Tommaso Campailla Medical Museum in Modica
The “Tommaso Campailla” Medical Museum of Modica is located inside an ancient building of the seventeenth century built to house the first hospital in the city, the “Santa Maria della Pietà” hospital, which later became Campailla Hospital . The hospital was a center of primary importance for the treatment of syphilis until the 1940s, only after the discovery of penicillin and its use for the treatment of the disease did it gradually decline until its definitive closure in the 1970s.
The museum is divided into four exhibition rooms: the Room of the Barrels, the Medical Office, the Anatomical Theater and the Museum of Medicine.
The Room of the Barrels is the oldest and most precious part of everything the path, the place where syphilitics were subjected to the benefits of the treatment. Of particular interest are the three mercurial stoves, commonly called "barrels", where the patient had to enter by sitting on a stool and through two small holes the patient was monitored and inserted the dose of cinnabar and incense into the burning brazier contained in the barrel, so that the fumigations exhaled the healing substance into the air; the Doctor's Office , furnished in a nineteenth-century style; the Anatomical Theater , where presumably the students or doctors intent on seeing the dead body dissected were located; the Museum of Medicine which houses a precious collection of medical and surgical instruments from the 19th and 20th centuries.
Some photographic evidence of the disease is exhibited along the route.
