Small, but perfectly formed

Abstract

If you are pondering what else to do in London during the Olympics, you might like to think about visiting the Florence Nightingale Museum, tucked away on the ground floor of St Thomas's Hospital, just over Westminster Bridge from the Houses of Parliament. For the usual entry fee, you can gain access not only to the main museum—which houses a wide range of exhibits associated with Florence Nightingale's life and work in the Crimea and her extraordinary impact on the modern history of nursing—but also to a new pocket exhibition entitled simply BONE. Medical exhibitions on single-themed ideas, like the recent blockbuster at the Wellcome Collection on the brain, seem to be thriving at the moment. But what is exceptional about this one is the number of intriguing items packed into a small space. Stacked Perspex cubes each contain an exhibit on the theme, either actually made of bone or associated with it as a material in some other significant way. So, for example, one of the exhibits is the shell of a pet tortoise known as Jimmy, from the hospital wards at Scutari. Another, a cookbook written by the great Victorian chef Alexis Soyer, who worked with Florence Nightingale to provide nutritious food for the troops in the Crimea. It lies in its box, opened at the page for a soup stock derived from the marrow of animal bones. Not all the items are related to Florence Nightingale, however. Most come from a wide range of other collections. When one first sees the room in which the exhibition stands, the dark space with its bright clear boxes seems diminutive and understated, but once you enter and engage with the thought behind the exhibition, time and space open up. Objects come from as far away as China—an exquisite pair of embroidered shoes for women who had undergone the torture-custom of foot-binding—and Mexico, an ornamented skull from the Day of the Dead. Exhibits range in date from prehistory to modernity: a stone-age antler-pick whose many tiny flint markings reveal the painstaking human effort by which it was fashioned; a modern metal hip replacement; a pair of mediaeval bone ice-skates; artist Melanie Roseveare's Victorian-inspired modern gothic bone china. Every object holds its stories, and sits quietly with its potential in its box. I found myself pondering the aperture in the handle of the amputation saw, sensing the grip of the bones of a vanished hand which once grasped it, or that which turned the trepanning tool, imagining the sound of these objects on bone, and wondering when and where they were used. A sense of relief followed, at being invited to contemplate the most ordinary and unregarded use of bone in the next box—as garden fertiliser. The curators, Simon Gould and Rhiannon Armstrong, have set every object silently, with only a number as identification: no long captions. One passes round the room recognising some things, puzzling over others, occasionally reaching for the beautifully designed catalogue which explains them all, but grateful for the uncluttered simplicity of the massed display. There are low boxes for children to peer into (jelly beans) and tall ones for adults, specimens of sarcoma and rickets to wince at and feel for, and beautiful silver-gelatin photographs by the artist Jane Wildgoose which initially intrigue and then ravish. A rolling programme of artists-in-residence is planned for the duration of the exhibition, each of whom has been invited to add something bony to the display, so a diminishing number of boxes remain empty to await new objects. Every visitor will find something interesting or diverting. For me, perhaps the most poignant is the exquisitely revealing early X-ray of a woman in a whalebone corset, who probably survived the rearrangement of her innards caused by tight-lacing, but died from exposure to radiation.