Poo-ruse the POO! Exhibition at Thackray Museum of Medicine Leeds

National World - LocalTV

How much do you know about poo?! Designed for children (and their curious grown-ups), POO! at Thackray Museum of Medicine transforms toilet talk into science fun, turning what can be seen as a taboo topic into a more interactive learning adventure.

Transcript

00:00Really the thing that would grab people's attention as they stepped in through the door,

00:04right in the middle of the room, over there, under a dramatic spotlight, you can see an orb of human poo.

00:10I'm Jack Gann, and I'm the curator here at Sacré Museum of Medicine.

00:16Poo is a fun, interactive, playful exploration of everything kids ever wanted to know about poo

00:24but might have been a little bit embarrassed to ask.

00:26So there's things to touch, there's things to smell, there's literal lifting the lid,

00:31as you can kind of see on the wall behind me, on people's deepest, darkest, stinkiest questions.

00:37The challenge with putting something like this together is to juggle appealing to kids

00:43because it's kind of a silly subject, it's obviously something that there's quite a lot of humour in,

00:48but then this is potentially a subject that has some quite serious angles to it as well.

00:52We came across some really troubling statistics, but 40% of people who had bowel complaints

00:57wouldn't go to see their doctors about it, and constipation in children had risen to 60%.

01:03So we wanted to make people more comfortable with poo, with going to the toilet,

01:12with going to their doctor if things aren't quite right.

01:16The whole exhibition is led by questions that children have asked us.

01:21One of the most popular, one of the ones that sort of almost every kid said to us is,

01:26why is poo smelly?

01:27Obviously we can answer that with words, but I think really we're going to answer that with smells.

01:32So we've got boxes with different smells and where people can smell.

01:37The chemical component in poo, Scatol, which is what makes poo smell.

01:42It's also a chemical compound that's in lots of other things.

01:45Flowers, jasmine, things like that.

01:47It's in a lot of perfumes.

01:48That's our Proctergram chair.

01:51And that's for people who are having difficulty pooing.

01:54And it helps the doctors find out what's wrong with them.

01:58So we have some ready-break with it, and that's mixed with barium.

02:03Now barium shows up on x-rays, so that is put at people's bottoms.

02:08And they're asked to kind of poo that out, and that helps the doctors find out what's wrong with them.

02:13We've actually loaned in two separate poos from two separate places.

02:16One of them is a historic poo.

02:19So York Archaeology have an incredible collection of historic poo.

02:23They have lent us, very kindly, a medieval poo, which is full of eel bones.

02:28During the process of the exhibition, we kind of found out a little more about the National Poo Museum in the Isle of Wight.

02:33And they have a thing where they collect different poos and preserve them encased in a sphere of resin.

02:40We don't want people to be afraid of going to the doctors.

02:43We don't want people to be afraid of their bodies.

02:46And so if we can tell people a little bit about both of those things while they're having fun,

02:54hopefully we think it makes them more confident, more medical confident.

02:59We don't want people to be afraid of them.

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