Spitalfields Life

You enter a door at the hospital and over it are the words, ‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.’ Then the first thing you come upon as you climb the stairs is a vast stone sarcophagus, stored on the landing as if it were a spare piece of medical equipment. It is wedged half open as if the inhabitant had climbed out and could return at any moment, and a sign above it warns ‘Smoking Prohibited,’ just in case they considered lighting up.

By the time you reach the top of the winding staircase in this lonely corner of West Smithfield, you are emotionally prepared to enter Barts Pathology Museum – one of the saddest and strangest places I have ever been. Arranged in bottles and jars, preserved in fluids and organised upon shelves spanning three storeys, is a vast, encyclopaedic collection of human body parts acquired by the hospital over centuries, for the study of anatomy and ailments. There are more varieties of carcinomas and hernias, more malformations and deformations, more ways that the human body can be blighted and broken than in your worst nightmares.

Each one of the five thousand specimens represents a different example of human suffering, and you stand overawed to see pain quantified and categorised in this way. Gazing around from the centre of the room at the expansive galleries that run floor to ceiling, I became wary to approach the display in any direction out of reluctance at what I might discover.

In such a circumstance, Contributing Photographer Patricia Niven & I were grateful to be greeted by the pragmatic enthusiasm of Carla Valentine, Technical Assistant Curator. “I’m a mortician,” she admitted reassuringly, “for eight years, I worked in  mortuaries doing autopsies, but this is what I always wanted to do. I wanted to do it since I was ten, I think some people are born to do this. I was always cutting up slugs and worms from the garden, and probably I was a weird child.”

Carla has been employed to work upon the conservation of the collection.“They’re all leaking over there,” she revealed, gesturing to a long gallery lined with organs in bottles that she has been transferring into safe containers. I learnt that in recent decades, the practice of preserving new specimens has ceased, except in rare cases. “The only people who are placed in here now are those who choose to be,” Carla explained helpfully, “if,  for example, they have some unusual cancer that they want to have put on display.”

Eager to reward our interest, Carla drew our attention to the case of foreign objects extracted from the human body – the toothbrush removed from the oesophagus in 1944, the pencil case removed from the bladder in 1932, the needle removed from the heart in 1879, the torch removed from the rectum in 1933 and the metal dart removed from the brain at an unspecified date. It became apparent that each specimen had its own story, even if they were not always obvious.

“We have a lot of Victorian factory workers,” Carla informed me, moving on and indicating a case of semi-disintegrated jaw bones that were examples of ‘Phossy Jaw’ – the condition acquired by those who worked with phosphorus in the manufacture of matches. Beside them were specimens that illustrated ‘Chimney Sweeps’ Cancer’ – the testicular cancer  that came about as a result of a life spent climbing up chimneys. And then there was the fractured mandible of the fourteen year old boy whose head was caught between the rollers of a rotary printing machine and died a week later. And I shall not easily forget the metal cap designed to hold together the broken pieces of the skull of a man run over by a carriage, that enabled him to live several years after.

Proudly, Carla showed us the inguinal hernia from around 1750 that is the earliest specimen in the collection, preserved by Percivall Potts – one of the museum’s most celebrated curators. “Unfortunately the perspex box was leaking, so I decided that – for the safety of the specimen and for aesthetic appeal – I would put the hernia into a glass pot with fresh fluid.” Carla confided to me cheerfully. You stand helpless in front of these examples and others, nodding politely at the explanations and feeling numb as you seek to discover a relationship with what you are seeing. The skull of John Bellingham who murdered the Prime Minister in 1812 and the skull of a Norman killed at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 leer back at you, and a vision of the largest centipede you ever saw in your life that, although safely preserved in a glass bottle, nevertheless wriggles deep into your consciousness.

There is certain grim grandeur to this museum designed by Edward l’Anson in 1878, where mustachioed busts of James Paget and John Hunter, two nineteenth curators, stare eternally upon their creations from either end of the gallery. Once you have confronted the detail for yourself, you cannot but admire the moral courage of those who were unflinching in their pursuit of medical science. As Carla Valentine concluded sagely, this is a museum of how we got to where we are today in medicine. Yet I could not resist a surge of personal grief when confronted with particular examples of afflictions suffered by those I have known closely and so, after everything I had seen, it made me grateful for my own good health.

In a lonely corner of the hospital.

“Whatsoever they hand findeth to do, do it with thy might”

The sarcophagus on the stair.

Specimens of ‘Chimney Sweeps’ Cancer’

Carla Valentine, Technical Assistant Curator & Mortician.

The oldest specimen is this inguinal hernia from around 1750, preserved by by Percivall Potts.

Specimens of ‘Phossy jaw’ – a decay of the jaw bone caused by exposure to phosphorus and suffered by workers in East End match factories in the nineteenth century.

Bladder stones

Skull of John Bellingham, the assassin who killed  the Prime Minister, Spencer Percival, in 1812.

A rat that suffered from tuberculosis

Photographs copyright © Patricia Niven

Archive images courtesy of the Royal London Hospital Archives

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I offer this choice selection of the language of drinking lest it may be of use to any of my readers who might be planning to take a draught over the forthcoming festive season.

Life in the East – At the Half Moon Tap, 1830

Barrel – A cask built to hold thirty-six gallons.

Beer – There is no bad beer but some is better than others.

Binder – The last drink, which it seldom proves to be. Also used to describe the person who orders it.

