— specimen no. i —

Medicine wasn’t always this civilized.

Before modern medicine came bloodletting, corpse remedies, poisonous pigments, strange instruments, and cures more dangerous than the diseases themselves.

Leech House opens the cabinet on the forgotten, unsettling, and sometimes absurd history of how humanity tried to heal itself.

Enter the Oddities

About Leech House

Plate I · Leech jar, Essex type · Wellcome Collection · CC BY 4.0 · toned

from the collection

The Oddities

The Doctors’ Riot of 1788: When New York Rioted Over a Dead Woman’s Arm

In April 1788, the United States was barely a country. The Constitution wasn’t even ratified yet. And in New York City, thousands of people were…
Read the entry →: The Doctors’ Riot of 1788: When New York Rioted Over a Dead Woman’s Arm
Body Snatchers: Why Doctors Paid People to Dig Up the Dead

Imagine burying someone you love, then going back the next morning to find the grave disturbed and the coffin empty. For people in 1700s and…
Read the entry →: Body Snatchers: Why Doctors Paid People to Dig Up the Dead
Why Did Plague Doctors Wear Beaked Masks? The Strange Truth Behind the Costume

A long black coat. A wide hat. Glass eyes. And that beak. The plague doctor might be the creepiest outfit in all of medical history.…
Read the entry →: Why Did Plague Doctors Wear Beaked Masks? The Strange Truth Behind the Costume

Browse every oddity

plates & engravings

The Archive

Public-domain oddities from the history of medicine, curated and captioned.

The Wound Man

A sixteenth-century surgical diagram cataloguing wounds, injuries and their possible treatments.

Wellcome Collection
The Extraction of the Stone of Madness

A satirical surgical scene based on the belief that madness could be cured by removing a stone from the head.

Wellcome Collection
Robert Liston’s First Ether Operation

Robert Liston performs one of England’s earliest public operations using ether anaesthesia in December 1846.

Wellcome Collection