I had never actually been to the Old Operating Theatre, up a precipitous spiral staircase on the site of the old St. Thomas’s Hospital. Up above the seventeenth-century church, commissioned by Sir Robert Clayton, was a garret which was used to grow medicinal herbs, including opium. In 1822, it was converted into an Operating Theatre, where students could stand in rows watching the surgeon at work:-
An amazing space, it’s the oldest in London. Medicines give way to fearsome iterating instruments – saws, bone shears and forceps, and an eight pronged cervical dilator that is more like an instrument of torture. Thank heavens for the NHS!