Il National Historical Museum of Health Art is located in the seventeenth-century wing of the Santo Spirito in Sassia Hospital in Rome. It is unique in its kind, and accurately documents the path that slowly brought medicine, surgery, and pharmacology from their original realm of magic to that of science. It was inaugurated in 1933.
In the rooms, medicine is presented over the centuries, from Imperial Rome to today, through objects, books, and instruments that served doctors of the past. The displayed material is divided into collections (Capparoni, Ovio, Solinas, Carbonelli).
Completing the museum are the reconstruction of an ancient pharmacy and laboratory and a rich library. Among the exhibited objects, visitors interested in the history of medicine can find detailed documentation not only of the surgical art but also of obstetrics and pharmacy, as well as of the diseases that affected people in the past. For the less specialized visitor, the objects speak the unique language of curiosity.
