Alexander Fleming, St Barts, Pains of Youth, Mixed Up North

[slemslempike]

Last week I was in London seeing people, plays and museums.

The Alexander Fleming Museum is the very laboratory where he discovered penicillin (after the fungus group so-named because it looks like a penis! Oh, and before it got called that he referred to it as "mould juice"). It's a very small room off a winding tiled staircase in a corner of St Mary's Hospital near Paddington. You have to follow slightly difficult signs through the building to a waiting room and ring a surprisingly loud bell for a volunteer to come and show you around. The lab is set up as if it were still the 1920s, with some of his actual equipment, and some like what he would have used. They have a mock-up of The petri dish (the original is in the British Museum), AND a test tube that used to have Winston Churchill's tears. (Churchill had conjunctivitis and contacted Fleming because it wasn't clearing up, and the lab assistant who took the sample just kept it).

The tears thing cropped up again because Fleming's first discovery was lysozyme, which he discovered because he had a cold and accidentally snotted onto a dish. Then he needed more samples of tears, so he qould get visitors to the lab to let him squeeze lemon juice into their eyes. (The then-Duchess of York, later Queen Mother was given an onion to hold to take part, and apparently always thought this was how he'd discovered penicillin.) Then he ran out of visitors/victims and starting paying the lab assistants to let him squirt juice in their eyes instead. I am tempted to start appending that to my covering letters - "I have a full clean driving licence and am prepared to have fluids squirted into my membranes in the name of science".

The story of discovering penicillin is pretty cool, and the museum have decided to play it up. They immortalise the apparent words of discovery: "that's funny". They tell you with great deliberation in the tour, and repeat it in the exhibition at the end. That's pretty good - there's a video that reveals that Fleming had VAMPIRE EYES, and a whole load of information about the making of penicillin, and all the stories people made up about the discovery and his life, like saving Winston Churchill's life twice, and that the discovery happened when the Luftwaffe bombed London and the samples got mixed up. Oh, and a true thing that when the British Army only had limited amounts of penicillin in WW2, they prioritised men with syphillis not with war wounds. And how cool is Fleming's second wife, Amalia Koutsouri-Vourekas?

We walked down Fleet Street and found where Prince Henry's Room and the Twinings Museum are, but both were sadly unavailable. Twinings had a meeting going on in it. Prince Henry's Room is apparently in the corner of a private office, and they had a polite sign saying it was not possible to visit it that day. But now I know where it is, though I think I will have to wait for someone else to be free during the day as I'm not brave enough to investigate that on my own. We did however find the St Barts Hospital Museum. I did not like this as much as the Royal London hospital museum, but it was pretty interesting. It was founded in 1123, and it hadn't occured to me before that the dissolution of the monastaries would also affect hospitals because that's where they were. I liked a huge old chest with three keyholes to prevent embezzlement because each person needed to be present. There is also a beautiful staircase that is decorated by Hogarth, because he'd heard that they were going to use Italian artists and was Outraged. There was a display of pictures of people's ailments and deformities, which was pretty cool, and lots of cases of random instruments.

We then went to see Pains of Youth. This is about medical students and it is weird. Katie Mitchell directed it, and there was dancing, and stilted scene changes. We were sitting at the top side of the Cottesloe, so lots of neck-cricking. It wasn't too bad, except that the part of the stage we couldn't see was the bed where girls sometimes kissed, which was not the part I would have chosen to miss. There was a horrid man, and he seduced the maid and turned her into a prostitute, I think? And then Dizzy (who is a countess) decided she wanted to have a go at that too, but instead she killed herself. At one point one of the students tied another one to the couch by her hair.

Afterwards chiasmata went back to Oxford and I walked over to Wilton's Music Hall to see Mixed Up North and, despite the best efforts of the district line, nerdcakes. Wilton's Music Hall is the last remaining music hall in London, and it's mostly derelict but rather beautiful. I curled up on a sofa in their bar and drank ginger beer until Sarah arrived and we went into the hall. I was slightly confused at first because the floor was covered with a basketball court and I thought surely that was never a feature of ye olde music hall. The play had been in Lancaster the week before, and I was feeling a little irritated that I'd come down to London to see it instead, but it was a much better venue to see it in (and it was with Sarah who is brilliantly enthusiastic about all things Northern). We were also in an audience that was almost entirely schoolchildren who were wonderfully engaged in the play - laughing uproariously everytime someone said "motherfucker", gasping when people said "paki" and cheering when someone finally stood up for herself and told Kylie to get fucked.

The play is about a youth group putting on a play, and so the plastic chair seating got us involved much more - we were being friends of the director come to see the dress rehearsal, and the actors addressed us and mingled around a lot. At one point I got some cake. It was one of those where the play starts gradually from a few people on "stage" messing around. (Schoolgirls next to me to their teacher - "miss, miss, what's going on? Has it started now? Are they acting, miss?") It was about social community work efforts to rebuild a community and strengthen multi-racial cohesion in Burnley following the 2001 "disturbances" (the council won't let them say riots). Celia Imrie is the main community worker in charge of the group (her accent slipped occasionally, I thought), and trying to keep things together when the kids are arguing and storming off and refusing to be in it if their girlfriends can't watch. Along the way the characters are invited to tell their stories to us, about growing up in Burnley and what it means. The main character storms out so the second half is a Q&A with a mutli-racial couple, which brings some criticism from one of the other workers who wants to know why that's always held up as an ideal, instead of saying that the Asian community might have something to offer on its own. And a council worker interrupts because there are disagreements about what it's appropriate to talk about in front of an open audience, older (mostly Asian) men grooming young girls, drug problems and violence, and why they're angry about being expected to shut up to "avoid playing into the hands of the BNP". Really, really good.

Comments

[yiskah.livejournal.com]

OMG PENIS-CILLIN! This is my new favourite fact. Thank you!

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

I know how cool! The tour guide was quietly smirking when he said it, and amused that one of its main uses was for STDs.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

They were way down the list, actually. At least at first. Because you could treat gonorrhoea effectively with sulphonamides by WWII, and syphilis with salvarsan (though this took ages).

Oh dear yes, there are all sorts of urban myths about Fleming and the discovery of penicillin: I am rather on the 'Florey/Chain/Heatley actually putting in the slog to make it effectively usable FTW' side.

[khalinche.livejournal.com]

Mine too!