Many of the London walks that feature in our calendar of tours include aspects of London that, at first glance, might not strike you as being of particular interest from an historical perspective.
Take hospitals for example. You might wonder what could possibly be of interest about hospitals. Yet several of the hospitals that we encounter on our various London walks have much to offer.
Take University College Hospital for example. Anyone who has driven along Euston Road and on towards Marylebone Road will have seen the striking green glass structure of the new hospital that opened in 2005.
However, those who join one of our Secret London walks around Bloomsbury will stand outside the original University College Hospital building and will learn a great deal about its fascinating history.
Designed by architect Alfred Waterhouse, University College Hospital, which opened in 1906,was his last major commission as he died a year before it was opened.
It took 8 years to build and it is widely considered to be London’s finest hospital building.
Waterhouse had limited space on which to construct the building so he opted for a cruciform shape.To this day the building is called the Cruciform Building and has to be amongst the most eye catching building in London.
Walks that go past it include Literary Bloomsbury, and Dickens London. We always pause to point out the striking towers towers topped by grey turrets.
These are the “Sanitary Towers” that contained patient toilets and bathrooms, and they were positioned away from the actual wards to reduce any dangers of cross-infection.
The cruciform shape had the advantage of allowing the air to circulate and the light to enter buildings.Looking closely at the walls beneath the ward windows you will notice the grilles that were intended to provide extra ventilation to the wards.
But, as we often say, our London walks are not just about buildings, they are about people and many famous names have, over the years been associated with University College Hospital. In addition, it can claim many firsts in medical history.
For example the great 19th Century surgeon Robert Liston performed the first operation under anaesthetic ( he used ether) here on 21st December 1846.
Liston was famed for the speed with which he could amputate a limb. Speed was of the essence since, for most of his career, he performed amputations without anaesthetic. His record for removing a limb was a mere 20 seconds!
Throughout the 19th century surgeons had experimented withe different ways to numb a patients senses to the pain of an operation. Alcohol was one such method, and some surgeons even employed boxers to knock their patients out. Another favourite method was mesmerism, pioneered earlier in the 19th Century by Dr Joseph Elliotson.
The idea of using ether had come in from America. Two days before Liston performed his operation James Robinson, a dentist, had removed a tooth from a female patient using ether to put her to sleep, at a house that then stood a little further along Gower Street from University College Hospital.Having performed operation Liston remarked “This Yankee Dodge beats mesmerism hollow.”
Anaesthetic, coupled, with the innovations in antiseptics pioneered by Dr. Joseph Lister meant that surgeons could now perform more complicated surgery and in 1884 the first operation for removal of a cerebral tumour performed here.This was followed in 1887 by the first operation on a spinal tumour.
In February 1896 Norman Collie took England’s first clinical X–ray photograph at UCL of pin in woman’s finger.
So just one building that you could easily hurry past believing it has nothing of historic interest to detain you can, in fact, offer so much. And if medical history is of no interest to you the hospital also features on our Literary London walk because it was here, in the Private Patients Wing that George Orwell married Sonia Bronwell, an editorial assistant with Horizon, whilst he was a patient here in October 1949. He died here on January 21st 1950.
