scientific
Edward l'Anson, 1879
3rd Floor Robin Brook Centre, St Bartholomew's Hospital
Barts Pathology Museum, based at St Bartholomew's Hospital, houses around 5,000 medical specimens on display over 3 mezzanine levels. This Grade II Listed building is in use by students of the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at QMUL and as such is very infrequently open to the public. Specimens include the skull of John Bellingham, examples of unusual diseases, and early surgical intervention.
Barbican, St. Paul's
City Thameslink, Farringdon
The museum can be accessed via a lift which takes you to the third floor. However, there are still 7 steps into the museum
Barts Pathology Museum is a Grade II Listed medical museum on the site of St Bartholomew's Hospital, and part of the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at QMUL. It was purpose built in 1879 to house anatomical specimens to be used by those studying medicine, and is still in use by QMUL's medical students today. This means it is infrequently open to visitors. The oldest specimen in the collection is from 1750, and other highlights include the skull of John Bellingham: the only person to assassinate a Prime Minister in the UK - he was hanged for the crime in 1812. Conditions represented include leprosy, tuberculosis, plague (Black Death), syphilis, and rickets. There are also examples of occupational diseases such as Chimney Sweep's Cancer of the Scrotum, and Phosphorous Necrosis of the Jaw in matchstick factory workers. Modification, surgery and injury are also represented amongst the 5000 specimens or 'pots' in the form of trepanning, foot binding and lobotomy, and there is a medico-legal or 'forensic' collection illustrating the effects of various poisons and weapons on the human body.
The way medical student are taught may have changed since the heyday of the Pathology Museum in the 1920s and 1930s, but the building itself has lost none of the drama. The architect Edward I’Anson oversaw the completion of the museum in 1878 and it was opened in 1879 by the Prince of Wales who later became Edward VII. Although built in a similar style to many other medical museums of the era, it differs in that it is an open plan space of approximately 28 by 11 metres square. It is made up of 3 mezzanine levels each around 8 metres high, all linked by a beautiful spiral staircase. After an illustrious history helping along the careers of such famous names as James Paget, Percival Pott and his student John Hunter among others, the museum was awarded Grade II Listed status in 1972. However, after the opening of a new Pathology department in 1909 and an extension for Clinical Skills teaching being built in the 1970s, the old Pathology Museum gradually fell into disrepair.
The neglect seems criminal when considering that these shelves house such specimens as the skull of John Bellingham, the assassin of the Prime Minister, Spencer Percival, who was subsequently ‘hanged and anatomized’ for his crime in 1812. The infrastructure of the museum began to suffer, as did the collection itself, and it has taken many years of grant applications and discussions for the management to be able to fund a technician to conserve the specimens and breathe life into this grand but crumbling relic. Grant funding was provided by The Medical College of Saint Bartholomew's Hospital Trust, a registered charity that promotes and advances medical and dental education and research at Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry.
