Amazing black and white photographs showing the inside of Barrow's former North Lonsdale Hospital have resurfaced.

The Cumbria Archives Facebook page posted the images from Barrow Archive Centre to celebrate 75 years of the NHS.

North Lonsdale Hospital was the town's primary hospital for almost a century. The medical building had seven wards, an operating theatre, dispensary and laundry.

These fantastic pictures show what medical staff looked like in the roaring twenties, pre-NHS, as well as offering an insight into wards and operating theatres.

The Mail: The women's ward often had children's toys

One incredible picture shows surgeons wearing smocks with basic face masks and head coverings. The rubber gloves worn by surgeons were before disposable latex gloves which were invented in 1964.

The pictures also depict nurses in old-fashioned attire. The uniforms are mostly white and made of cotton chambray or linen. The 1920s matrons are wearing stockings with their uniforms and black heels with a basic single Mary Jane strap.

One picture also shows a team of nurses with one holding a cat that belonged to the hospital and was a welcome sight for many of the ill patients. 

The moggy was fed from the kitchen, slept in the boiler house and once had kittens on site.

The Mail: Staff with the hospital

During this time period nurses were adjusting to their new professional status and self-regulation through the General Nursing Council (GNC), which had been created in 1920.

Also around this time in medical history, Britain’s first birth control clinic opened in 1921. There were also many breakthrough discoveries such as penicillin, insulin and vitamins which dramatically reduced communicable diseases.

There was also advancing diagnostics and the dramatic expansion of public health departments.

The hospital was built between 1885 and 1887 and was designed by local architects Paley and Austin. A further wing was added in 1899 for the town's expanding population.

The Mail: The matrons of the ward in 1920s Barrow

The hospital closed in 1989 after the opening of Furness General Hospital in 1986 and all services were transferred to Abbey Road. Despite being listed, the building that you see in these pictured were demolished.

Two nursing homes were built in its place with some features of old the building saved which were maintained and incorporated into the new buildings.

The stone lintel, which topped the entrance to the old medical ward dating from 1899, still remains.