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Old Operating Theatre
9a St Thomas StreetAbout
Above St Thomas Church in Southwark is London's oldest surviving operating theatre. Built in 1821, it was the scene of many amputations carried out with a saw and no anaesthetic. Blood would drip - or probably pour - off the wooden table and get soaked up by three inches of sawdust. One wonders what the congregation below would have thought of the screams emanating from upstairs, with the odd drip of blood seeping through the ceiling. With anaesthetics unavailable, patients would often awake from their drunken state (they had a choice of passing out from either alcohol or pain) in the midst of an operation. Fortunately the National Health Service's operating theatres have leapt forward, and medical students don't have such a frighteningly free rein.
