Zoe reviews her recent visit to Thackray Medical Museum...
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Thackray Museum
The Thackray Museum is one of the places in Leeds which I had always intended on visiting, but never quite got round to. So when my family decided to come up for a visit it seemed like a perfect time to finally make the trip.
The building was really impressive upon arrival, but with it being so close to Jimmy’s hospital, there’s the constant reminder of what it’s all about - medicine, surgery and illness.
The ground floor has an area designed to look and smell like Leeds in Victorian times. This reminded me of the Jorvik Viking Centre in York and it is equally as well done. You get a sense of the overcrowding and glum conditions families had to live in, whilst learning about diseases and their cures (or lack of), at the time.
The temporary exhibition was about replacing old parts with new, man-made ones. It was interesting and you even got the chance to look at x-ays and dance around in a mirror,but it did seem misplaced within the museum.
The second floor has a fake surgery experience, which advised young children and the squeamish to stay out of, but this was a slight disappointment to me (after probably watching too many horror films), as it wasn’t as gruesome and scary as it potentially could’ve been. I had to be reminded this was designed to be educational and not to give children nightmares.
The men seemed to whizz around the childbirth section, until they were found queueing to try on the empathy belly. This area shows how much medicine and surgery have advanced, even in the past 100 years.
The final section of the museum takes you back down the stairs and is a more hands on area, giving you the chance to guess the smells, see how your spine works and even follow the journey of your food, starting in the mouth (and ending by an oversized toilet). A few of the exhibits were broken or with parts missing, but overall it was really impressive.
The museum gave me the chance to learn more about the history of Leeds, as well as the broader history of medicine. I would advise anyone to take a trip there, but give yourself plenty of time to look around because the place is huge, with plenty of things to see and do!