DOI: 10.1111/tog.
12597
The Obstetrician & Gynaecologist
2019;21:224
http://onlinetog.org
A night at the museum
James Drife MD FRCOG FRCPED FRCSED FCOGSA FFSRH
Emeritus Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Leeds, UK
The RCOG, like many Royal Colleges, has an interesting
museum, but unlike others we don’t make a big thing of it. In
fact, for the last few years we’ve kept it under the stairs. Will
it be housed in more splendid surroundings when we move
to Union Street? I hope so. Plans are already afoot for an
accessible cafe (the essential feature of any contemporary
museum) so we’re halfway there already.
Roll up! Roll up!
Museums are big business these days. Last year in London
nearly six million people visited the British Museum, while
north of the border the National Museums pipped
Edinburgh Castle as Scotland’s top visitor attraction. Part
of their allure, I suppose, is the fact that admission is free, but
there’s more to it than that. People can be fascinated by
history if it’s expertly presented, which is why so many
museums, including medical ones, are having makeovers.
The Royal College of Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inn Fields is
undergoing massive redevelopment and when it reopens, the
Hunterian Museum will occupy most of the ground floor. In the
meantime its collection of 50 000 specimens and instruments
can be browsed online at surgicat.rcseng.ac.uk. In Edinburgh,
Surgeons’ Hall has recently had a £4.5 million upgrade and now
houses three museums. Tourists with a taste for the macabre can
see dental equipment, tumours, surgically removed foreign
bodies and a book covered by the skin of Burke the murderer. Or
go on a walking tour entitled ‘Blood and guts’.
Our past and proud of it
If the public wants blood we can provide it, but I suspect this is
not the image the RCOG wants to project in these sensitive times.
After years of being criticised by everyone (except our patients)
for doing large numbers of hysterectomies and caesarean
sections, are we now embarrassed by our surgical past? And
even by our forceps, though they’ve saved the lives of countless
mothers and babies over the years. We no longer conduct
instrumental deliveries under a blanket like the Chamberlens,
but neither do we unwrap the forceps with a theatrical flourish
and wait for the birth partner to applaud. Or at least, not often.
Our specialty has a story of historic achievements, but how
to tell it? In Leeds in the 1990s I tried to help the Thackray
Medical Museum illustrate the spectacular fall in UK
224
And finally. . .
maternal mortality during my parents’ lifetime. I drew a
graph which a designer expanded and filled with little clay
models of pregnant tummies. The eye-catching torsos
grabbed visitors’ attention – so much so that they didn’t
notice my graph at all. Today the Thackray has closed for its
own costly makeover and his models are probably on eBay.
Museums Inc.
There’s a knack to using objects to tell stories and it’s not a job for
amateurs. Fortunately the RCOG museum now has a
professional curator. After Peter Basham moved here from the
Royal College of Physicians in 2016, retired Fellows like myself
slowly became aware that the museum world has moved into the
21st century. Last year the RCOG joined a network, London
MuseumsofHealthandMedicine(http://medicalmuseums.org),
whose 26 members range alphabetically from the Alexander
Fleming Laboratory Museum to the Worshipful Society of
Apothecaries. Our nearest neighbours when we move to
Southwark will be the Gordon Museum of Pathology (which
is not open to the public) and the Old Operating Theatre
Museum (which is).
How open do we want to be? At present the curator runs
guided tours on request and the majority of the 50 or so
groups each year are midwives (the RCOG now houses the
Royal College of Midwives’ collection). We obstetricians
probably feel that we don’t need to be guided around our
own treasures but perhaps we should give it a try. We might
learn a lot.
Hello, Dolly
Museums can inspire as well as inform. Recently I attended a gala
evening at the Royal Scottish Museum, which has just completed
an £80 million transformation from Victorian institution to
modern tourist attraction. Wandering past Lewis chessmen and
Sir Jackie Stewart’s racing car, I found myself face to face with
Dolly the Sheep, slowly rotating on a pedestal. I’d seen a sheep
before, but this time the wow factor kicked in. That nose! Those
eyeballs! That wool! All produced by the nucleus of a mammary
cell – gee whizz! I’ve always been amazed that two little cells can
create a baby, and Dolly reignited that sense of wonder. It’s the
kind of feeling that can make a blas
e teenager decide to study
reproductive biology, or perhaps even obstetrics.
ª 2019 Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists