Home > Articles > Leeds > Visit the award winning interactive Thackray Museum in Leeds payment options

27th February 2008

Visit the award winning interactive Thackray Museum in Leeds

The Thackray Museum is a large grade 2 listed former Victorian workhouse now owned by an independent charity. The doors opened to the public on the 25th May 1997 and have shown how our living conditions have improved over the years. It also documents the advances in medicine over the past century. The museum takes you through a personal journey of social history of medicine and the impact it has had on our lives.

The award winning interactive museum is nationally renowned and has one of Europe’s largest medical museums. The collections hold over 35,000 objects and 14,500 books and catalogues on medical advances over the centuries.

The museum houses five exhibits featuring Life In Victorian Leeds, Hannah’s Ordeal, Pain, Pus and Blood, Having A Baby and the Life Zone.

Life in Victorian Leeds has the public travel back in time to the year 1842, to witness the living conditions of the period. The Thackray Museum has reconstructed some of the worst slums in Leeds and also exhibits medical treatments that were available in the 19th century.

The second exhibit is a story of an eleven-year-old girl called ‘Hannah’s Ordeal’. The reconstruction is of a 1840s operating theatre and it follows the story of Hannah as she goes through the ordeal of having her leg amputated.

Pain, Pus and Blood is an exploration into the development of surgery and medicine. The exhibits show people having their teeth extracted without anaesthetic and the development in heart surgery.

Having A Baby is the fourth exhibit and it goes back to the year 1890, where you are needed to assist a midwife with a delivery.

The last of the exhibitions is the Life Zone, which is an interactive journey through your body. It shows you the process that your body goes through as it is digesting a pea.