Across from the monument was Royal Albert Hall (equivalent to Carnegie Hall in the US)!
After the park, we took a quick walk down to the Science Museum where I spent the whole rest of my morning. The top two floors were my favorite; they displayed the history of medicine from Mesopotamian cultures and Babylon all the way to the present day. In early civilizations, medicine was obviously very primitive. However, intellectuals like Galen in the Greek and Roman empires really set the tone for modern medicine. The Greeks believed that the human body is made of four components: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile, and an imbalance of these four components led to sickness and disease. Galen was a pioneering anatomist, and people used his model for medicine all the way through history until the Scientific Revolution, which was when medicine began to morph into what we know it as today (through science, research, and experimentation). In another exhibit, there were life-size dioramas of medical procedures and treatments. For example, one diorama showed a man in the Persian Empire getting a cataract surgery, one showed a dentist's office in the 1890's, and one showed an open heart surgery in the 1980's! I loved looking at these and watching how medicine changed through time visually.
After grabbing a quick lunch (another delicious baguette), we went to the Hunterian Museum! John Hunter was another brilliant scientist of the Enlightenment. He was a medical experimenter and is responsible for many, many surgical practices we use today. Hunter was a dissector and collector and had his own museum of his specimens at his house while he was living. I saw many of these, including the skeleton of the "Irish Giant," a human that was 7 feet, 7 inches tall!!! The top of my head barely reached the bottom if his ribs! In one of the exhibits, I read about surgery through the ages. I learned all about laparoscopies (minimally-invasive surgeries) that we use today (and that I have had two of since March!). One of Hunter's specimens I also got to see was a gall bladder extracted from a woman in 1911. This was so cool! She had weeks of recovery from the surgery, but today this is an outpatient procedure! After the Hunterian Museum, we stopped at Borough Market. This was an awesome site with lots of delicious produce, candy, nuts, sandwiches....everything you could imagine! It was kind of like a huge farmer's market. (There were lots of free samples too!). Next, it was on to the Old Operating Theatre. This was once a part of St. Thomas's Hospital; it was a room where patients would receive surgery while medical students stood around in a theatre-like setting and observed. I learned (quite vividly) how a surgery at the time was performed. Doctors in the 18th and 19th centuries only worked in hospitals one day a week (usually Friday), because hospitals were places of refuge for the poor. The well-to-do families received care in their homes. So, if an average poor person broke his leg ion a Saturday, he would have to wait almost a whole week until the following Friday to receive his leg amputation. By then, he had probably already developed gangrene if the wound was an open one. Anyway, the patient would be put on this wooden table and his hands would be tied and he would be given a piece of leather to bite down on (this was before anesthetics). The surgeon would come in and prepare himself (sometimes he wouldn't even wash his hands), prepare the tourniquet and saw off the limb. Quickly, of course, to hopefully avoid the patient dying of shock on the table. The chances of this happening were 2 in 3. If the patient did happen to survive the amputation, it was quite possible he would die in recovery due to infection. All I have to say is thank God for anesthetics.
This ended our "school day." After I changed my clothes and relaxed a little at the hotel, Lauren and I went out for some shopping and dinner. We went to the biggest Disney store in Europe! It was pretty cool:
After exploring Oxford Circus and grabbing a bite to eat, we took the tube down to Waterloo and walked along the south bank of the Thames. This is a bustling place in the evening, complete with street performers, live music, an amphitheater, and of course, ice cream stands!
When we got bored of river life, we decided that we wanted to go see St. Paul's Cathedral, so we again hopped on the tube and went to see it! It was absolutely beautiful.
It was still pretty light out, so we decided to hop on a double-decker bus and ride around the city for a while. It was a fun adventure!!! We didn't really know where it was going, but we knew we could hop off at any underground station and find our way back to our hotel. Which, after driving past Big Ben, Parliament, Westminster Abbey, the Courts, and Victoria station, we did, and found our way back.
Tomorrow is Prime Meridian day!!!!
