Historical background

The Charing Cross Hospital and Medical School was founded by Benjamin Golding, MD in 1818, and built in 1831. Its aim was to provide a Medical School upon

One of the first departments to be established in 1835 was the Museum. Two of its first Curators were Surgeons, John Howship (1834-1841) and Edwin Canton (1844-1853) – both were very interested in their work and their excellent collections laid the basis of the present Medical School Museum.

In the autumn of 1881 the new Medical School Buildings were opened in Chandos Street, close to the Strand and near Charing Cross Station. Subsequently, the museum specimens were moved to Chandos Place, nearby. The building was enlarged in 1889 and new physical, biological and pathological laboratories were added in 1894. It was extensively altered in 1911 when a large Museum with 4,000 specimens and a Curator’s Room were created. This Museum consisted of three galleries. In the 1960’s, the expansion of the laboratories in Chandos Place meant that the Museum be moved to the Adelphi in the Strand. When the New Charing Cross Hospital Medical School was built on the site of Fulham Hospital, the Museum specimens were moved to their present home.

In 1984, the Westminster Hospital Medical School merged with Charing Cross Hospital Medical School forming the Charing Cross and Westminster Medical School. Following the opening of the new Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in 1993, and consequential closure of the Westminster campus, the museum collection at Charing Cross was greatly enlarged with specimens from Westminster.

In 1997, Charing Cross and Westminster Medical School entered the Imperial College School of Medicine, where it joined the St Mary's MEdical School, by then already part of Imperial College. The smaller museum collection at St Mary’s Hospital campus was relocated to join thecollection at the Charing Cross campus. All the wealth of specimens from these Medical Schools is now incorporated at the present site in Fulham. The collection of specimens is exceptionally good and well-arranged Pathological Museum containing nearly 4,000 prepared specimens on display, with another 10,000 specimens also available.

Lockyer collection
On 4 October 1930, the Museum received the largest individual collection of specimens ever brought together by any individual since the collection of John Hunter (now in the Royal College of Surgeons’ museum). The Lockyer Collection was almost entirely of obstetrics and gynaecological specimens donated by Dr J Cuthbert Lockyer, a previous student and the then Junior Obstetric Physician to Charing Cross Hospital. This unique collection of about a thousand specimens and histology slides was prepared by him at his own cost during the previous 15 years. Also, with this collection is a specimen donated by Wertheim who performed a very radical operation for the first time in Britain for uterine cancer involving removal of all possible lymphatic glands as well as the uterine growth.

Pathology specimens in the museums were always a high priority in all medical schools in London in 1820’s because they were an important learning resource for medical students. Therefore, one of the first departments created in the medical schools were Pathology Museums and appointments of Curators. Pathological specimens in the museum provided medical students the basis for learning medicine and surgery. Many distinguished medical personnel learnt and got new ideas for teaching and research through medical museums and also circuitously contributed enormously to the museums as well.

Famous people who have taught or been taught in the Pathology Museums

John Snow (1813-1858) - Westminster Hospital Medical School - was one of the most outstanding anaesthetist and epidemiology, given chloroform to Queen Victoria during childbirth in 1853 and 1857. He also identified the source of a major cholera outbreak in London, in the Golden Square area in 1854 as being the water supply in Broad Street. Officials removed the pump handles and the epidemic subsided.

WG Grace was a student at Westminster Hospital Medical School in 1878-79. There is no record of whether he played cricket for the school.

David Livingstone, the great African missionary and explorer, was a student at the Charing Cross Hospital Medical School. His medical studies extended from 1838 to 1840 and records show that he “paid the fees for the full course of medical practice, midwifery and botany”.

TH Huxley (1825-1895) one of the most illustrious nineteenth century student had his first paper published in the London Medical Gazette in 1845, whilst still a medical student. Entitled On a hitherto underscribed structure in the human hair sheath, it describes the inner layer of the root sheath of the hair follicle which has since been known as Huxley’s layer.

Edith Summerskill (later Baroness) was amongst the first women to be admitted to medical school at Charing Cross. She became Labour MP for Fulham in 1938 and was a member of the Attlee government after the Second World War.

Augustus Désiré Waller (1856-1922), lecturer in physiology at St Mary’s 1884-1902, discovered the electrical reaction of the human heart in 1887, which led to the development of the electrocardiograph. His pendulum, used to measure heart rate, and formerly at St Mary’s, is in the Sir Alexander Fleming Building on the South Kensington Campus.

Sir Almroth Wright (1861-1947) joined St Mary’s in 1902 and was a Director of the Inoculation Department. He was the inventor of vaccine therapy, which saved the lives of men of the allied armies during the Great War. He was a forthright, controversial figure and a friend of the playwright, George Bernard Shaw. The character Sir Colenso Ridgeon in The Doctor’s Dilemma is based closely on Wright.

Alexander Fleming (1881-1955) discovered penicillin at St. Mary’s in 1928. He was knighted in 1944 and received the Nobel Prize in 1945, with Sir Howard Florey (1889-1968) and Dr. Ernst Chain (1906-1979), later to be Professor of Biochemistry at Imperial College, who had refined penicillin for clinical use at Oxford in the early 1940s. The Fleming Museum at St Mary’s is managed by Hospital trustees and contains the Fleming archives.

Sir Bernard Spilsbury (1887-1947) was a pathologist and morbid anatomist from 1907 to 1919 at St. Mary’s, frequently giving expert evidence in the most notorious murder cases of the day. He provided some interesting Forensic samples for teaching.

Rodney Porter (1917-1985) won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1972 for his work on the development of cellular immunology at St Mary’s

Lord Porritt (1900-1994) was an Olympic athlete and a surgeon with a career at St. Mary’s Hospital spanning almost forty years. He used Pathology Museum constantly to teach his students.

Sir Roger Bannister (1929- ) was the first ever athlete to run a mile in under four minutes on 6 May 1954 while a student at St Mary’s.

JPR Williams (1949- ) was student at St Mary’s 1967-1973 and senior orthopaedic registrar 1982-1986. Between 1969 and 1981 he won fifty-five rugby caps for Wales and toured with the British Lions in 1971 and 1974.

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