Cecil Symons (1921-1987) was a physician and cardiologist at the Royal Free Hospital, Hampstead, London from 1961-87. He was also a collector of medical instruments, principally from the Georgian era. These are now displayed in the foyer to the Seligman Theatre at the Royal College of Physicians.
Cecil Symons' approach to collecting and the pleasure and inspiration he derived from it is best described in his opening to the Samuel Gee Lecture, which he gave at the College in 1981, entitled 'Invalids in the Georgian Era':
I am not a medical historian but someone who became interested in the Georgian era because of the collection which I have made over the years of contemporary medical instruments. The acquisition of articles may become a passion and arouse interest far beyond the particular inanimate piece collected. To see, for example, an early medicine spoon, inevitably gives rise to thoughts of who used it and how and why... The Georgians were very much aware of self-care and comfort, and even in sickness their inherent sense of good design remained evident.
Despite his obvious enthusiasm for the Georgians, however, Cecil Symons did not confine himself to one era or one country, so both Roman and Chinese medicine are represented in the collection.
The Georgian era began in 1714 and ended in 1837 following the reign of William IV, brother of George IV. Known variously as the Age of Reason, Elegance, Romanticism or Enlightenment, stability was the keynote of the period. 'Medicine', as both a means of treatment and self-care, received much attention and the vigorous cartoons and illustrations by artists of the time such as Hogarth, Gillray, Cruikshank and Rowlandson told Dr Symons much about medical practice in that rumbustious age and about the personalities and preoccupations of both practitioners and patients.
Ill as he was to become, George III always practised self-care and his idiosyncracies were regarded with tolerance and affection. Gillray showed him as Temperance enjoying a frugal meal, thus setting an example to all at a time when over-eating and drinking, with obesity and gout as a consequence, were prevalent: George is pictured eating a boiled egg whilst his wife Charlotte is devouring greens. In contrast, Gillray showed his son, George, Prince of Wales, as a Voluptuary under the horrors of digestion: the Prince's concern with his health is illustrated by a vegetable draught, a pot of ointment for piles, another for bad breath and a chamber pot full of urine.
Hogarth depicted poverty and alcoholism in Gin Lane whilst, in contrast, Rowlandson illustrated the pleasures of Bath for the better off - including those who were sick and disabled. Nurses, as such, had not yet been invented. Elderly women, usually addicted to the bottle, filled the role; Rowlandson depicted one about to administer an enema while another, in a drunken stupor, was soon to have the house on fire.
From the literature of the period Cecil Symons deduced that people were frightened of illness - it was the great unknown. He noted that, in the Diary of a Country Parson 1758-1803, James Woodforde describes only injury. He gives, for example, details of the drawing of a tooth and describes a death, but there is almost no reference to disease. The Symons collection is a useful adjunct to medical history in that it provides so much evidence of how people cared for themselves at that time.
Motivated by a deep interest in France, Cecil Symons founded the Société Clinique Française, based at the Dispensaire Française in London, and initiated exchange visits between the Société and the Hertford British Hospital in Paris. In 1987 he was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre du Mérite. The difference between the English and French approach to sickness and health in the eighteenth and nineteeth centuries particularly fascinated him. Whilst the invention of the stethoscope by Laennec in 1819 was the high point of that period of medicine in France, it was the profusion of items relating to infants and motherhood, such as feeding spoons, cups and nipple shields - all of which are represented in the collection - which was of special interest to Dr Symons and prompted him to study the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and relate it to art.
On a College visit to Singapore in 1986, a year before he died, Cecil Symons told the then Treasurer, the late Sir Anthony Dawson, about his collection and that he would like the College to house it. However, there was no suitable site - until the new extension was built. The architect of the College, Sir Denys Lasdun, having seen items from the collection several years earlier and remembered particularly the nipple shields ('guards' as he called them), designed the present exhibition space specifically to house the Symons Collection and received the enthusiastic support of Dr Norman Jones (Treasurer at the College 1994-96).