Thackray Museum of Medicine

The building is a Grade II listed building, the former Leeds Union Workhouse, which opened in 1861 (foundation stone laid 1858) to accommodate 784 paupers.[6][7] By the end of the 19th century, the buildings had become largely used for medical care of the poor, rather than workhouse and training. During the First World War it was called the East Leeds War Hospital, caring for armed services personnel.[7] The building was later known as the Ashley Wing, which was part of the hospital until the 1990s when the old Leeds Union Workhouse building was considered unfit for modern medicine. As a listed building, it could not be demolished and Parliament gave permission for it to house the Thackray Medical Museum, which opened in 1997.[8]

The museum's origins can be traced to Great George Street, Leeds, where Charles Thackray opened a small family-run chemist shop in 1902. In less than a century the corner shop grew into one of Britain's principal medical companies, Chas F Thackray Limited, manufacturing drugs and medical instruments and pioneering the hip replacement operation alongside Sir John Charnley.[9][10] In the 1980s Charles Thackray's grandson Paul Thackray established a small collection as an archive of the Leeds-based medical supplies company. In 1990 a charitable trust was established to develop the collection.

Before the 2021 redevelopment, highlights included Leeds 1842: Life in Victorian Leeds: visitors walked through a reproduction of slum streets complete with authentic sights, sounds and smells and were invited to follow the lives, ailments and treatments of eight Victorian characters, making the choices that determine their survival amongst the rats, fleas and bedbugs. Pain, Pus and Blood described surgery before anaesthesia, and how pain relief progressed and Having a Baby focused on developments in safety for childbirth. Hannah Dyson's Ordeal was a video reconstruction of 1842 surgery, before anaesthetics were in use: visitors watched as a surgeon, his assistant and a group of trainee doctors prepared for Hannah Dyson's operation - the amputation of her leg after it was crushed in a mill accident. (The actual operation was not seen in the reconstruction.) The LifeZone! was an interactive children's gallery, looking at how the human body works, with a smaller room for the under-fives. The 'Recovery?' Gallery explored treatment of veterans of warfare, looking at the First World War and modern conflict medicine. There was a temporary exhibition gallery which changed annually.[11]

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  Moving and Growing. Activity zone for children
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  Entrance to feature on the digestive system
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  Slum street in Victorian Leeds
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  Tableau of a 19th-century midwife at work
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  Part of the Wilkinson Apothecary Gallery
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  Apothecary
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  Set of tools for amputation
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  Red wine and germ theory

The Thackray Medical Museum houses a collection of over 47,000 objects from medical history which date from Roman times to the present day, along with 15,000 trade catalogues and 9,000 books on medicine and healthcare. Highlights include Prince Albert's personal medicine chest and Hitler's blood transfusion kit. The strengths of the collection include European surgical instruments from the 1600s to today; a "nationally significant collection" of hearing aids including the British Society of Audiology collection; the J F Wilkinson Pharmaceutical Ceramics Collection; patent medicines, and domestic first aid kits.[12]

The Thackray Medical Museum featured in Most Haunted on 1 November 2015 on Really (TV channel).[13]

In 2016 the Thackray Medical Museum was one of fifteen venues across the UK, Europe and Africa to have been selected by the Wellcome Trust to, simultaneously, exhibit the winning collection from the Wellcome Image Awards. The awards celebrate scientists, clinicians, photographers and artists of images that best communicate significant aspects of biomedical science. A temporary exhibition of twenty images was displayed at the Thackray Medical Museum. The display included inside the human eye, a 3D image produced using optical coherence tomography. The image depicts blood vessels as tunnel like structures. Other images focused on bone development, the Ebola virus and engineering human liver tissue.[14]

Temporary exhibitions planned for 2021 include Mothers in Lockdown and Stitch Your Story.[2]

The museum offers a medicine and history public lecture series on Saturday mornings which runs from October to March each year. Lectures focus on the changing nature of health and medicine. [15]

Visited by 20,000 school students each year the museum delivers a series of in-classroom work and education resources, loans boxes and teacher events. The museum has been awarded the Sandford Award for Heritage Education.[16]

• Listed buildings in Leeds (Gipton and Harehills Ward)

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Thackray Museum.

• Official website
• Yorkshire Medical and Dental History Society
• Wellcome Image Awards 2016
• Historic England. "Details from listed building database (1256272)". National Heritage List for England.

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