A museum in your hand 

Last year Surgeons’ Hall Museums welcomed more than 100,000 visitors to the galleries. The museums also have a sizable global online audience and College Members and Fellows span from across the globe. As such the museums have long wished to make its collections more accessible to those who have not yet visited and to those visiting who might face limitations such as a language barrier. 

We are delighted to announce that this is now a reality, as we have been working alongside ArtUK to join the Bloomberg Connects community to launch a Surgeons’ Hall Museums app experience.

Using the Bloomberg app, you can access a range of content, wherever you are in the world, either to add to your experience when viewing the gallery in person or to enjoy from the comfort of your own home. The free-to-access app is designed to remove barriers related to experiencing arts and culture by containing various built-in accessibility features, including voiceover, captions and audio transcripts, image zoom and font size adjustment. All content can be translated into 37 languages. 

Surgeons’ Hall Museums is now able to exhibit its award-winning galleries online and the app will include a full tour of the History of Surgery galleries with highlighted objects and curated content. These galleries take the visitor on a journey of development from the College’s founding in 1505 to the discovery of antiseptic technique in the late 19th century. They cover subjects such as the barber surgeon, the growth of medical teaching in Edinburgh, bodysnatching, Burke and Hare and groundbreaking developments in anaesthesia and aseptic surgery. They also highlight the history of dentistry, examining the early attempts to ‘cure the tooth’, the various traditional methods of tooth removal and the battle to specialise and regulate dentistry. The app content currently includes interpretation from more than 15 of the museums’ cases and nearly 100 objects in the History of Surgery galleries alone. 

The app also offers several enhancements to an in-person visit, such as object highlights and past exhibitions, which are no longer on display. This includes a guide to the now-closed but extremely popular temporary exhibition on midwifery, co-curated by the College Archivist, Dr Jacqueline Cahif. 

The museums hope to continue to add new temporary exhibitions each year. The current temporary exhibition, which looks at one of medicine’s oldest specialties, ophthalmology, will soon be available on the app. This exhibit uncovers the development of the specialty from oculist to ophthalmologist and explores the anatomy of the eye, while providing fun facts and strange fiction about one of the most complex areas of the human body. 

The advantage of the app is that the museums can continue to develop content and hope to follow this launch with tours of the Body Voyager and Wohl Pathology galleries. The latter house one of the largest and most historic pathology collections in the world. The galleries are set in the historic Playfair Building and still retain the original character of the 1832 design. Here, visitors can explore the human body by examining a range of diseases and the 11 specialty fields of surgery recognised by the College. Key themes in this gallery are the history of preservation, individual collectors and the impact of war in the development of surgery. In contrast, the Body Voyager galleries explore more modern developments, depicting the impact of technology on surgical development, including robots and computer-assisted techniques. 

In the future the museums plan to add further accessible content such as British Sign Language tours of the museums and further descriptive audio, focusing on its objects. It is also looking at introducing a tour aimed at children to help younger visitors engage more with the collection.

The app will also signpost remote users to the online museums shop and virtual events, keeping us all connected. We look forward to welcoming you there and to creating unique content for all to enjoy. 

Find out more about the app here.