What the Victorians did for us. Health and hygiene.

Adam Hart-Davis looks at innovations in the world of surgery and medicine made during the Victorian era. In the Old Operating Theatre (once part of St. Thomas's Hospital) curator Stuart Caine explains how operations such as amputation of a leg would be carried out before an audience of students. Hart-Davis talks about the introduction of antiseptic, and, in a modern operating theatre, anaesthesia and the discovery of applying an electric voltage to restart the heart. Roxanne Fea of the British Dental Association shows us some Victorian false teeth, probably taken from dead soldiers and bedded in ivory. In a recreation of a Victorian chemist Hart-Davis buys a pennyworth of opium, used for pain relief. He then talks of the chemical revolution of the Victorians who created the first ever synthetic drugs, showing us willow bark from which salicyclic acid was extracted and eventually formed into aspirin tablets. (Note: some of this footage may be found in longer version 'What The Victorians Did For Us - Social Progress'.)