Week 3: #15 Visit the Hunterian Museum

I try to visit the museums and galleries of London as much as possible, particularly the free ones or exhibitions that I can get into free through work (yes, being a public servant does have some benefits). But there is a small museum in the back streets of Holborn that I had been meaning to visit for a while.

The Hunterian Museum is a display in the Royal College of Surgeons in Lincoln's Inn Fields round the back of LSE. It contains the collections of John Hunter, who was an eminent surgeon in the late 1700s who is widely regarded as contributing a huge amount to our understanding of anatomy. He was very concerned with scientific method in medicine and gathered vast amounts of animal and human specimens for study. All of which can be found in jars, still preserved to this day. And it's FREE to get in to!

I am not particularly squeamish about stuff to do with innards and dead things. I grew up thinking I would be a doctor until I realised just how crap I was at chemistry (truly, seriously, never got it AT ALL). But even I found some of the things in jars quite unnerving. There were anteater foetuses and elephant hearts. There was a baby kangaroo that looked like something out of the Alien films. There was a skeleton of a giant man (around 7 foot 7) that made me glad I wasn't dating a basketball player. The stuff that caught me by surprise, though, was the bits of human pickled for posterity. There was a cross-section of a young boy's face that was preserved as an example of nose cancer, but they had injected the face with red dye to show up the cancer better. This meant the face had a proper pink, living tinge to it and looked like it was from last week rather than over 200 years ago. They also had several human foetuses in jars showing stages of development. While I am vehemently pro-choice I had never been confronted with what these things look like in reality and it did take me aback a little. I don't think it's changed my opinion (nor did it set out to), but at least I feel a bit better informed about the physical nature of what grows inside you at four, eight, twelve weeks.

So, yes, I would recommend it to anyone with a reasonably strong constitution, and perhaps advise vegetarians to steer clear. There's lots of our animal friends displayed in most undignified fashions.