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 led medicine, surgery and pharmacology from the original realm of magic to the scientific one. It was inaugurated in 1933.
In the rooms, medicine throughout the centuries is presented, from Imperial Rome to the present day, through objects, books, instruments that were used by doctors of the past. The exhibited material is divided into collections (Capparoni, Ovio, Solinas, Carbonelli).
The museum is completed by the reconstruction of an ancient pharmacy and laboratory and a rich library. Among the displayed objects, visitors interested in the history of medicine can find detailed documentation not only of surgical art but also of obstetric and pharmaceutical art, as well as of the diseases that afflicted humans in the past. For the less specialized visitor, the objects speak the unique language of curiosity.
