Cape Medical Museum, Medical history museum in Green Point, Cape Town, South Africa

The Cape Medical Museum is a medical history museum in Green Point that displays collections of surgical instruments, medical equipment, and pharmaceutical items from different periods of South African medical history. The building occupies part of the former Old City Hospital Complex and makes the development of medical technology and practice visible.

The Cape Medical Museum was founded by a volunteer group led by Prof J C De Villiers in the 1980s and was proclaimed a Provincial Museum of the Western Cape government on 24 September 1981 under proclamation 299 of the Government Gazette. Its displays trace Cape medical history back to 1652, when Jan van Riebeeck was commissioned to set up a VOC halfway station at the Cape, partly because of scurvy and other deficiency diseases among passing fleets.

The exhibits show how medical practices developed in South Africa, from traditional African healing methods to modern surgical techniques. Visitors can see how different healing traditions came together in one place and influenced each other over time.

The museum is accessible by public transport and sits in an active neighborhood with cafes and shops nearby. Visitors should plan for about two to three hours to explore the exhibits at a comfortable pace.

The museum contains reconstructed medical spaces such as a 1910 pharmacy, an early 20th-century hospital ward, and a period operating theater. These recreations allow visitors to understand how medical work actually happened in earlier times.