George Marshal medical Museum
Charles Hastings Education Centre
Worcestershire Royal Hospital
Worcester, WR5 1DD
tel: 01905-760738
www.medicalmuseum.org.uk
Curator: Catriona Smellie
Catriona.smellie@worcsacute.nhs.uk
The museum is open to members of the public without charge, and is open from Monday to Friday, 10am to 4pm.
The George Marshall Medical Museum is an independent museum housed within an education charity, the Charles Hastings Education Centre (CHEC). It has been open since 2002, and is named after the first Curator of the collection, Mr. George Marshall, a long-standing surgeon in Worcester at the Infirmary.
The Museum collection contains around 600 artefacts on display with over 7000 in storage, including some 1000 historic medical books and archives. The 19th and 20th Centuries are particularly well-represented (with several artefacts dating to the 17th and 18th Centuries), as are key medical and surgical specialties. A growing digital oral history archive on the Powick Lunatic Asylum (1852 – 1980s) and 50 digitized volumes of patient records offer a fascinating insight into an under-represented area of medical history. The Museum’s set of ten death masks is infamous! These masks, made to investigate theories of a link between skull shape and criminal personality in the 1820s, were taken from the heads of hanged Worcestershire criminals shortly before their bodies were anatomised at the infirmary.
Notable objects and collections that are not currently on display due to limited exhibition space include:
~ over 80 hours of digital oral histories of Worcestershire medicine and healthcare
~ various items of army medical officer’s uniform and kit from the Boer War and WW1
~ archives from local medical societies and buildings, including the BMA and the Worcester Eye Hospital
~ books, clothing and nursing paraphernalia that belonged to a local Nurse, Sister Tarran, who worked at the WRI for 30 years, as well as other local nurses
~ the first key-hole surgery (laparoscopy) machine also from WRI (the earliest of its type).
~ a collection of paper archives found at the historic Worcester Royal Infirmary during the building survey conducted on behalf of the University of Worcester
The Curator welcomes reasonable requests from researchers and interested members of the public who would like access to stored collections for projects.
Parking at the Centre is free for visitors to the Museum. Group bookings can be made for tours during normal opening hours as well as evenings and weekends. The curator does not charge a set fee for group visits but always requests that a donation be made to the museum of an amount of the group’s choosing.
Please contact the Curator for more information or to book a group visit: