Sign indicating a public urinal ('urinoir') in Bruges, Belgium (Stewart Emmens 2010)

In Britain, closure of public toilets has become a cause célèbre in recent years. Such facilities first appeared in numbers following the Public Health Act of 1848. But many of these older sites and their modern counterparts – regularly vandalised and expensive to maintain – have closed their doors. Yet while these often substantial buildings still survive, albeit boarded up or changed in use, most of the old simple public urinals have long gone. 

This is less true in other parts of Europe. Despite the removal of many open urinals (aka ‘pissoirs’), they can still be found.  During my recent holiday in Belgium, referred to previously, these humble structures were occasionally sighted.

Old street urinal in Bruges, Belgium (Stewart Emmens 2010)

This is the street ‘urinoir’ in Bruges indicated by the sign at the top of this post. Like most earlier public toilets they were built for the use of men only, but unlike traditional facilities provided in Britain, privacy is limited.

Urinal alongside a church in Langemark, Belgium (Stewart Emmens, 2010)

Similarly, this is the ‘W.C’ next to the church in the Belgian town of Langemark. I must admit when approaching it, in need, I assumed the door was round the back. There was no door… just the other side of the wall. I’m not sure where this leaves desperate female churchgoers.  

While I’ll put my expectations of an enclosed room down to cultural conditioning, things in Britain have and are changing. A bit.

Portable 'four man' urinal unit in Bruges, Belgium (Stewart Emmens, 2010)

This final example is also from Bruges. But it could be from London’s West End or other British streets where such portable open urinals are laid on for late night crowds. Coupled with more elaborate offerings like the Urilift, they are a partial replacement for the lost facilities. But, as with an earlier generation of public urinals, they are for the convenience of men only.

Remains of the Advanced Dressing Station at Essex Farm, north of Ypres, Belgium (Stewart Emmens)

This was once an Advanced Dressing Station (ADS), at a site known as Essex Farm. One of the largest surviving groups of military buildings in the area, these damp, claustrophobic structures were comparatively comfortable. Built in 1916, they replaced a more temporary station established the year before.

Close to the frontline trenches, it provided basic care for those wounded with each of the rooms having a designated function.  The largest were reserved for stretcher cases, those awaiting evacuation and for applying dressings and performing emergency operations.  Smaller rooms provided a kitchen, toilet and an area to treat the ‘walking wounded’.

Interior of Dressings room / Operating theatre at Essex Farm (Stewart Emmens)

The ADS was one of a chain of facilities that an injured soldier could pass through. From here, the wounded would be evacuated back to Main Dressing Stations, Casualty Clearing Stations and Base Hospitals further behind the lines.

First World War British bandages and dressings in our Blythe House store (Stewart Emmens)

Artificial arm, 1850-1910 (A602817, Science Museum, London)

You may remember a post by my colleague, Stewart, on Arms, legs and ex-Servicemen showing our 20th century collection of prosthetic limbs. The history of artificial limbs is inseparable from the history of amputations and closely linked to warfare. 

This artificial arm was made for someone who had their left arm amputated above the elbow. Many people have commented on how sinister and robotic the arm looks. This is probably because you can see all of the joints in each of the fingers and the wrist. Unlike some modern prosthetics no attempt has been made to replicate the appearance of a hand, just its function - each of the fingers have some movement, the wrist and elbow rotate and move up and down.

A great deal of craftsmanship has gone into the arm. By the beginning of the 1800s, specialist prosthetic makers took over the jobs of making them from carpenters, blacksmiths and armour makers. Some prosthetic limb makers originating in the 1850s such as Hanger and Chas A. Blatchford are still in business today.

Aritfical arm by Chas A Blatchford, 1943 (1999-547, Science Museum, London)

If you want to see the sinister looking arm, it is on display at Medicine Man at the Wellcome Trust. There are also a number on display in our Science and Art of Medicine gallery.

And feel free to ask for more details on Twitter using the #askacurator hashtag, or by posting a question in the comments below.

Florence Nightingale (A661274/1, Science Museum, London)

The Lady with the Lamp came to fame during the Crimean War by improving the standards of cleanliness and hygiene in hospital wards. Nightingale was believed to have dramatically reduced the death rates of soldiers from 40% to 2% in just two years. Recently, historians have suggested that the increase in survival rates was mainly due to improved sewage and ventilation systems, not just improved nursing standards.

Nightingale did do much to put nursing on a modern professional footing setting out not only hygiene practices but also moral and social conduct for nurses. A nurse must not be ”no gossip, no vain talker; she should never answer questions about the sick.”  The Nightingale Nursing School was set up in 1860 as part of St Thomas’ Hospital in London and it is still in existence today – now known as Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery.

