In which we visit the science museum

Saturday we decided to brave another museum, this time the London Science Museum, and, this time, we were prepared for our troglodyte walk through the tunnel to the museum entrance. After spending an entire day at the Natural History Museum, and finding that we'd only managed to cover a third of it, I was a bit apprehensive about the Science Museum, which, as it turned out, was a fair bit smaller than Natural History, and a good thing too.

We started with a room that detailed the history of the steam engine, full of both scale models and actual historic steam engines, with one massive running machine in the middle, dripping water and sending off puffs of steam. Several of the machines that we saw were in use for over a century, which seems pretty impressive in our disposable economy. Then it was off through the "Making the Modern World Exhibit," which was either

• arranged according to some schema that made sense to the organizers at the time it was set up, or
• arranged in accordance with some writings of the French philosopher Jean d'Alembert.

It wasn't clear to what the principle was, though I'm fairly confident that it wasn't chronological. In any case, the room was fairly interesting, if somewhat crowded. We finished off the ground floor, or at least as much of it as we were going to see, with an exhibition of flight, both airplane and space. 

Up the elevator we went to the third floor, where we discovered that we had entered some weird nothingness space in the museum. On the plus side, there were definitely not any crowds there. On the minus side, there were also not any exhibits there. A bit of poking led us to a big open area with tables and a stand in the corner selling smoothies, so we plopped ourselves down at an open table and I went off on a quest to find a drinking fountain and fill our water bottles. Reasoning that drinking fountains in museums tend to occur in concert with bathrooms, I used the handy map hanging on the wall to figure out where the nearest bathrooms were. I soon discovered that the lovely maps that were hanging all over the museum left off one important detail—walls, or at least internal walls. So after walking the length of the big room I discovered that the bathrooms that I wanted were on the other side of the wall, and that all of the doors in that particular wall were exit only from the other side. Fortunately, someone had failed to properly shut the door, and so I managed to slip through and, avoiding the many small children rattling around the room, make it to the bathroom and, since there was no drinking fountain, fill the water bottles at the sink. (I later discovered that many of the bathrooms in the museum had big red signs up warning us not to drink the water from the tap. We're still alive though, so I'm going to assume that whatever we drank was benign.)

We spent most of the afternoon in a variety of medical exhibits, beginning with a small room full of historical veterinary tools. Let's just say that I'm extremely glad that I wasn't a 19th century horse. From there we headed to a giant winding exhibit on the history of modern medicine, beginning with the Babylonians and Egyptians and progressing from there through the Greeks and Romans all the way up through modern times. I was alternately amazed at what the ancients had managed to figure out, and shocked that anyone managed to live long enough to reproduce back then. We saw some medieval books of herbal cures, various wooden statues of saints that were supposed to offer some protection against various diseases, terra cotta votives that were supposed to be offered as thanks for healing at the Temple of Asclepius, various set ups for treating diabetes, and much more.

From there we headed down the stairs to a room of life size dioramas, depicting the state of medical treatment over the last couple of centuries. (Apparently the British National Heath Service is very fond of a sort of sickly green on the walls of hospital rooms. I'm not sure whether this is because the color is so hideous that patients have an additional incentive to get better quickly.) Then on to the next floor down, and still more medical equipment, including an iron lung, which my kids generally agreed seemed barbaric. 

Then, on to an exhibit on energy, and one on the history of agriculture. It appears that in ancient China and India they had no need of oxen to pull the plow because they had women. Maybe the men were doing the laundry and tending the children, but I somehow doubt it. Finally, we headed back down through the second half of the steam engine exhibit, and back to the flat.