Image Credit: CFJC Today / Adam Donnelly

By Jill Sperling

KAMLOOPS MUSEUM

Kamloops Museum reopens with timely display on historic healthcare facilities

Jun 23, 2020 | 4:06 PM

KAMLOOPS — The Kamloops Museum and Archives has reopened with a new exhibit. The museum was forced to cut the run of its previous exhibit short amid concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic.

Today (June 23), the museum was once again able to open its doors, with a few extra safety precautions.

“Probably the biggest change visitors will notice is when they bring their kids in, the Children’s Museum has always been a hands-on interactive experience, and what we’ve done now is we’ve introduced a scavenger hunt where kids can go through the museum, including the children’s space, and look for objects there, but it’s definitely, for now, a hands-off space,” said Museum Curator Matt Macintosh.

Upstairs, dozens of black and white photographs line the walls.

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“Right now it’s primarily records, photos and textual records,” noted Macintosh,” so correspondences between individuals and a lot of photographs.”

The newest exhibit highlights both Royal Inland Hospital and the former Tranquille Sanatorium.

The show has been set up with plenty of space to prevent people from getting too close.

“If we see that traffic patterns through the space allow us to start to introduce more objects, we’ve got a lot of materials on Royal Inland Hospital nurses in particular,” Macintosh said. “So there’s lots more that could be rolled out. This is one of those shows that we love doing where people can come back and see different things each time.”

RIH has been expanded many times over since opening on Columbia Street in 1912, with another expansion project currently underway.

“Sort of two trajectories of the Royal Inland Hospital in terms of constantly developing and Tranquille, which has sort of gone the other way; they’re not quite sure what’s going to happen with that space,” Macintosh said.

Once considered a cutting edge facility for the treatment of tuberculosis, the Tranquille Sanatorium hardly resembles its early days.

“I think one of the things that’s unique about Tranquille’s approach to healing is that there was an architecture and a landscaping that combined to create this convalescence experience, very garden-like,” Macintosh said. “So the idea of isolating to heal obviously has some correspondence to what’s happening right now.”

The museum saw it fitting to highlight two historic Kamloops healthcare facilities during the current COVID-19 pandemic.

“Now we’ve introduced a show that is, I think, in response to the pandemic, and hopefully gives people a little bit of a sense of the past and a bit of hope to how we move forward through this.”