Nightingale nurse figurine, 1963 (1984-1733, Science Museum, London)

Florence’s legacy not only lives on through training but also through objects in the Science Museum’s collections. Henry Wellcome collected a number of items belonging to Florence Nightingale such as her whistle, tea caddy, moccasins, parasol and shawl.

These objects are part of a number of famous person’s belongings - or relics as many people call them - that Wellcome acquired. If you visit the Wellcome Library take a look at the names that adorn the walkway around the seating area you’ll find that Florence is the only woman represented.

Florence Nightingale's shawl (A87224, Science Museum, London)

This shawl is now on show at the Florence Nightingale Museum where you can also see many other treasures relating to her life and work. The Wellcome Library also has an astonishing array of her papers.

Artificial limbs in our London store (Stewart Emmens)

Our medical collections are built on the legacy of Victorian entrepreneur Henry Wellcome. He was a millionaire who collected far, wide and en masse. Even our main, highly object-rich medical gallery can only contain a small fraction of the vast number of objects we look after. At our London store, over 40 rooms are devoted to medical objects – and that’s just the smaller stuff.

Roman objects in storage (Stewart Emmens)

Luckily, the web provides an alternative form of access. For the past year Brought to Life, the Science Museum’s history of medicine website has been receiving both acclaim – and many thousands of visitors.

The site has long been the main project for us medical curators – pretty much consuming our working lives for the past three years. It was recently re-launched, with even more themed content, more interactives and hundreds more objects.

Indeed, objects are very much the heart of this website. Images of over 4,000 of them are now accessible, many of objects which have never been on display. It was a personal privilege to be given the chance to select most of them.

Wax model of decaying corpse, Italy c.1774-1800 (Science Museum)

New additions include one of the earliest stethoscopes, Islamic pharmacy jars, relics from Victorian asylums, a mobile X-ray vehicle and apparatus from the early days of penicillin.

Also tucked away are objects that reflect the eclectic fringes of Wellcome’s collecting. Look deep enough and you might find a hangman’s rope, a loveable netsuke, Queen Victoria’s slippers, relics from a doomed Arctic expedition – then there’s the just plain weird stuff.

Enjoy!

Saints in store at Blythe House (Stewart Emmens)

But sometimes people’s daily experience is more interesting that the nuts and bolts of medicine. In the past there was an array of choices in the medical market-place and many sought help from their family or from religion.

Many Christians have long believed that the saints are able to plead with God on their behalf and that particular saints can give protection against specific illnesses. Sometimes a statue of a saint you can tell you two things. One – how the saint was martyred and two - what they are the patron saint of.

Take Saint Lucy:

Saint Lucy, 1601-1700 (Science Museum, London/SSPL)

Martyred in 304 CE for her beliefs, her eyes were removed before her death. To Christians today she is the patron saint of sight and eye diseases. But that’s not all - she is also invoked for dysentery, haemorrhages and throat diseases. Saints often multi-task.

But how did these items come to be here? Well, they’re part of the Wellcome collection that the Science Museum has on permanent loan from the Wellcome Trust. Collecting agents were partly responsible for building the massive collection. My favourite is Captain Johnston-Saint, who in my head is the Indiana Jones of the history of medicine.

The Captain collected a large number of these saints while travelling around France, talking to curés, priests and locating items of interest in furniture shops, people’s homes and markets. If you want to know more about the Wellcome collection check out Frances Larson’s An Infinity of Things.

Back in the present, with over 200 of these statues looking down at me whenever I venture into the room, I can’t help but think I’ve got a lot of saints watching my back.

Memento mori, England, 1810-1850 (A78828, Science Museum, London)

Most of these items are in our store, but they recently got a rare outing, many of them for the first time. The Rubin Museum of Art in New York held an exhibition Remember That You Will Die: Death Across Culture bringing together their own fabulous collection of Himalayan art with Western material culture.

My favourite object that went on loan was this:

Pocket watch, 1700-1930 (A103905, Science Museum, London)

A watch could not be a more perfect reminder of the shortness of life. On the watch face is a small inscription meaning ‘time flies’ to hammer the message home. The thing that makes this object even more remarkable is it that it was once owned by Queen Mary, wife of British monarch George V. She presented it to Henry Wellcome at Buckingham Palace in 1931 to add to his enormous collection.

