Contemporary representations of surgical operations in Britain in the eighteenth century are rare. A recently recovered oil painting, stolen from the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1983, provides a unique visual record of the practice of surgery in Britain in the mid-1700s.

Dawn’s talk challenges research from the 1960s and 1970s, published in the Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, which set the scene in the men’s operating theatre of St Thomas’s Hospital, London in the 1770s.

Through new research into the key figures depicted and contemporary biographical accounts: the patient, medical men and onlookers are identified as well as the hospital setting. The paper brings new information to bear on the circumstances surrounding, arguably, the most famous leg amputation of the century.

Dawn Kemp is Director of Museums and Special Collections at the Royal College of Surgeons of England. She was Project Director and co-curator of the redesigned Hunterian Museum which opened at the Royal College of Surgeons of England in May 2023.

She was previously Curator/Manager of the National Museums of Scotland’s National Museum of Flight and, for seven years, the Director of Heritage of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, which holds Scotland’s largest medical collection.  She was General Manager of the Cheslea Physic Garden from 2009 to 2012, Director of the Old Operating Museum and Herb Garrett, 2014-16, and Acting Director of the Freud Museum London, 2013/14, where she curated the exhibition and public events season: Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors and curated the re-display of the Anna Freud Room.

She has curated over 15 major exhibitions including: Anatomy Acts (co-curated with Professor Andrew Patrizio), which was nominated in 2007 for the Gulbenkian Prize, the UK’s largest museums and galleries award.

She is the author and editor of several books related to the history of medicine including: Anatomy Acts: How WeCome to Know Ourselves (winner of the Society of Authors and Royal Society of Medicine’s Medical Book of the Year 2007); Conan Doyle and Joseph Bell; the Real Sherlock Holmes and Surgeons Hall: A Museum Anthology.

She was Chair of the Scotland & Medicine: Collections & Connections partnership from 2004 to 2009 and is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and the Hunterian Society.

Refunds, minus a £5 admin fee (per ticket), will be offered, upon request, to anyone cancelling for any reason up to six working days before an event.  After this time, no refunds are available.