A Visit To Thackray Medical Museum - Leeds, England

A Clever Mix of Education and Entertainment
Makes Learning About Health Choices Fun
by Barbara Payne

“My Fair Lady” fans are charmed by the story of a young woman who escapes from the slums into polite society with a song on her lips and all the style and grace of someone born to it. The adventures of her jolly n’er-do-well father back in their poor neighborhood bears no resemblance in fact to some of the more unpleasant realities of living in Victorian England slums, but does succeed in establishing the contrast to the luxury lifestyle enjoyed by Professor Higgins and his associates.

The story is, after all, entertainment of the highest order, and while there are subtle hints that life is not all that wonderful in the “slums,” moviegoers are not exposed to the harsh facts of short life expectancy, squalid living conditions, and few medical treatment options to help people survive even the most common ailments. Audiences might have had an entirely different reaction had this been the focus of the award winning movie and stage play.

There is a place where high drama, education and entertainment do successfully converge to help people learn how the evolution of medical care contributed to the quality - and quantity - of life in Victorian England. The Thackray Medical Museum is one of the top, award winning, interactive tourist attractions in the UK, and its visitors include more than 26,000 students each year. Situated on the outskirts of Leeds, a renaissance city in the North of England, the museum is housed in a magnificent Victorian workhouse building adjacent to “Jimmy’s” - St. James’ Hospital -- now the country’s largest hospital with a sterling reputation for surgical excellence. 

Much of the success of this medical adventure in learning can be credited to Mike Cooper, the museum’s Chief Executive, who was given the task of turning a dream into a reality. As a 20 year employee of Thackray with a creative, fertile mind and a background in marketing and design, Cooper was asked by Paul Thackray -- grandson of founder of the medical company Charles F. Thackray, Ltd. -- to help him create a showcase for the company’s many collections of medical instruments, literature and artifacts. Thackray, a private, family-run company until the last decade, was the pioneer in the manufacture of replacement hips, having collaborated with the "father" of modern hip replacement surgery, Sir John Charnley. Thackray began manufacturing the Charnley Hip System in 1963 and it is still the best selling cemented hip system in the world. After their acquisition in 1990, Thackray has operated under the name DePuy International and serves as that company’s headquarters outside the U.S.

Over the years, the Thackray company had accumulated a huge variety of company products that Paul felt deserved to be on public display. Following the sale of the company he developed the concept of a medical museum in Leeds, and the search began in earnest for an appropriate home for it.

“It was a fluke that this magnificent warehouse next to Jimmy’s happened to be available,” explained Mike Cooper. “In 1861, this was the Leeds Union Workhouse, a rather unsavory institution by today’s standards, where men and women from the slums of Leeds found employment doing sewing and laundry and odd piecework. I’m afraid working conditions weren’t ideal, but the institution put food on the table and something like a roof over their heads. Next door, was the Leeds Moral and Industrial Training Institute where youngsters from poor families were sent to earn what little they could to help support their families. With the close proximity to this questionable institution, for years many women refused to go to Jimmy’s to have their babies, as the old workhouse fears remained.”

“In the 1850’s, these workhouses were supported by those who had money,” said Cooper. “Not unlike today, some people made charitable donations back then because it gave them a sense of power, and contributed to their self-importance. This wasn’t the only reason, of course, but it was certainly a big factor in attracting the funding necessary to keep these institutions going. It was quite ‘the thing’ to be listed as a benefactor who helped put food on the table for hungry youngsters.”

The poor had a significant need for financial assistance in Victorian Leeds, a city profoundly transformed by the Industrial Revolution. Following the completion of the Leeds to Liverpool canal in 1816, which established a coast-to-coast waterway, the city was ideally situated for the development of an engineering and manufacturing driven economy, and the city’s population grew to over 150,000 by 1840. The quality of life for workers - who today would be called the “working poor” -- was quite miserable, however. All surgeries in the 1850’s - before anaesthetics, remember - were trauma-based, and living to a ripe old age meant surviving into your 40’s. Rodents and fleas carried diseases that wiped out whole neighborhoods, if you could call them that. It is around this squalid and unlikely tableau that the Medical Museum has creatively built its concept.

“It was one thing to want to create a lasting legacy,” Cooper explained, “that would allow visitors to see the many collections and memorabilia. But it was quite something else to create an institution that would sustain itself into the foreseeable future. Our very first challenge then was to find just the right ‘hook’ that would provide this sustainability. Fortunately, creating an educational experience aimed at students age 7 through 16 as our direct market would accomplish this by attracting visits from schools all over the country to fulfil their curriculum requirements. The key was to tailor what we wanted to present to specific areas in which the youngsters were periodically tested, and to provide top quality resources for teachers to help get their students ready for the exams. Thus ‘Medicine Through Time’ was born.”

