10 ODDBALL EXHIBITS

deemed to be caused by a surplus of blood so, to restore balance, bloodletting would be urgently prescribed. If the first course of bloodletting was unsuccessful, as it inevitably was, then the fever was deemed to be extremely severe and another pint or two was drawn off. Over the centuries, millions of people – including kings and popes – were killed by doctors bleeding them to death. As late as the Forties, textbooks would describe bloodletting as an appropriate treatment for pneumonia. Thanks a bunch, Galen.

could fill the entire newspaper with stories of medical misadventures throughout history, much as I could have spent days in the Wellcome Galleries. Who wouldn’t want to look at hundreds of colossal human stones, some the size of cantaloupes, removed from kidneys and gall bladders around the world? Or, safely behind glass, an early euthanasia machine displaying the chilling message: “IF YOU PRESS THIS BUTTON, YOU WILL RECEIVE A LETHAL INJECTION AND DIE IN 15 SECONDS”. There are metal plates from the original model of the double helix structure of DNA and the incubator jar used for the world’s first IVF baby, Louise Brown.

Then there’s Buckingham Palace’s own operating table – made by the attractively named Genito-Urinary Manufacturing Company – on which George VI’s lung was whipped out. It all adds up to a delightfully detailed meander from midwifery kits to death masks, from iron lungs to a resuscitation machine designed to literally blow tobacco smoke inside the human rectum.

It’s also a salutary lesson in not assuming that everything we think we know today is actually beyond question. Who knows how many of today’s unassailable truths will become the discarded bleeding bowls and leeches of yesteryear?

SCRUBS UP Former doctor Adam Kay