Mislaid for almost a century, the oldest surviving operating theatre in the country now wins awards and is visited by scores of students and those tourists, athletic enough to negotiate its tortuous spiral staircase. The Old Operating Theatre, Museum and Herb Garret is located in the garret of St Thomas's Church Tower, on the original site of St Thomas's Hospital, on London's South Bank. The theatre was rediscovered in 1957, restored and established as a repository of medical instruments from the 19th century especially. Anthony Lyman-Dixon wrote about this rather remarkable place for the 1995 spring issue of Herbs.

The Old Operating Theatre, as it is most often called, is one of the twelve museums in the London Museums of Health and Medicine group founded in 1991. Given the popularity of hospital programmes on the television, the formation of such a group was probably inevitable. The difference is that the Old Operating Theatre is for real, and it takes a strong stomach to appreciate the hacked-about wooden table (seen above) on which countless patients had their gangrenous legs neatly removed within less than a minute each. A modern butcher would be prosecuted under the Food Safety Act if s/he cut up a side of beef on it. The wooden box of sawdust to catch the blood underneath does nothing to engender one's nostalgia for the Good Old Days either.

The horrors can not be exaggerated. The trauma of undergoing surgery not infrequently left the patient with permanent mental damage. Only a combination of the surgeon's speed and the ability to stupefy the patient could mitigate the trauma. This is where herbs played such a vital role. Various solanums and opiates had been used for knocking out victims since the Hellenistic Age, possibly earlier. Thus herbs provided the only respite until Michael Faraday (1791-1867) and Sir James Young Simpson (1811-1871) pioneered anaesthesia techniques -- ether in 1815 and chloroform in 1847 respectively. The present day Herb Garrett, a few feet away from the operating theatre, therefore represents the culmination of two thousand years' work on the use of herbs as anaesthetics.