The Royal College of Surgeons on Lincolns Inn Fields WC1 houses the Hunterian Museum. This brilliant faulty freaky medical collection dates back to the 1700s. The ancient exhibits dwelling inside this glistening, hyperreal, hi-tech interior are in startling contrast.
They host many a lecture here and there are a couple of crackers coming up (in their words):
How to Lose a Museum
Tuesday 8th March, 1pm
Dr Sam Alberti, Royal College of Surgeons: Museum collections are painstakingly acquired at great expense. How, then, do they come to be lost? Sam Alberti explores how medical and natural history collections have been sold, dispersed, destroyed or even stolen. Drawing on unpublished historical sources and specimens that somehow survived, Sam explores the curator’s worst fear.
Royal College of Surgeons Book on 020 7869 6560.
Victorian Medicine’s Lost Property: Dissecting London’s poor
Tuesday 26 April, 1pm
Dr Elizabeth T. Hurren, Oxford Brookes University For eight centuries, St. Bartholomew’s Hospital has treated the sick poor of the City of London. Medical staff cared for the living, however, by dissecting the dead – trainee doctors needed to buy bodies and body parts to qualify in human anatomy. Body dealers were employed to walk the capital’s streets at night buying cadavers to sell on to anatomists and medical students. Elizabeth Hurren will explain how this business of anatomy profited from a human ‘lost property’ which symbolised the medical underworld of Victorian London.
Lost London 1870-1945
Thursday 9 June, 7pm
Philip Davies, English Heritage Using stunning photographs from his best-selling book Lost London 1870-1945, Philip Davies will explain how Victorian London was transformed in to a great Imperial capital before the devastation of wartime bombing altered it forever. The talk features fascinating images of Holborn, Aldwych and Lincoln’s Inn Fields before the construction of Kingsway, the largest single clearance of London since the Great Fire.
