Bits & Bobs: The Anatomy of Sex

Bits & Bobs: The Anatomy of Sex is on at the Florence Nightingale Museum on Tuesday 3 November, from 6:00pm to 9:00pm. It's an interactive session that takes a look at human anatomy, and it forms part of the museum's regular events programme.

The venue itself is worth a bit of a detour. The Florence Nightingale Museum stands at St Thomas' Hospital, where Nightingale founded the first training school for nurses in 1860. She returned from the Crimean War in 1856 as the most famous woman in England after the Queen, and the museum follows her through three rooms: her gilded Victorian girlhood; the military hospitals at Scutari where the legend of the lady with the lamp was made; and the forty years she spent afterwards writing reports and drawing the charts that made her the first woman elected to the Royal Statistical Society.

Among the objects on display is her lamp — a folding Turkish lantern rather than the oil lamp of the statues — alongside her medicine chest, her letters, and Athena, the owl she rescued in Athens and carried in her pocket. If you've never been, it's a good chance to see the personal side of the woman behind the legend, from the early years to the decades of data and reports that followed.

The session runs from 6:00pm to 9:00pm on Tuesday 3 November at the Florence Nightingale Museum, Lambeth Palace Road, SE1 7EP, Lambeth, and it's free.