It was a beautiful day and a perfect day to have lunch in the garden of Burgh House, a Queen Anne mansion built in 1704, situated in one of my favorite neighborhoods of London, Hampstead.
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| The house is free to enter and is filled with art. This is the music room. |
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| The Library |
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| Art work by John Burningham, Hampstead resident, for the children's novel Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang. |
Today we stopped into the Jack the Ripper Museum which tells the story of the notorious serial killer who murdered and mutilated anywhere from five to eleven or more women in the impoverished district of Whitechapel in East London in 1888. The museum, housed in an an old building in Whitechapel, replete with squeaking floor boards and small ramshackle rooms, transported us back in time to the days when fear ruled the gas-lit alleys of Whitechapel's crowded slums.
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| Catherine Eddowes, the fourth victim, discovered by Police Constable Watkins on his regular night patrol. |
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| Jack the Ripper's Sitting Room, Imagined. It has been speculated that Jack was a doctor, artist or member of the Royal family. |
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| Jack the Ripper's Sitting Room, Imagined. His identify remains a mystery. Some have speculated that Jack was Queen Victoria's surgeon or her grandson. |
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| The Police Station |
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| A Victim's Bedroom, Imagined |
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| Mary Jane Kelly from Limerick, Ireland Said to be the last of Jack's victims. She died at age 25 years. Shortly before her death, she was heard singing the song, "A violet plucked from mother's grave." |
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| A Victorian stain glass window from the Whitechapel mortuary where the victims' bodies were brought. |
Today I went to my first London's St. Patrick's Day parade and it lasted an hour or so, consisting mostly of different Irish social and athletic groups in London. There were a lot of people in green wigs and shamrock glasses. The parade ended at Trafalgar Square, which was packed with well-behaved revelers. I took a lot of photographs which I hoped to post here, but unfortunately my memory card became corrupted, and I lost them all. What a shame. I had a lot fun, and there were some real characters there.
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| Walking Sticks that belonged to Charles Darwin |
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| More than 500 votive offerings ended up in Wellcome's collection. These terracotta Etruscan or Etrusco-Campanian votives on display are from 4th to 2nd century BC. |
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| A doctor's signboard with human teeth from China, possible 19th century |
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| Napoleon Bonaparte's Toothbrush! |
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| A shrunken Head from the Amazon Rainforest |
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| A lock of hair said to have belonged to "Mad" King George III who lived 1760 to 1820 Scientific tests have revealed high concentration of arsenic which may have explained his madness. |
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| Acupuncture Figure from Japan 17th century |
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| Nkisi, a container for spiritual forces, from the Congo circa 1900 |
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| A guillotine blade used during the French Revolution. The last execution by guillotine in Europe took place in 1977 in Marseille, France. |
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| An oil portrait of Henry Wellcome |
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| An oil painting of William Prince in Druidic costume. An eccentric physician and surgeon from Wales, he opposed marriage, vaccination vivisection, law, government and orthodox religion. He is best known for introducing cremation to Britain in the late 1800s. |
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| Henry Wellcome collected hundreds of paintings including this 18th century painting of a man stabbing a woman. who we're told was saved by praying to the Virgin Mary. |
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| Henry Wellcome amassed over 4,000 surgical instruments including many amputation saws and obstetrical forceps. Many of these were used before anesthetics were developed. |
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| Artwork in paper depicting a microbial community |
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| A display about bacteria and virsuses. |
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This prosthetic leg belonged to a man in 2010 injured in Afghanistan. |
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| Our genetic code or genome is the blueprint of life. |
