Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences

This museum occupies the Old Pathological Institute, a red-brick building constructed in 1906 by the architectural firm Leigh & Orange as Hong Kong's first Bacteriological Institute, built in direct response to the bubonic plague outbreaks that devastated the city from the 1890s onward. Three connected blocks originally housed laboratory space, a dormitory and animal-care facilities; after the Second World War it was renamed the Pathological Institute, and in 1972 its operations moved to Victoria Road, leaving the building in use as Health Department storage until the government designated it a monument in 1990 and transferred it to the newly formed Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences Society in 1995. It opened to the public on 16 March 1996 as the only museum in Hong Kong dedicated specifically to medical history. The roughly 10,000-square-foot building holds 11 exhibition galleries across three levels, an unusually dense arrangement for a museum this size. Named galleries include the Lui Hac Minh Gallery, the Hong Kong Tuberculosis, Chest and Heart Diseases Association Gallery, and the Hong Kong College of Radiologists Gallery, each sponsored by and focused on a different medical specialism, plus a gallery devoted to the Tai Ping Shan View, connecting the museum's plague-era origins to the neighbourhood outside its windows. The museum deliberately covers both Western scientific medicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine, tracing Hong Kong's long fight against infectious disease from cholera and plague through to more recent public health history, rather than presenting Western medicine as the only story worth telling. A game room, a small library and the Gordon King Lecture Theatre round out the facility. Because it sits up a quiet lane in the Mid-Levels rather than on a main tourist route, it draws far fewer visitors than its West Kowloon counterparts, which makes it one of the more contemplative stops on this list.