As I continue to tick off the museums of Reading today I visited one that is only open a couple of times a month – The Royal Berkshire Medical Museum and Archive. I’ve known of its existance for quite a while but have only just got around to visiting and they make it challenging for you to do so.
It’s Here Somewhere…
The museum is housed in the very attractive original hospital building at the Royal Berks but the place is, literally, falling apart and now isn’t due to be dealt with until 2037 at the earliest. I say “dealt with” as the building is Grade II listed and so can’t just be knocked down and rebuilt. You can read more about all that in my previous post on the RBH below.
The reason I mention the state of the building is because the left-hand side of it is shrouded in scaffolding and boards hiding the discrete sign for the museum. You would have to known it was there to be able to find it. It took me a while as it was down a hidden path and then in a very dingy corridor.
The place itself is tiny, probably four times the size of our lounge, and was previously the laundry for the hospital. It clearly was an attractive room at one point and has a fine wooden ceiling.
Over Attentive
There is, I have discovered, an issue with very small museums that open irregularly, are staffed by volunteers, and where you are the only visitor and are outnumbered by volunteers three to one. Let’s put it this way, I wasn’t short of attention as one of the helpers took me through every one of the glass cabinets pointing out their contents. I was glad when some other victims, sorry, visitors came in and he went off to start to show them round.
That sounds a little mean-spirited and ungrateful, but it is not meant to be that way. These people give up their time and have a lot of knowledge about their museum and its specialist area. It’s just that I much prefer to do things at my own pace, take things in, and then ask any questions I might have.
A Gruesome History
The museum is a pretty gruesome place which shows just how well we have come on in the last few hundred years. I did have a conversation with my guide about how we look back upon the practices with horror now probably just as those in the future will do about our current practices. He suggested that surgery in particular will probably be seen as backward and primative as blood letting does to us now. Speaking of which there was a jar of live leeches in there.
For such a small space, they have packed a lot in there, including the contents from a local apothecary, a dentist’s chair and associated gubbins, and an iron lung. There are also plenty of smaller exhibits too, such as the rather horrific trepanning equipment and a collection of bladder stones which would have been hell to have tried to pass, and the picture illustrating how these used to be extracted made me shudder.
As with all these small specialist museums where they don’t have a huge amount of space for long explanations you have to have a little knowledge or an interest in the particular area to get the most out of them. This is an interesting diversion and I hope that when the hospital is finally rebuilt/revamped the museum can come out of the bowels and to a more prominant position – the King Edward VII Ward would be ideal.
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