Time Travelling in the Operating Theatre
For those of us with no medical training probably the only time we will see the inside of an operating theatre is as a patient.
We have a general idea of the space – perhaps something like the picture above – yet the performance of the operation, the purpose of the machinery and instruments, and the different roles of the many masked figures working within remain mysteries. The Time Travelling Operating Theatre invites audiences to get to know the operating theatre better, to meet the people who work within them and to find out how remarkably the space of surgery has changed over the last century.
Our journey begins in 1884 with an operation carried out not in an operating theatre as we might imagine it, but in the patient’s own home. By the early twentieth-century surgery was increasingly performed in purpose built theatres in hospitals but before this time it was common for surgeons to operate in their practices or in patients’ own houses. Late nineteenth-century surgical manuals were full of advice for making a domestic space suitably surgical, with rooms needing to be misted with sulphur or carbolic in order to rid the space of any ‘putrefactive organisms’.[1]
One hundred years later, in 1984, and the situation had changed dramatically. By that time surgery was of course confined to specialist operating theatres in hospitals, however these spaces were constantly changing and adapting to new ways of doing surgery. The 1980s saw the spread of a new way of performing operations through so-called ‘keyhole surgery’. The surgeon no longer needed to make a large incision into the patient’s body and could instead operate using an endoscope while watching the progress of the instruments on a television screen. This new surgery added yet more machinery to the operating theatre and reshaped the roles of many figures within surgical teams.
We might not expect to see much change in only thirty years, however the operating theatre has changed again since 1984. Rapid social, cultural and technological change continues to re-shape the spaces, team dynamics, and ethical climate of surgery today. Our present day operating theatre is a world away from the situation in 1884 and it continues to evolve and adapt. With so much change in the location, character, technology and people in the operating theatre taking place over the last 130 years, the Time Travelling Operating Theatre presents an opportunity to explore these hidden spaces, learn from this past, and inform the future.
[1] Stephen Smith, Manual of the Principles and Practice of Operative Surgery (Boston, New York and Cambridge, 1884).
