★★★★★ 5.0
Discover
The Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret
Dried OPIUM plant heads are still hiding in these wooden rafters above your head... that's because you're standing in Europe's oldest surviving operating theatre, built way up here in this church attic in 1822! Before doctors knew about germs or pain medicine, 150 medical students would cram into these tiered seats to watch surgeries on women patients. This whole garret used to smell like a spice shop where the hospital's herb doctor dried medicines, but in 1862 it was sealed up and forgotten for almost 100 years until someone rediscovered this treasure in 1957. Florence Nightingale herself walked these floors when she started her famous nursing school right here! Can you spot those old wooden herb-drying racks? They're the same ones apothecaries used over 200 years ago!
Did You Know?
- Hidden high above St Thomas’s Church in Southwark, The Old Operating Theatre is the oldest surviving surgical theatre in Europe, dating to 1822, and was originally lit only by sunlight streaming through a skylight—crucial for surgeons operating without modern anaesthetics or antiseptics, where speed and daylight could mean the difference between life and death.
- The museum’s Herb Garret was once the hospital apothecary’s attic, filled with drying medicinal herbs and even opium poppy heads found in the rafters; this unique space, just a corridor away from the operating theatre, stored the remedies and ointments of pre-modern medicine and is now part of the museum’s fascinating displays.
- Discovered by chance in 1956 when a medical historian crawled through a hole in the church’s brickwork, the theatre had been forgotten for nearly a century after the hospital moved in 1862; today, visitors can see the original operating table, surgical instruments, and even the door that once connected the women’s ward directly to the theatre—now leading to a blank wall as a poignant reminder of its past.