Thackray Medical Museum
Thackray Medical Museum
The Thackray Medical Museum in Leeds is a museum of the history of medicine adjacent to St James's Hospital. Since it opened in 1997 it has won "Museum of the Year" and other awards.
Highlights include Leeds 1842: Life in Victorian Leeds: visitors walk through a reproduction of slum streets complete with authentic sights, sounds and smells and are invited to follow the lives, ailments and treatments of eight Victorian characters, making the choices that determine their survival amongst the rats, fleas and bedbugs. Pain, Pus and Blood describes surgery before anaesthesia, and how pain relief progressed and Having a Baby focuses on developments in safety for childbirth.
Hannah Dyson's Ordeal is a video reconstruction of 1842 surgery, before anaesthetics were in use: visitors watch as a surgeon, his assistant and a group of trainee doctors prepare for Hannah Dyson’s operation - the amputation of her leg after it was crushed in a mill accident. (The actual operation is not seen in the reconstruction.) The Life Zone is an interactive children's gallery, looking at how the human body works, with a smaller room for the under-fives.
There is a temporary exhibition gallery. The museum also houses the skeleton of Mary Bateman, the "Yorkshire Witch", who was executed for fraud and murder in 1809.
School Visits
The Thackray Medical Museum opens its doors to 20,000 school students every year, and reaches out to many more through our in-classroom work, educational resources, loans boxes, and teacher events.
We’re committed to working with schools to enhance knowledge and learning about the history of medicine and related subjects. Our education programme is carefully designed to complement and support the national curriculum as well as teaching plans and examination requirements.
The museum has been awarded the Sandford Award for Heritage Education for a number of years. This is an independently judged, quality assured assessment of education programmes at heritage sites, museums, archives and collections across the British Isles.
We aim to make learning exciting, enjoyable and inspiring. Students can explore our recreation of a Victorian street to experience the grim reality of life in the 19th century with all its squalor, smells and attendant health problems, or join Florence Nightingale as she travels to the Crimea and discovers the terrible conditions in wartime hospital wards.
Students can also enjoy a range of other interactive learning experiences at the Thackray Medical Museum, including the surgery-related Fantastic Plastic gallery, and our popular Life Zone! where children can find out how their bodies work and follow the journey of a pea through the digestive system.
We offer: