1590 building housed health pioneers
Feeling off-colour? Perhaps you should make an appointment with your barber. That’s how it used to be in the Middle Ages, when barbers were not mere purveyors of short-back-and-sides and something for the weekend, but medical men. They could amputate a limb with the same dexterity used to lop an inch off your fringe. So the wise customer always made exactly clear what it was that needed trimming.
And it was the work of the York Gild of Barber-Surgeons that was the inspiration for York Medical Society. Founded by seven physicians in 1832 for “the purpose of promoting and diffusing medical knowledge,” it has been doing just that ever since.
Info
Address 23 Stonegate, York YO1 8AW, +44 (0)1904 849821, www.yorkmedsoc.org, ymsenquiries@yahoo.co.uk | Public Transport 6-minute walk from Bootham Row car park. Closest bus stop: Exhibition Square | Tip A few doors down from the Medical Society are Kennedy’s, a modern bar run by locals, and a classic old pub, the Punch Bowl, both worth a visit.
The society’s records provide remarkable insight into medical advances and social change through the decades. In 1842, a paper entitled “A Plan of Political Medicine” foretold the establishment of the National Health Service, more than 100 years later. Equally fascinating are the reports on lectures given to the society. These underline York’s status as a pioneer in mental health: in 1796, the Retreat, on Heslington Road, was founded to offer humane treatment for those with “disordered states of the mind.”
York Medical Society has retained strong links with the city’s medical school, first established in 1834 and now split between university campuses in York and Hull. Since 1944, the society’s HQ has been a splendid timber-framed house on Stonegate. Most of the property dates from Elizabethan times, while the low and narrow wing to the left of its entrance, known in early deeds as Little Paradise, is much earlier in origin. A library was added in 1804 – although the priceless medical tomes it once contained have been bundled off to York University for safekeeping.
The property is not open to the public, but hosts regular exhibitions which are. And if you can’t wait for one, the rooms are available for hire at remarkably reasonable rates.
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