Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret

Inside the museum

Creak up a church’s spiral stair to Europe’s oldest surviving operating theatre (1822), once serving the women’s ward of St Thomas’ Hospital. Before anaesthesia and antisepsis, speed and spectacle ruled; the timber amphitheatre puts you in the splash-zone of medical history. Next door, the herb garret evokes the apothecary—dried plants, jars and tools telling how surgery once leaned on botanicals. Small, vivid and unforgettable. Allow 45–75 minutes.