Medical Museums in the spotlight

Several years ago I was thrilled to be appointed as Marketing Consultant to the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London. I was well used to the audience development and PR challenges of museums and galleries but the wealth of fascinating, sometimes beautiful and sometimes gruesome, collections of medical museums was quite new to me. The Hunterian was well deserving of greater visitor numbers and wider audiences and I worked hard with the team there to delve into the stories behind the cases and help them achieve that.

And so it is with much interest that I’ve recently been reading about the activities of medical museums now, during the Covid-19 pandemic, as they work hard not only as museum professionals through these torrid lockdown times but also how they are wrestling with the practical and ethical challenges of ‘collecting’ the pandemic throughout its stages. The Chief Executive of the Thackray Museum in Leeds is quoted as saying, “Medical museums should be helping people deal with this pandemic not as something catastrophic, as it is often presented in the media and social media, but as something we can have a measured view about – whilst not to diminish individual tragedies”. If anyone can achieve that, then I reckon the brilliant team at the Thackray can. Meanwhile the curators at the Science Museum in London are busy collecting iconic items for exhibition, as long as the items can no longer be of practical use and only once it is safe to actually take them in. I’m pleased to report that Downing Street has donated that podium graphic we saw on TV every evening during lockdown from Number 10 declaring: “Stay home, protect the NHS, save lives.” Let’s all hope and pray that the slogan remains a museum item and doesn’t have to be brought out again any time soon.