On this day in 1631 the Court decided that a separate anatomy room should be built. The entry in the Court minute book reads:
Also this Court taking notice of the lack of a private dissection room for anatomical employment and that hitherto the bodies have been a great annoyance to the tables, dresser boards and utensils in the upper kitchen by reason of the blood, filth and entrails of those anatomies and for the better accommodating of these anatomical affairs and preserving the kitchen to its own proper use, We now order that there shall be a fair room built over the great staircase next the backyard to be employed only for dissection of private anatomies to the value of £10.10.00 whereof to be paid out of the stock of the yeomanry and the other £30 out of the stock of this house.
In 1633 it was decided that the room should be an anatomy theatre and it was designed by the King’s Architect, Inigo Jones, and opened in 1638. It was only the third such purpose-built structure in western Europe, following Padua (1594) and Leiden (1597). Serving its purpose well for a century until the surgeons’ departure from the Company in 1745, it became redundant and was demolished in 1784 — an irreplaceable loss to English architecture.
The Court minutes do not provide much information about the building process but the Account book for the period names gives the names of individual craftsmen and labourers, together for how much they were paid for digging and laying the foundations, plumbing, carpentry, stonework etc and the costs of materials and tools. These were all transcribed by Susannah Bach for her dissertation which is available in the Company's Library (see Further Reading below).
Image to left: William Cheselden giving an anatomical demonstration to six spectators in the anatomy-theatre of the Barber-Surgeons' Company, London. Oil painting, ca. 1730/1740. From Wellcome Library no. 47339i
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Top left: William Cheselden giving an anatomical demonstration to six spectators in the anatomy-theatre of the Barber-Surgeons' Company, London. Oil painting, ca. 1730/1740.
Left: Elevation (left) and section (right) drawings of the Barber Surgeons’ Anatomy Theatre. The original drawings are held by Worcester College, Oxford and the Guildhall Library respectively.
Middle: Interior plans of the Barber Surgeons’ Anatomy Theatre held by Worcester College, Oxford.
Right: Portrait of the architect Inigo Jones (1573-1652), after the original by Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641). On display in the Reception Room.
Below: An artist's impression of Barber-Surgeons' Hall showing the location of the Anatomy Theatre by Peter Jackson.
Further Reading
“Inigo Jones and the Theatre of Death” by A J B Missen (Fifth Jessie Dobson Lecture, 1997) available to read online here
“Inigo Jones” by Robin Price available to read online here
“The Barber-Surgeons’ Anatomy Theatre” by Susannah Bach (1999) available to read in the Barbers’ Library.
Chapter on ‘The Anatomy Theatre’ by John Missen and Dennis Hill in “The Company of Barbers and Surgeons” edited by Ian Burn (2000) available to read in the Barbers’ Library.