News - Devon & Exeter Medical Society Collection

Part of the first xray machine used in Exeter (c. 1898)

Exeter's first X-ray machine, trepanning drills for boring into patients' skulls, a sinister-looking amputation set and razor-sharp scarificators for blood letting are just some of the gruesome and bizarre defunct medical instruments that have been collected by Devon doctors over the years. A collection of around 6,000 medical implements has been amassed by the Devon and Exeter Medical Society.

Until recently the collection resided in a cupboard in the Postgraduate Medical Centre at the Royal Devon & Exeter Hospital, but now the instruments are being brought together for research and teaching purposes by the University of Exeter's Centre for Medical History.

Consultant neurologist Dr Christopher Gardner-Thorpe, custodian of the Devon and Exeter Medical Society collection, said: "The collection is made up of medical and surgical equipment as well as some apocatharies' odds and ends. Often it is equipment that doctors have used themselves for many years, items picked up as curiosities, or things with sentimental value such as an old medical bag from the 1920s which was passed from father to son.

"We are hoping to use the collection for teaching."

roman medical instruments

The university has obtained a grant from the Wellcome Trust to catalogue the collection, put it on the internet and organise a programme of school visits to educate pupils about the past, present and future of medicine. It also hopes to find a permanent home to display the collection.

Professor Mark Jackson, director of the Centre for Medical History, said: "The Devon and Exeter Medical Society has collected many of the items from local doctors and hospitals, so there's a lot of local history involved.

"It's been sitting in the hospital for years because they don't have the resources to do anything with it. They still own the collection but we are working in partnership to use it more effectively.

"As a research resource and educational resource it's fantastic. We want to get people to think about what medicine was like in the past and whether it's changed or improved.

"A lot of the items are recognisable - we are not doing much differently today!"

The oldest instruments in the collection are believed to date from Roman times, with a 1960s pacemaker one of the most recent. Among the more unusual items is a Victorian 'Vee Dee vibro-massage machine' and a tonsil guillotine.

"The strength of a lot of the collection is that it was material routinely used by family doctors," said Professor Jackson. "A lot of it is standard material, but there are some quite stunning things. The X-ray machine from 1898 is one.

Allergy treatment, electric, 1930s

"There's also some very interesting apparatus for treating allergies from the 1930s, which tried to desensitise hay fever patients by applying an electrical current to their skin. It's probably quite rare - I doubt if there are many others. I've never seen anything like it.

"The Vee Dee massager was used on women, who were believed to suffer from various nervous disorders, be neurotic and hysterical, and suffer from 'the vapours'.

"There is also vapo-cresolene vaporiser, which was advertised as a cure for asthma, catarrh, colds, diptheria, croup, yellow fever, hay fever, sore throats and all diseases of the air passages. It was made by a small independent company and marketed over the counter. There was no cure for most of those conditions, so people used inhalers and vaporisers all the time."

It is not just the weird and wonderful instruments that are of value - it is often the more mundane, every day equipment that doesn't usually survive, like nurses' uniforms and medicine cabinets.

"In terms of medical history it offers insights into the way doctors practised through their instruments," said Professor Jackson.

"We tend to rely on what they have written, rather than having a clear idea of what they did in practice - but now we can reconstruct it."

There are similar collections at the Royal College of Surgeons, the Thackray Museum in Leeds and the Hunter Collection in Glasgow, but Professor Jackson and his team are using the Exeter collection as part of the university's widening participation programme.

The schools' programme has been designed to fit in with GCSE teaching in secondary schools, and has been organised around different themes including public health and vaccination; surgery and anatomy; common ailments and treatments; and childbirth and children.

"This collection is about understanding medical practice in the past, but it also helps students develop historical awareness of where current medical practice has come from," said Professor Jackson.

"We hope it encourages schoolchildren to think about how medicine has developed, how the experience of illness has changed, to question the treatments they get now, and consider what developments might be important in the future.

"The other audience for us is medical students and doctors, to encourage an interest in medical history."

The hunt is on to try and find a suitable home to display the collection for the first time.

"One of the biggest problems we have is trying to find a safe place for the collection where the public and students can see it, and people can use it for research, but where it's controlled and safe," said Professor Jackson. "Once that's done, we can started cataloguing it properly. We are still trying to verify the origins of some of the instruments. We are only beginning really."