Medicine & Health

The Roman bath house is a reminder that the standard of hygiene and physical health brought by the Roman army was far above any achieved in the next millennium and beyond. The hospital of the Roman fortress, which will have been a large aisled building, has not been discovered, but such a building was a normal component of a fortress at this time.

From the Saxon and Norman periods the insanitary conditions of townspeople are illustrated at Exeter, as elsewhere. Like all medieval towns, Exeter had hospitals in the Middle Ages, their treatment usually more spiritual than medical. Analysis of skeletons of the 15th and 16th centuries shows that, even then, more than half the population died before reaching adult age. Late medieval and Tudor evidence of medical practice includes the use of the still for distilling potions, the presence of flasks used in examining patients’ urine and jars to hold wet and dry drugs.

Exeter’s part in the early stages of the growth of modern medicine includes the work of Dr William Musgrave, an early figure in the study of arthritis, and the establishment of the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital, the second English hospital in the modern sense to be established outside London.

Improvements in the city’s health were slow to develop in Georgian times, and the great majority of citizens still lacked a clean water supply or anything approaching proper sanitation in the early 19th century. The squalor of poor people’s lives is strikingly recorded in a series of Exeter engravings. The devastating outbreak of cholera which killed many in the 1830s was recorded by Dr Thomas Shapter, a heroic figure. Although he did not understand the source of the disease, his mapping of its occurrence was very innovative.

Finally, the museum holds one relic of the most recent development in health care - the model of the new Wonford Hospital.