Museums Weird and Whacky

3.10.19

In keeping with our determination to avoid Madame Tassauds and Ripleys Believe It Or Not etc, we continued to tick off items from Meg’s bucket list.
Just opposite Euston Station is the Wellcome Medical Museum.

In the early 20th century, good old Henry Wellcome amassed one of the largest museum collections of the time, of “stuff”. Spanning continents, cultures and centuries, the objects reflect his interest, (read obsession), in medicine and the human body. Henry made his money from flogging pharmaceuticals, and as well as donating heaps of money for scientific research, he was driven to capture the art and science of healing through the ages. So he spent a lot of money on buying “stuff”. There were lots of obstetric forceps and hacksaws for limb amputations.

There were replacement eyeballs, artificial limbs and enema syringes. Ouch!

An ornate snuff container in a ram’s head was a real conversation starter. Shoving snuff up your nose was supposed to ward off colds and alleviate the symptoms of cattarrh.

A first aid kit was recovered from Scott’s expedition to the south pole. Why didn’t they paint it red?

Florence Nightingale’s slippers sat comfortably beside Napoleon’s toothbrush.

Especially for the ladies was a chastity belt and an iron mask called a Scold’s Bridle that could be locked over a woman’s head to stop her from talking.

Kind of weird that they look alike!

A black Madonna even turned up in a painting of ‘The Virgin of Guadalupe’. What has she got to do with medicine I wondered? Apparently this virgin attracted many pilgrims looking for both grace and good health.

But being a royalist at heart, my personal favourite was a lock of hair belonging to King George lll (known as ‘Mad King George’).
Scientific testing has since discovered the hair contained unusually high levels of arsenic, which is guaranteed to send you nuts! It all makes sense now!

Before we knew it, half the day was over. But it was onward and upward to the Sir John Soame museum, on the boundary of Lincoln’s Inn Fields Square which had a very pretty structure in the middle, and where I saw my first squizza!

Sir John Soane was even more insane than Henry Wellcome when it comes to collections. John was a neo-classical architect in the 19th century. He bought 3 houses on the Square, demolished them and promptly rebuilt them pretty much the same, then proceeded to fill them with “stuff”. Three houses across five storeys, linked together by galleries and passageways. It was an internal maze filled with treasures and antiquities.

Soane’s drawings and models of his architectural projects, and collections of anything else that took his fancy filled the rooms.

Plaster sculptures seemed to be a favourite, along with a sarcophagus or two, furniture, paintings…you name it!Photography was forbidden, so the last 3 pics are from the guide book. Luckily, on my way out I paid a visit to the loo, and stumbled upon a real antique.

An original crapper! It doesn’t get much better than that!

Feeling very smug that I’d managed to sneak a photo in forbidden circumstances, we made our way to St Paul’s for Evensong. Perhaps I was hoping for forgiveness for my photographic misdemeanors?

More like a tourist destination than a church service, the music and singing was still devine despite the constant comings and goings of backpackers and shoppers.
We hightailed it back to Angel to join Katie and Chris for dinner at the Island Queen, a very atmospheric pub close to the canal.