Activities

Overview

[P1] Does an apple a day keep the doctor away?
[P2] Only if you aim it well enough.

Jokes aside, we all know how much we need medics. On our tour, we uncover the secret histories of London and medicine. We explore places, people and events at the intersection of medical science and the humanities.

Highlights

• Explore the first medical school for women in Britain
• See remains of the first foundling hospital
• Hear the stories of British medical reformers
• Visit the longest surviving medical society in England
• The first hospital created by Florence Nightingale

Perhaps you would have wished to have a time machine after you realize that before 1873 alcohol was prescribed by doctors.

Nowadays nearly everyone has an opportunity to visit a doctor and receive proper medical advice. While just 200 years ago, it was not like that. London was once known as a dirty place and site for epidemic distempers. On our tour you will examine the highways of London’s medical past. You will discover how health care trades transformed themselves into professions, hear stories about the greatest people in medicine and see the places where people sought treatment.

Meet your Guide at the statue of Thomas Coram who was a philanthropist and campaigner. Discover how the kind-hearted man saved abandoned infants. Walk towards the national hospital of neurology and hospital for infirm and incurable women and Hear stories about cholera outbreaks. Discover how hysteria was treated by doctors and how it brought doctor Joseph Mortimer Granville, to invention of the first vibrator. Walk through the London school of hygiene and tropical disease and discover how incurable diseases were brought to London in the past few Centuries. Pass by the Cardiovascular Society founded by was a Scottish cardiologist who was knighted by King George V, before you arrive to the site of the Florence Nightingale’s first hospital. Florence Nightingale was an English social reformer and the most important person in British nursing system in the 19th Century. Discover how Florence helped British soldiers in the Crimean war.

Pass by the oldest surviving medical society in England founded in 1773 by the Quaker physician and philanthropist Dr John Coakley Lettsom.

Finish your tour at The Royal Society of Medicine, the major provider of accredited postgraduate medical education in the United Kingdom.