Medical Museums

This is the project that preceded, and inspired, the medical landscapes project I am currently working on. I became aware that, in many cases, the medical history of Britain is presented in a quiet almost secretive way. Often these museums are tucked away in the basements or corridors of the great areas of medicine they seek to venerate, and in one case the whole building is both museum and conference centre mixing lectures and fine art.

I wanted to show how these two worlds of old and new exist, one creating the other to support itself.

Medical Landscapes

Right, have decided to fire up the old blog idea for the final push in. Mainly because I would like to keep people in the project and those interested outsiders informed as to what is happening, though it will be a visual blog in the main.

The idea of the work is to create New Topographics inspired landscapes of sites that are of special interest in British medical history. Most of these places are unknown or unseen by the public at large and this is an attempt to highlight that important things can happen anywhere. The images are made intentionally 'without art' in order to show the everyday nature of the scenes, if the pictures are made to look special then the lose their relevance to the project.

These are images made so far, they are intended to work alongside more detailed text to give an idea of what the picture represents. The captions below are for illustration and are not representative of the final text to be included.

Lanesborough Hotel, before becoming a 5* hotel this building was St Georges Hospital and was were Henry Gray wrote his book on anatomy (or his famous TV program). The various war memorials are included to represent the vast leaps in medical science that war provides.

This house was one of the London residences of the Crimean War nurse Mary Seacole.

Residence of William Hunter, anatomist.

The next three are all shots of Embankment in London, built by Joseph Bazalgette as part of his sewer program for London. Creating the sewers and using embankments to speed the flow of the river helped reduce and end water-borne disease in London. The number of lives saved is innumerable. 

The Pub here  is named after John Snow and the memorial pump without handle celebrates his achievement. He worked out the cholera was water borne and not air borne by tracking an epidemic in London back to this single site. He removed the handle and the disease stopped, however he would die without his work being recognised. 

John Merrick, the Elephant Man, was first found in a freak show being held at the building that now houses a sari shop by Frederick Treves, a London surgeon. After being robbed in Europe Merrick made his way back to London and was cared for in The London hospital (it is really called The London!).

The building in scaffold is the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery at Kings College London. Whilst her efforts in the Crimea are subject to many debates, Nightingale did help make large strides in the teaching of Nursing and strangely the visual presentation of statistics!

Please comment as you see fit, but bare in mind that this site is also being seen be people outside the course who are involved in the project and might not appreciate our sense of humour!