The museum occupies a building put up in 1926 as the locomotive maintenance workshop of the state railways, one of the early Republican structures of the Samsun–Sivas line and among the few of them left in the centre of the city.
Restoration of the building began in June 2017, and it was turned into a museum of surgical hand instruments and health through a project carried out jointly by the Samsun governorate, Ondokuz Mayıs University, the metropolitan municipality, the Middle Black Sea Development Agency, the provincial health directorate, the provincial directorate of culture and tourism, and the Samsun medical innovation cluster association, which now runs it. It opened to visitors on 3 December 2021, World Disability Day, with a first display on patient care and mobility support. Turkish Wikipedia puts the number of surgical hand instruments at sixteen thousand and describes it as the first museum of medical instruments in Türkiye.
Most of what is shown dates from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the entrance are eighteenth-century invalid chairs along with prostheses and orthoses.
The central axis holds a nineteenth-century wooden commode chair, a bedside cabinet, chamber pots and other vessels, hot-water bottles of about 1900, hygienic syringes of the 1920s, canes and crutches, scales, invalid chairs, massage devices and back scratchers, nineteenth-century ultraviolet lamps, further prostheses and orthoses, hernia trusses, and stretchers surviving from the 1800s.
The first hall is given to general surgery, with sterilising autoclaves of about 1900, surgical cutting instruments and instruments used in obstetrics. The second holds dental instruments and an eye examination set, the third a painting exhibition, and the fourth the surgical hand instruments made by the member firms of the medical innovation cluster. On the upper floor is a hall of 180 square metres that public bodies and private organisations can use for meetings, seminars and receptions.
The museum is at Kılıçdede Mahallesi, Fuar Alanı Kümesi Sokak No 47, İlkadım.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Samsun as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 7.2 °C in February to 23.7 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, July, August, September and October; rainfall is heaviest in November (83 mm) and lightest in July (35 mm). Long-term means for 1929-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