Much to my colleagues’ envy, I’ve been asked to courier the loan back to Britain. Loans take a lot of organising, the lions’ share by our Collections Registry and Conservation teams. But couriering is not glamorous - there’s a lot of waiting around in cargo sheds at 5am and once you’ve seen one aircraft hanger, you’ve seen them all. I must admit I will be keeping to myself that I’m travelling with memento moris so not to scare the more nervous flyers….

Gilray's 'A Scientific Lecture', 1802, depicts Humphry Davy 'bellowing' laughing gas

What have Humphry Davy, Mike Melvill and my dentist got in common? Answer: They’ve all exploited the chemistry of nitrous oxide, popularly known as ‘laughing gas’.

Davy experimented with euphoria-inducing properties of the gas with his friends Samuel Taylor Coleridge and James Watt. Davy was working at the Pneumatic Institution, set up by Thomas Beddoes to investigate the medical properties of inhaled or ‘factitous airs’. Davy pursued his experiments – part scientific, part recreational – with his normal con brio and was fortunate not to have seriously damaged his and others’ health.

Lucy Baldwin's Analgesic Apparatus, 1955-80, mixed oxygen and nitrous oxide during midwifery (Science Museum/Science & Society)

My dentist, alongside doctors and medics, has long employed nitrous oxide as an analgesic, to relax patients and as a prelude to anaesthesia.

And Mike Melvill? Well, as pilot of SpaceShipOne, the world’s first privately developed spacecraft, he depended on its ability to oxidise rocket fuel for the thrust that carried him spaceward on his pioneering sub-orbital flight of 2004.

Dobson Ozone spectrometer, 1926. Dobson's technique for detecting ozone led to the discovery of the ozone hole over Antartica in 1985. (Science Museum/Science & Society)

So nitrous oxide has a variety of uses but it also has a dark side. Whether produced naturally or by industrial activity it leads to ozone depletion of the upper atmosphere. This lets in more of the Sun’s harmful ultra-violet radiation which the ozone molecules normally absorb. Plus, nitrous oxide acts as a particularly effective greenhouse gas, trapping the heat re-radiated from the Earth’s surface and causing global temperature rises.

No laughing matter indeed.

Statutory no smoking sign at the main entrance to the Science Museum (Stewart Emmens)

On that day in 2007, England followed Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland by making it illegal to smoke in most enclosed public spaces and work premises. As part of this major public health legislation, shops, pubs and other businesses – including museums – were obliged to display a sign, like the one above, at each entrance.

Smoking signage collected from various London pubs in 2007 (Stewart Emmens)

A train's first class smoking compartment, 1936 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

The bans were a big expansion of earlier legislation which had banned smoking in many workplaces, but also in buses, cinemas and even on the London Underground. All signs of our changing relationship with smoking. And there is an earlier generation of smoking signs that hint at levels of acceptance which seem almost inconceivable now.

No smoking sign from a hospital ward, c1960-1975 (Science Museum)

For example, while the sign may have reminded the smoker that the ward was out of bounds, it does give the impression that if you just nipped out to the corridor – you’d be free to puff away with impunity. 

Limbs from Queen Mary's Hospital in our London store (Stewart Emmens)

The date is significant. By 1915, the trickle of amputees shipped home to Britain in the early weeks of the First World War was becoming a torrent. The authorities, who were obliged to provide them with artificial limbs, were soon overwhelmed. The new hospital was a response to this crisis.

Limb fitting at Queen Mary's Hospital, c1916-1918 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

As the War progressed, St Mary’s became the main focus of limb production and fitting in the UK. A specialist service it retains to this day.

This collection contains examples from across the 20^th century, but those relating to the two World Wars form the largest groups. Retained by the hospital when veterans were issued new prostheses, they have some of the most intriguing back stories.

Artificial leg with extensive 'home repairs' (Science Museum)

Perhaps the strangest is this limb, worn for over 40 years by one ex-soldier. Made of fibre and intended only as temporary measure, its owner didn’t return Queen Mary’s for his proper limb-fitting. He preferred to prolong this pylon leg’s life – through occasional applications of glue, wire mesh…..and cement. It now weighs over 20 kg. Amazingly for most of that 40 years he worked as a roof thatcher and tiler.

Artificial leg made for a prisoner of war, c.1943 (Science Museum)

More subtly ingenious is this limb, handed in by a survivor of a Japanese prisoner of war camp. One of several made by fellow captive and surgeon Julian Taylor, it’s made from metal salvaged from a crashed aircraft. As an added touch for the British owner, who’d have worn little more than shorts in the sweltering heat, it is – of course – painted pink.