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St George's Hospital was established at Hyde Park Corner, London, in 1733. The history of the hospital and the medical school are closely intertwined, and the surgeons and physicians at the hospital were able to take pupils long before the formal establishment of the medical school in 1834. The building is now an expensive hotel.

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Westminster in the 18th and 19th century was notoriously poor, and many of the patients to St George's came from the overcrowded, filthy slums. Those who could afford it would not have come to hospitals, as the likelihood of getting infections was very high before the  development of antiseptics. This money collection box to support a bed at the hospital is from the 1930s, before the introduction of the NHS and free healthcare.

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St George's has a large collection of post mortem records, dating from 1841-1946, with details of the treatment of patients and the development of dissection practices. They also tell us a lot about the lives of the patients and chart epidemics such as the infamous cholera epidemic in Soho in 1854 and influenza pandemic in 1918-1920. These volumes are currently being catalogued, and are freely available online.

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St George's Post Mortem Register_1880_page_236

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Many of the specimens from the post mortems were preserved in the pathological museum: we still have some of those specimens, such as this fractured femur from 1861. The post mortem case describing the accident of the 74-year old woman is held in the archives.

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This photograph shows the dissecting room at St George’s in 1860, with lecturers and students. We know it was taken on the camera of one of the students in the picture, and Henry Gray (who wrote Gray’s Anatomy with his fellow student Henry Vandyke Carter) is depicted in the front row centre-left. You can see a skull and a pair of legs there in the foreground.  You might also notice that everyone in the image is male and white...

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Assaad Kayat was a Lebanese student at St George's in the 1840s, studying alongside Henry Gray: he wrote an autobiography in which he describes his life in London. The student records reveal a number of visiting students over the years. You can read more about them and some of the attitudes regarding them in this blogpost.

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The first time women were allowed to become medical students at St George’s was during the First World War. This image shows two of the first female students, Helen Ingleby and Hetty Claremont. But after the war ended, and the men came back from the front, it was swiftly decided that the women were no longer needed, and by 1920 there were only a couple of women finishing up their contracts as it had been decided not to admit any more of them.

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The next time women were allowed to study medicine at St George's was in 1945. This is Kathryn Hamill Cohen, who was one of the first students at that time, and who became a psychoanalyst before her untimely and tragic death in 1960.

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From 1882 onwards, probationer nurses were offered lectures by the medical school and hospital staff, leading to the gradual formalisation of nursing training. St George's nursing records illustrate the impact of immigration and in particular the Windrush generation to the healthcare system, showing how for instance in the 1950s-60s up to 70% of the student nurses were immigrants. The Archives was given a grant by The National Archives in 2022 to catalogue these collections, and the project is now underway.

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Prior to the establishment of the NHS in 1948, the hospital and the medical school were funded by charitable donations and subscriptions. The archives hold various lists of these early donors to St George’s, and research is on-going to their backgrounds. In some cases, the funds were based on proceeds from slavery, and many of the donors had various connections to the British Empire. The results of this research are uploaded on the archives' online catalogue, which currently includes brief biographies of 532 of them.

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John Hunter and the skeleton of Charles Byrne, 1788

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John Hunter and the skeleton of Charles Byrne, 1788

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John Hunter, often referred to as the 'founder of scientific surgery', was a student and surgeon at St George's. His legacy is nowadays quite controversial - although his contributions to medicine and anatomy are impressive, his methods in acquiring specimens were often cruel, and raise many questions of ethics. Charles Byrne, known as the 'Irish Giant', suffered from acromegalic gigantism, and before his untimely death at the age of 22 left behind explicit instructions to not let Hunter have his body. His skeleton, however, is still preserved at the Hunterian Museum in London, although they have recently announced it will no longer be displayed following the re-opening of the museum. Hunter died during a meeting at St George's, and his couch and table are displayed in the lobby.

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During the lockdowns we began collecting digital material relating to the pandemic in a collaborative project across the university. This has allowed us to preserve for instance research records, email communications, social media posts and material relating to teaching during this time - something which will surely interest future visitors to the archives!

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One of St George's most famous alumni is Edward Jenner, who is credited with developing smallpox vaccination in the 1790s, which eventually, in 1976, led to the eradication of smallpox. Vaccination as such was not a new invention, but Jenner's innovation was to use the related, but much less dangerous, cowpox. The famous cow who helped him in this endeavour was called Blossom, and her hide is still displayed at the SGUL Library.

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This surgery kit was awarded to a St George’s student called Edward Walker in 1856. It includes amputation knives, a trephine and bone forceps, among other items. At this time, antiseptics and anaesthesia were still being developed, which made surgery of any kind a horrifying prospect for the patient. John Snow was one of the early adopters of ether and chloroform in surgical anaesthetics at St George’s; he was also the one who traced the beginning of the cholera epidemic in Soho to the infamous Broad Street Pump.

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St George's Archives & Special Collections

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St George's Archives & Special Collections

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Want to find out more about the history of St George's? Check out our website with further stories and information about the resources we have. We frequently post all the most interesting snippets on Instagram and Twitter, and we would love to hear from you so please don't hesitate to get in touch! You can also email us: archives@sgul.ac.uk

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Queen Elizabeth opening the Tooting site

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Queen Elizabeth opening the Tooting site

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In the 1970s, the hospital and the medical school were moved to Tooting in South London, for a more spacious and modern location. Queen Elizabeth II attended the formal opening of the new site in 1980.