This new exhibition at the State Library of New South Wales looks great.
“From the influence of the stars and the phases of the moon, to healing chants and prayers, to the knife-wielding barber-surgeon and game-changing scientific experiments, Kill or Cure? takes you behind the curtain of western medicine’s macabre history.
Explore our many treatment rooms with instruments that will make your skin crawl. Hear quack doctors spruiking dangerous cures from behind the interactive walls. Meet the bloodletting man and learn why veins were opened to restore health.
The Library’s extensive rare books collection reveals some of the powerful and enduring ideas from western medicine that have since been debunked, and those we take for granted today.”
Lots of fascinating, gory exhibits about bloodletting, leeches, plague and scurvy! It’s free and will be at the State Library’s Exhibition Galleries in Shakespeare Place, Sydney until January 2023.
And after you’ve visited the exhibition, if you want to learn even more about the weird and wonderful history of medicine, why not read (or re-read) Dr Huxley’s Bequest: A History of Medicine in Thirteen Objects?
