The Thackray Museum of Medicine in
Leeds
Leeds () is a city and the administrative centre of the City of Leeds district in West Yorkshire, England. It is built around the River Aire and is in the eastern foothills of the Pennines. It is also the third-largest settlement (by popula ...
,
West Yorkshire
West Yorkshire is a metropolitan and ceremonial county in the Yorkshire and Humber Region of England. It is an inland and upland county having eastward-draining valleys while taking in the moors of the Pennines. West Yorkshire came into exi ...
,
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...
, is a museum of the
history of medicine
The history of medicine is both a study of medicine throughout history as well as a multidisciplinary field of study that seeks to explore and understand medical practices, both past and present, throughout human societies.
More than just histo ...
adjacent to
St James's University Hospital
St James's University Hospital ''Confirming name as "St James's"'' is in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England and is popularly known as Jimmy's. It is one of the United Kingdom's most famous hospitals due to its coverage on television. It is managed ...
. It opened in March 1997 as the Thackray Medical Museum. In 1998 it won "Museum of the Year" and has other awards including in 2004 both the "Excellence in England Small Tourist Attraction of the Year" and "Sandford Award for Heritage Education".
[Thackray Museum (2008) Thackray Museum Background Information]
As of 17 May 2021, the museum reopened its doors.
The museum closed temporarily in 2019 for a £4 million refurbishment, while the museum conference centre and car park remained open,
and remained closed because of the
COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identi ...
. In October 2020 it was announced that the museum was to receive £370,000 from the
Culture Recovery Fund
The Culture Recovery Fund is a grants programme issued by the UK Government as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The fund aims to financially support cultural organisations in England (such as theatres, museums, and music venues) which had bec ...
to help it to re-open safely.
In December 2020 the museum's conference centre was used as a COVID-19 vaccination hub.
The redeveloped museum has since been shortlisted for
Art Fund's
Museum of the Year
The Museum of the Year Award, formerly known as the Gulbenkian Prize and the Art Fund Prize, is an annual prize awarded to a museum or gallery in the United Kingdom for a "track record of imagination, innovation and excellence". The award of £ ...
award 2021.
History
The building is a
Grade II listed building
In the United Kingdom, a listed building or listed structure is one that has been placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Historic Environment Scotland in Scotland, in Wales, and the Northern Ir ...
, the former Leeds Union
Workhouse
In Britain, a workhouse () was an institution where those unable to support themselves financially were offered accommodation and employment. (In Scotland, they were usually known as poorhouses.) The earliest known use of the term ''workhouse' ...
, which opened in 1861 (foundation stone laid 1858) to accommodate 784 paupers.
By the end of the 19th century, the buildings had become largely used for medical care of the poor, rather than workhouse and training. During the
First World War
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
it was called the East Leeds War Hospital, caring for armed services personnel.
[ The building was later known as the Ashley Wing, which was part of the hospital until the 1990s when the old Leeds Union Workhouse building was considered unfit for modern medicine. As a listed building, it could not be demolished and Parliament gave permission for it to house the Thackray Medical Museum, which opened in 1997.
The museum's origins can be traced to Great George Street, Leeds, where Charles Thackray opened a small family-run chemist shop in 1902. In less than a century the corner shop grew into one of Britain's principal medical companies, Chas F Thackray Limited, manufacturing drugs and medical instruments and pioneering the hip replacement operation alongside ]Sir John Charnley
Sir John Charnley, (29 August 1911 – 5 August 1982) was an English orthopaedic surgeon. He pioneered the hip replacement operation, which is now one of the most common operations both in the UK and elsewhere in the world, and created the ...
. In the 1980s Charles Thackray's grandson Paul Thackray established a small collection as an archive of the Leeds-based medical supplies company. In 1990 a charitable trust was established to develop the collection.
Museum displays
Before the 2021 redevelopment, highlights included ''Leeds 1842: Life in Victorian Leeds'': visitors walked through a reproduction of slum streets complete with authentic sights, sounds and smells and were invited to follow the lives, ailments and treatments of eight Victorian characters, making the choices that determine their survival amongst the rats, flea
Flea, the common name for the order Siphonaptera, includes 2,500 species of small flightless insects that live as external parasites of mammals and birds. Fleas live by ingesting the blood of their hosts. Adult fleas grow to about long, a ...
s and bedbugs. ''Pain, Pus and Blood'' described surgery before anaesthesia
Anesthesia is a state of controlled, temporary loss of sensation or awareness that is induced for medical or veterinary purposes. It may include some or all of analgesia (relief from or prevention of pain), paralysis (muscle relaxation), a ...
, and how pain relief progressed and ''Having a Baby'' focused on developments in safety for childbirth
Childbirth, also known as labour and delivery, is the ending of pregnancy where one or more babies exits the internal environment of the mother via vaginal delivery or caesarean section. In 2019, there were about 140.11 million births glob ...
