Rob’s 'Medical Madness' Walking Tour

Let us traverse the London streets of Marylebone, Fitzrovia and Bloomsbury in search of those places and people who have made our capital city a nest of disease and contamination, but also a metropolis of healing and good health.

Our start point is St. Andrew’s Place near the medicinal garden of the Royal College of Physicians (Nearest tube stations are Great Portland Street and Regent’s Park).

• The hangouts of healers and hoaxers around one of our best known medical streets, those characters who made medical history in London for the greater worldwide good, or dangerously for deception and even death with their ‘quackery’ and queasy cures.

• A ‘tongue in cheek’ look at the royals and high ranking government ministers, and whether they were fit to rule us, either physically, mentally or morally - and whether they were well enough to take charge of our nation at all!

• The real reason for those expressions ‘dutch courage’, ‘one for the road’ and ‘on the wagon’, and medicine's long and complex relationship between getting a patient back on their feet and boozing!

• Medicine and sexuality, and undress the often unsavoury tales of the relationship between the medical profession and sex and sexology, as we take a walk on the wide side to uncover the innovation from practitioners who would liberate people from centuries of intolerance.

• Medicine at the Movies! It’s lights, scalpel, action as we check out our obsession with the silver screen and tragic, comic, romance, scandal and intrigue in fiction.

Our end point is the Welcome Collection at 183 Euston Road NW1 2BE, where I shall introduce you to the museum highlights and any exhibitions. This space has an excellent cafe, as well as restrooms.