Hunterian Museum, Royal College of Surgeons, London

The Hunterian Museum opened to the public on 16 May 2023, with free entry. It is a medical museum, housed in the ground floor of the Royal College of Surgeons, at Lincolns Inn Fields, London. Directly across the park is Sir John Soane's Museum.

The Hunterian Museum is named after the 18th century surgeon and anatomist John Hunter (1728-1793).  It displays over 2,000 anatomical preparations from Hunter’s original collection, alongside instruments, equipment, models, paintings and archive material, which trace the history of surgery from ancient times to the latest robot-assisted operations. The Museum includes England’s largest public display of human anatomy.

It was larger than I expected and covers several rooms. Being new, everything is laid out really well with easy to see labels and good lighting. The display A Curious Mind shows lots of animal bones and skeletons and preserved bodies.

Student surgeons in Hunter's day needed lots of corpses to practice their anatomy skills -

I liked the large touch screen displays

Cross section of an elephant trunk on 2nd shelf down, with lizards on shelf below -

The Long Gallery is the biggest room and contains very many human specimens, including fetuses. Photography is not allowed here, though most people were ignoring this rule!

The last few rooms progress up to the current times with modern surgery and how it transforms lives.

The museum is well worth a visit, although there is an awful lot to take in. 

See all the details on the Hunterian Museum official site. Also an article on Time Out.