Camilla's sister Amy and her husband Alex were visiting, so we went for at trip out to the Jenner Museum in Gloucestershire.
On the way we stopped briefly at Uley Long Barrow, had lunch in the village of Uley, and did a short walk up onto the Iron Age fort of Uley Bury. This is a huge (13 hectare) flat-topped hill, with steeply sloping sides. There was no sun, but it was bright and clear and we had excellent views towards the Severn and the Welsh mountains. And the local forest had fantastic autumn colours.
from Uley Bury
|
the edge of Uley Bury
|
The Jenner Museum has a 20 minute video on Jenner (which is somewhat hagiographic, claiming that Jenner's ideas were rapidly accepted by the medical establishment when in fact they sparked a bitter and divisive conflict). Downstairs there's one room with objects from and displays about Jenner's life and another with a recreation of his study as it was on his death. Upstairs there are two rooms with general information about immunology - this looked like quite a nice presentation, but not one with anything a textbook wouldn't offer - and a room with displays about the eradication of smallpox. (This was a nice complement to a talk we'd been to earlier in the year on disease eradication.)
There's also an attractive garden with a "Temple of Vaccinia" and a greenhouse with some huge vines.
Jenner Museum (interior)
|
Jenner Museum (exterior)
|
The Jenner museum is worth a visit if you're interested in medical history or you're passing by. In our case Amy and Alex were doctors (and Alex an immunologist), Camilla was studying infectious microbes, and I'd recently read two books on smallpox, so this was topical.