Cooper suggested that it is at this stage in development when many museums or educational experiences go astray. Far too many museums or specialty centers do not succeed, he said, because they fail to invite active involvement in the planning process by the very people who will be their ultimate customers. Lacking that input, he warned, can be a prescription for disaster.

“We have been very fortunate in obtaining some really excellent guidance and support from some educators in creating modules and classroom materials that are convenient and easy for teachers to use -- that are both entertaining and educational for the kids, and informative enough that the students somehow manage to acquire the knowledge they need to pass the major exam given at age 16. This makes us part of the team, working for the teachers, in a sense,” Cooper said.

In March 1997 -- with the aid of a £3 million grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund and many contributions from individuals and charitable organizations -- the museum opened. Its variety of exhibits dramatically explain the ways in which people’s lives have changed over the last 150 years as a result of improvements in public health, medicine and healthcare. Visitors are able to enjoy the museum collection of more than 35,000 objects, including a vast range of surgical instruments dating from the late 19th century to the present day; a unique collection of English pharmacy ceramics; and a library with over 8,000 books including the largest collection of medical trade literature in the world.

Fine as it is, this collection by itself would not have provided a basis for attracting a steady stream of visitors, year after year. This is where the creativity came in.

“You can present information on just about any subject,” Cooper said, “if you do it accurately and with a little humor. To confirm this assumption, one of our most popular displays is the ‘potty’ part, where we follow a meal through the digestive system to its logical conclusion.  Adjacent to the giant toilet, are three boxes, which, when you lift the lids, produce a variety of ‘styles’ of passing gas…and also explains why - and how -- this phenomenon occurs. This ‘fart fanfare,’” the director explained, “is consistently one of the biggest crowd pleasers.”

This exhibit is part of Bodyworks, a series of interactive displays that explore everything from the “skin that keeps you in” to the potty part. For the younger students, the cartoon guides to Bodyworks are Sherlock Bones and his dog Baskerville. Visitors can pause along the way to pull out a rope to discover the full length of a person’s intestines or make some “informed” healthy food choices.

In another gallery, visitors walk through a grim replica of the streets of Leeds in 1842 and gain a clear idea of how people really lived and died -- with all the squalor, the sounds, and the smells! Walk past an open-air butcher shop, complete with flies and stray dogs waiting hungrily for scraps. Peek into a hovel crowded with family members and animals along with rodents and disease-carrying pests. Get out of the way as a chamber pot of urine is dumped into the refuse-filled gutters that flow through town.

A grim display demonstrates all too vividly the dangers to health in an industrial town, as an adult mill worker carries a young girl -- whose leg has been hopelessly mangled by industrial machinery -- to the surgeon. A combination of film and diorama follow the amputation without benefit of aesthetic, leaving little question as to the young girl’s life expectancy. More displays show how the battle against infectious diseases was won, highlighting the work of Jenner, Pasteur, Koch and Fleming. The early days of anaesthetics, the development of antiseptics and blood transfusions right up to the miracles of modern surgical techniques are also illustrated in the first floor galleries.

One of the more innovative learning techniques employed by the museum is the opportunity for visitors to select a card which provides information about one of the characters in the street scenes, to learn about what “ails” them, choose a remedy for their illness among “treatments” available at that time, and then to take a realistic look at their chances of survival. Throughout the galleries, visitors can obtain information up to their interest and education level, but it is readily apparent to all that quality of life under such slum conditions was virtually nonexistent.

Of equal impact is the realization of how far medicine and public health has come in 150 years. The museum also periodically offers an innovative and increasingly popular History of Medicine course held on Saturdays through the Winter and Spring , aimed at health care professionals who want to broaden their continuing education opportunities. The next series -- designed around the Shakespearean concept of the 'Seven Ages of Man' -- is suitable even for those with little or no knowledge of the subject, and will feature top lecturers, all experts in their field, who have been chosen for their lively and entertaining approach.

In planning the museum, the founders were insightful enough to include a major conference center which is now, according to Cooper, nearly the biggest slice of the facility’s sustaining business. There are a number of fully equipped and different size rooms, with the largest capable of seating up to 120 guests with meal service for up to 180 people. These rooms are in high demand for medical conferences, with the added attraction of enabling participants to observe -- through video links -- surgical procedures being performed in operating theatres next door at St. James’ Hospital.

The Thackray Medical Museum is a “must-see” attraction for visitors to the UK who want to gain a better understanding of the contrasts between life in days gone by and the 21st Century. It offers an exciting combination of humanitarian interests and the ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit that fosters invention and research. Its exhibits also provide a strong reminder of how health - or the lack of it - is inextricably interwoven into our environment, for better or for worse.

For more information about this award-winning museum, visit http://www.thackraymuseum.org