{"id":695,"date":"2022-12-03T05:53:35","date_gmt":"2022-12-03T05:53:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/grousablebooks.com\/?p=695"},"modified":"2026-02-28T21:03:02","modified_gmt":"2026-03-01T05:03:02","slug":"at-old-st-thomass-this-thursday-december-8","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/2022\/12\/at-old-st-thomass-this-thursday-december-8\/","title":{"rendered":"At Old St. Thomas’s — This Thursday, December 8"},"content":{"rendered":"

In anticipation of my Conversation to benefit the Old Operating Theatre and Herb Garret<\/a> in London, which will take place in Zoom on December 8 at 7pm British time, I am posting here about the history of the old hospital and its time in Surrey Gardens. I will be talking about some of this during my presentation. This is a re-post from March of 2020, as I was starting to write the book. Enjoy!<\/p>\n

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St. Thomas’s Hospital at the Zoo<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The cholera ward, of course, was in the giraffe house\u2026<\/p>\n

In my recent researches of St. Thomas\u2019s Hospital, Southwark, I have discovered an unusual episode, a time when the hospital went to the zoo.<\/p>\n

St. Thomas\u2019s Hospital was located on Borough Street in Southwark from the medieval period until 1862. (What remains of it, the\u00a0Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret<\/a>, is my all-time favourite museum in London.) At that time, the railway was forcing itself through the area as companies competed with each other. The proposed railway went right through the heart of the hospital grounds. So in 1862 the hospital was sold to the railway company, for \u00a3296,000,\u00a0according to this<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Guy\u2019s and St. Thomas\u2019 Hospitals shown on \u201cImproved map of London for 1833, from Actual Survey. Engraved by W. Schmollinger, 27 Goswell Terrace\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

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\u2018St Thomas\u2019s Hospital 1860\u2019, aerial view. Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images, Roberts, G.Q., A brief history of St Thomas\u2019s Hospital (1920)<\/em><\/p>\n

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A new hospital site was arranged to be built where most of it still stands, in Lambeth, across from the Houses of Parliament. But this site wasn\u2019t complete until 1871.<\/p>\n

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View of St Thomas\u2019s Hospital with plan taken from Henry Currey\u2019s, St. Thomas\u2019s Hospital, London. [London] : [Royal Institute of British Architects], 1871 [St Thomas\u2019s Historical Books Collection PAMPH. BOX RA988.L8 T1 CUR]<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Most sources skip over this gap. Where did the hospital go in the meantime, for nine years?<\/p>\n

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It went to\u00a0Surrey Gardens<\/a>, in Newington, Walworth, in September 1862. Surrey Gardens had been a pleasure garden, like Vauxhall. It had a zoo. But as business declined, the animals were sold off to build a huge music hall. The hall was gutted by fire in 1861, which coincidentally led to a\u00a0court case<\/a>\u00a0that determined you cannot hold someone to a contract when it\u2019s impossible to fulfill it (in this case, a concert reserved for a burnt-out hall).<\/p>\n

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St. Thomas\u2019s Hospital decided to lease the whole property, repaired the building, and repurposed some of the zoo.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been looking for histories and records of St. Thomas\u2019 Hospital to learn more about the situation at Surrey Gardens. The\u00a0St Thomas\u2019s Hospital Report<\/a>\u00a0of 1867 is available, for some reason, at Google Books. Amputation fatalities, I discovered, were\u00a0lower at the new location<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[Aside: there were also some figures in the Report tables that seem odd to me. How could the average stay in hospital for an ankle sprain be 11 days (p602)? This made me wonder whether one had to stay in hospital to be allowed off work, or whether people really had no one at home to take care of them (or no home \u2014 quite possible in a poor neighborhood), or whether ankle sprains were for some reason more serious then? Four men and four women had sprained their ankle that year, and the\u00a0average<\/em>\u00a0stay was 11 days? Perhaps they had more wrong with them than a sprained ankle.]<\/p>\n

The giraffe house really was the cholera ward, and the\u00a0old elephant house was used for dissections<\/a>. That piece of information comes from a book about Florence Nightingale, who was a big part of all this. She had opened her first nursing school at Old St. Thomas\u2019 only two years before the move, and\u00a0helped provide for room and board for nurses<\/a>\u00a0at the hospital. She also helped design the new Lambeth hospital for maximum light, ventilation, and separation of patients into pavilions. [And she\u00a0promoted hand-washing<\/a>\u00a0as the best anti-infective, as true now as it was in 1860.]<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Illustrated London News<\/em>\u00a0of December 1862 (copy available at\u00a0HathiTrust<\/a>) features a quick column on how the facilities at Surrey Gardens boasted the \u201crapid and complete conversion of the old buildings to their new and beneficent uses\u201d, and imagined the gardens would provide a unique opportunity for medical students to stroll and contemplate. Nightingale, who believed in patient access to the outdoors, would have approved this. She wrote a letter to Henry Bonham Carter (her cousin and\u00a0the Secretary of the Nightingale Fund<\/span>) on the advantages of temporary buildings for hospitals, but\u00a0it isn\u2019t available online<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The 9-year relocation gets only a single-sentence mention in\u00a0Wikipedia<\/a>. That\u2019s a shame. It seems like such an interesting interlude.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In anticipation of my Conversation to benefit the Old Operating Theatre and Herb Garret in London, which will take place in Zoom on December 8 at 7pm British time, I am posting here about the history of the old hospital and its time in Surrey Gardens. I will be talking about some of this during […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[84,73],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=695"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10443,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695\/revisions\/10443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}