. ''Hannah Dyson's Ordeal'' was a video reconstruction of 1842 surgery, before anaesthetics were in use: visitors watched as a surgeon, his assistant and a group of trainee doctors prepared for Hannah Dyson's operation - the amputation of her leg after it was crushed in a mill
Mill may refer to:
Science and technology
*
* Mill (grinding)
* Milling (machining)
* Millwork
* Textile mill
* Steel mill, a factory for the manufacture of steel
* List of types of mill
* Mill, the arithmetic unit of the Analytical Engine early ...
accident. (The actual operation was not seen in the reconstruction.) ''The LifeZone!'' was an interactive children's gallery, looking at how the human body works, with a smaller room for the under-fives. The 'Recovery?' Gallery explored treatment of veterans of warfare, looking at the First World War and modern conflict medicine. There was a temporary exhibition gallery which changed annually.
File:Thackray Moving and Growing.jpg, Moving and Growing. Activity zone for children
File:Thackray Open Wide.jpg, Entrance to feature on the digestive system
File:Thackray Street Scene 2.jpg, Slum street in Victorian Leeds
File:Thackray Midwife Scene.jpg, Tableau of a 19th-century midwife at work
File:Thackray Apothecary 1.jpg, Part of the Wilkinson Apothecary Gallery
File:Apothecary image.jpg, Apothecary
File:Amputation Set Thackray.jpg, Set of tools for amputation
File:Red wine and germ theory.jpg, Red wine and germ theory
Collection
The Thackray Medical Museum houses a collection of over 47,000 objects from medical history which date from Roman times to the present day, along with 15,000 trade catalogues and 9,000 books on medicine and healthcare. Highlights include Prince Albert's personal medicine chest and Hitler
Adolf Hitler (; 20 April 188930 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was dictator of Nazi Germany, Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his death in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the le ...
's blood transfusion kit. The strengths of the collection include European surgical instruments from the 1600s to today; a "nationally significant collection" of hearing aid
A hearing aid is a device designed to improve hearing by making sound audible to a person with hearing loss. Hearing aids are classified as medical devices in most countries, and regulated by the respective regulations. Small audio amplifiers s ...
s including the British Society of Audiology
British may refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies.
** Britishness, the British identity and common culture
* British English, ...
collection; the J F Wilkinson Pharmaceutical Ceramics Collection; patent medicines, and domestic first aid kits.
The Thackray Medical Museum featured in ''Most Haunted
''Most Haunted'' is a British paranormal reality television series. Following complaints, the broadcast regulator, Ofcom, ruled that it was an entertainment show, not a legitimate investigation into the paranormal, and "should not be taken ser ...
'' on 1 November 2015 on Really (TV channel)
Really is a British free-to-air digital television channel broadcasting in the United Kingdom and Ireland, currently owned by Warner Bros. Discovery. The channel launched on 19 May 2009 as UKTV's channel for female audiences. The channel show ...
.
Temporary exhibitions
In 2016 the Thackray Medical Museum was one of fifteen venues across the UK, Europe and Africa to have been selected by the Wellcome Trust
The Wellcome Trust is a charitable foundation focused on health research based in London, in the United Kingdom. It was established in 1936 with legacies from the pharmaceutical magnate Henry Wellcome (founder of one of the predecessors of Glaxo ...
to, simultaneously, exhibit the winning collection from the Wellcome Image Awards. The awards celebrate scientists, clinicians, photographers and artists of images that best communicate significant aspects of biomedical science. A temporary exhibition of twenty images was displayed at the Thackray Medical Museum. The display included inside the human eye, a 3D image produced using optical coherence tomography
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is an imaging technique that uses low-coherence light to capture micrometer-resolution, two- and three-dimensional images from within optical scattering media (e.g., biological tissue). It is used for medica ...
. The image depicts blood vessels as tunnel like structures. Other images focused on bone development, the Ebola virus and engineering human liver tissue.
Temporary exhibitions planned for 2021 include ''Mothers in Lockdown'' and ''Stitch Your Story''.
Medicine and history lecture series
The museum offers a medicine and history public lecture series on Saturday mornings which runs from October to March each year. Lectures focus on the changing nature of health and medicine.
Education and learning
Visited by 20,000 school students each year the museum delivers a series of in-classroom work and education resources, loans boxes and teacher events. The museum has been awarded the Sandford Award for Heritage Education.
See also
* Listed buildings in Leeds (Gipton and Harehills Ward)
References
External links
*
Yorkshire Medical and Dental History Society
Wellcome Image Awards 2016
*
{{Coord, 53, 48, 29, N, 1, 31, 06, W, type:landmark, display=title
Museums in Leeds
Grade II listed buildings in Leeds
Medical museums in England
History museums in West Yorkshire