Boiling Copper – Vessel in which wort is boiled with hops.

Boniface – Traditional name for an innkeeper, as used by George Farquhar in ‘The Beaux’ Stratagem.’

Bragget – A fancy drink made of fermented honey and ale.

Brewer – The artist who by his choice of barley and other ingredients, and by his sensitive control of the brewing process, produces beer the way you like it.

Butt – A cask built to hold one hundred and eight gallons.

Buttered Beer – A popular sixteenth century drink of spiced and sugared strong beer supplemented with the yolk of an egg and some butter.

Cardinal – A nineteenth century form of mulled ale.

Casual – An occasional visitor to the pub.

Cheese – A heavy wooden ball used in the game of skittles.

Chitting – The appearance of the first shoots while the barley is growing during the first stage of the malting process.

Coaching Glass – An eighteenth century drinking vessel with no feet that was brought out to coach travellers and consumed at one draught.

Collar – The frothing head on a glass of beer between the top of the beer and the rim of the glass.

Crinze – An earthenware drinking vessel, a cross between a tankard and a small bowl.

Crawler – One who visits all the pubs in one district, drinking a glass of beer in each.

Dipstick – An instrument used to measure the quantity of wort prior to fermentation.

Dive – A downstairs bar.

Dog’s Nose – Beer laced with gin.

Down The Hatch – A toast, usually for the first drink.

Finings – A preparation of isinglass which is added to the beer in the cask to clarify it.

Firkin – A cask built to hold nine gallons.

Flip – Beer and spirit mixed, sweetened and heated with a hot iron.

Fob – The word used in a brewery to describe beer froth.

Goods – The name used by the brewer to describe the crushed malted grains in the mash tuns.

Grist – Malt grains that have been cleaned and cracked in the brewery mill machines.

Gyle – A quantity of beer brewed at one time – one particular brewing.

Heel Tap – Term for beer left at the bottom of the glass.

Hogshead – A cask built to hold fifty-four gallons.

Hoop – A device displayed outside taverns in the middle ages to indicate that beer was sold. Later, it became the practice to display certain objects within the hoop in order to differentiate one tavern from another. eg The Hoop & Grapes

Kilderkin – Cask holding eighteen gallons.

Lambswool– A hot drink of spiced ale with roasted apples beaten up in it.

Liquor – The term used in the brewing industry for water.

Local – The pub round the corner.

Long Pull – Giving the customer more than they ordered, the opposite of a short pull.

Lounge – The best-appointed and most expensive bar of the public house.

Mash – The mixture of crushed malted grains and hot liquor which is run through the masher into the mash tun and from which is extracted liquid malt or wort.

Merry-Goe-Down – Old term describing good ale.

Metheglin – A spiced form of mead.

Mether Cup – A wooden drinking cup used by the Saxons, probably for Metherglin.

Mud-In-Your-Eye, Here’s – Traditional toast, with a meaning more pleasant than it sounds.

Nappy – Term describing good ale, foaming and strong.

Noggin – Small wooden mug, a quarter pint measure.

Noondrink – Ale consumed at noon when trade was slacker. Also, High Noon, drunk at three o’clock when street trading was finished.

One For The Road – Last drink before leaving the pub.

Pig’s Ear – Rhyming slang for beer.

Pocket – A large sack made to contain one and a half hundredweight of hops.

Porter – Popular in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries among London market porters, equivalent to a mixture of ale, beer and twopenny.

Public Bar – Where everything is cheapest and decoration and equipment is smiplest.

Puncheon – Cask built to hold seventy-two gallons.

Quaff – To drink in large draughts.

Regular – One of the mainstays of the public house.

Round – An order of drinks for more than one person.

Saloon Bar – Enjoying better amenities than a Public Bar and therefore more expensive to the customer.

Shandy – A drink of beer mixed with ginger beer, or sometimes beer and lemonade.

Short – A gin or whisky, usually taken before a meal.

Small Beer – A beer of lesser gravity, hence a trifling matter.

Smeller – A man employed in the brewery to examine casks after they have been washed and prior to their being filled with beer.

Snifter – Colloquial term for a drink.

Snug or Snuggery – Semi-private apartment in the pub, by custom reserved for use of the regulars.

Sparge – To spray hot liquor onto the grist in the mash tuns.

Spell, To Take A – To go round to the local for a beer, coined by Mr Peggotty in David Copperfield.

Stingo – A strong ale, similar to Barley Wine, popular during the winter months and usually sold in a bottle.

Stool – A useful piece of furniture for a customer who wants to stay at the bar, but is anxious to sit down.

Swig – To take a draught of beer, generally a large one.

Thirst – Suffering enjoyed by beer drinkers.

Tipple – To drink slowly and repeatedly.

Trouncer – The drayman’s mate who pushed and manhandled the wagon over potholes.

Tumbler – A flat bottomed drinking glass, derived from  the Saxon vessel that could not stand upright and must be emptied in one draught.

Tun – Vessel in the brewery where the fermenting takes place.

Twopenny – A pale, small beer introduced to London from the country in the eighteenth century at fourpence a quart.

Wallop – Mild ale.

Wassail – Hot ale flavoured with sugar, nutmeg and roasted apples.

What’s Yours? – An invitation which sums up the companionable atmosphere of a public house.

Wort – The solution of mash extract in water, derived from the grist in the mash tuns.

Image from Tom & Jerry’s Life in London courtesy  Bishopsgate Institute