience.

Medical ethics would, I hope, forbid that practice now anywhere on Earth. And I think medical ethics should now see the bones of Mary Bateman respectfully disposed of, with a proper funeral - if that has not already happened. I have no problem with the Human Rights Act being retrospective.

Odd to start a museum review with such a comment, but the anecdote springs to mind because fascinating as the museum is - and it really is - I am disappointed not to have seen an exploration of medical ethics. Medical history practically begs for such discussions.

Public health advances in Britain and medical developments in the nineteenth century dominate the exhibits. Downstairs a recording tells how Louis Pasteur vanquished with his theory of germs the idea of spontaneous generation as the cause of disease. Upstairs we learn how filthy surgical conditions killed those patients who survived the trauma of brutal surgery without anaesthetic.

Of course in the early part of the nineteenth century the connections among disease, filth, overcrowding and excrement in the street had not been made. We learn from the museum how small pox, whooping cough, measles and fever killed so many. When cholera broke out in 1870 in China it reached India by 1896, and en-route killed 8 million people. In Leeds doctors noted, as they did around the country, that when cholera strikes it is the labouring classes who are hardest hit. They were the people living cheek by jowl with slaughterhouses and sewers, and no piped water. Nineteenth century British prosperity built on squalor and suffering. Children as young as six and seven working 12 hour days, six days a week.

In fact the first part of the exhibition takes the visitor into dark uneven streets, with slaughterhouses, dwellings and filthy Inns for travelling workers. I trod warily, because my brain and monovision contact lenses were not doing a brilliant job of processing the input.

Almost half of all deaths in 1840, assert the museum exhibits, were children under five. In 1845 those who could escape the "miasma" of the city did so. Unfenced machines caused horrific accidents.

We learn how in 1854 medical geography revealed that cholera was waterborne. By 1900 - which would be just before the Labour Party we now know was being born - the horrors of death by infectious and contagious disease in Britain were drastically reduced. Travel had been recognised as a problem in the spread of some disease. Legislation in the 1870s enforcing small pox vaccinations for the public good, and better standards of living were helping ratchet down infection and contagion related deaths.

Oddly enough, given the grim nature of the subject matter, the visit engrosses rather than grosses out. A few Mums and Grandmas told me their young charges were not distressed. Some hadn't liked the operation without anaesthetic or the dim dark streets of mid nineteenth century Leeds, but they were not distraught.

Possibly I, rather than the youngsters, was more disturbed by the medical vaccination equipment of 1880 to 1960, though the thickness of needle would not be unfamiliar to a diabetic today. And luckily the prospect of any of the 11-year olds at the Thackray today finding themselves having their limbs amputated with filthy equipment and no anaesthetic is so remote that it has no visceral connection to their life.

The Thackray Museum opened in March 1997. It was visited earlier this year by The Princess Royal, and the building was used in 1916 as the East Leeds War Hospital for the wounded in World War I.

Helen Gavaghan has a BSc (hons) in biophysics from the University of Leeds, has been a science writer and news journalist/editor since 1980, and studied the history of science, technology and medicine as part of an M.Phil course at the University of Manchester (2002-2004), but did not submit a thesis.