Today being Laura's class day, Scott, the girls and our guests, Grandma Dorothy and Aunt Linda and Uncle Bill, ventured forth on our own. It was a perfect day with beautiful sunshine and warm temperatures. (We knew it would be when the BBC forecaster labeled in "mild", which means "balmy" by our standards!) Our destination this morning was the Old Operating Theater. Attached to St. Thomas hospital, which has been around since the 12th Century, this curiosity was boarded up in a remodel and forgotten. It wasn't rediscovered until 1950, and it wasn't opened to the public until the late 1980s. The theater was built in 1820 to provide a space for operations to be conducted on women, without anethetic, while students stood in a tiered gallery and observed and learned. A simple limb amputation, we learned, could be performed in 30 seconds, and the doctors even performed a kind of plastic surgery to replace or repair noses. A more complicated surgery was a shoulder removal which took 20 to 30 minutes. Did I mention there was no anathesia? Remarkably, all this was free, and most of the patients at the hospital were poor, since rich people had surgeries performed at home, perhaps on the table in the dining room. Even more remarkably, was the survival rate: about 1 in 3 patients lived!
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