Director of the Thackray Medical Museum

The Thackray Museum is one of those amazing places that manage to grab you and not let go – and I’m not only saying that because I run it! For anyone with even the tiniest interest in medicine or health, the Thackray is the place to go. “My” museum has everything from weird medicines to artificial limbs, from Roman surgery knives to endoscopy, and from public health acts to the MMR scare. Nobody can say that we’re a boring museum! 

The Thackray Museum is also the place that made me – a previously self-confessed culture geek – think about science, and how important science and scientific research are. I might not be a medical professional myself, but I can certainly see how much medical developments have changed our lives, and I can make my own contribution by encouraging more people to take an interest in science, or even become scientists themselves. And that is something that I am good at.

I always assumed that science wasn’t for me. Or maybe I wasn’t for science; the dislike seemed to be mutual! Chemistry, physics and maths to me consisted of impenetrable formulas that seemed to disappear into the clouds as soon as I thought “I’ve got it!”. My family’s career choices followed the more traditional gender boundaries: my father and brother were the engineer and the physicist, while my mother was a teacher. My interests were literature, languages, history and business; the latter more out of a sense of reality (“I need to find a job”) rather than out of love for the subject.

I was also quite a shy kid, and my parents probably never really expected that much of me. Nor did I. Strangely, and luckily, one person managed to change that. She was a private teacher who I had hoped might teach me maths, but she didn’t. She basically said, “go and do it yourself. I don’t know what you want from me, you can do it on your own”. She was right. I passed my maths finals with the highest score in that year.

How often does it still happen to us girls that we think the least of our own abilities?  

A work placement at the Wyoming State Museumin the U.S. during my university studies kicked off my love affair with museums and collections. Museums have this knack of telling you things about your own life through stories and objects from the past. I have always found industrial history particularly fascinating. In that respect, the Thackray Museum really has got it all: medical history that people are interested in (are you not interested in your body?), objects that talk about our industrial past (where else do you think that artificial limbs come from?), and it’s fun.

I firmly believe that everybody is open to learning. It’s not so much about “talent” than about encouraging someone to find their own way of learning. I think it is important that more girls are encouraged to take up science in school and beyond – and if my museum can help make it happen, that’ll make me proud.

Almut Gruner is Chief Executive of the Thackray Medical Museum. She is a member of the Museums Association, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and member of the Museum Management Group (Germany). The Thackray Museum is a partner in the S Factor, a new project led by UKRC.