The architects Leigh & Orange designed the Bacteriological Institute in the Edwardian style — red brick, symmetrical facades, the confident solidity of colonial public architecture at its most earnest. It opened in 1906 as Hong Kong's primary site for studying infectious disease. The building comprised three blocks: a main two-storey structure with a basement for laboratory work, a dormitory block for staff, and a third block for keeping the animals used in research. After World War II the institute was renamed the Pathological Institute, reflecting the broader scope its work had taken on. In 1972, as Hong Kong's medical infrastructure expanded, the institute relocated to Victoria Road, and the building on Caine Lane became a storeroom. For nearly two decades it sat quietly, repurposed but not forgotten.

In 1990 the Hong Kong government declared the building a monument — recognition that its architectural and historical significance outweighed its utility as storage. Five years later, in 1995, it was handed over to the Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences Society. After conversion, it opened to the public on 16 March 1996, giving the Edwardian laboratory a third life as a public museum. The transformation preserved the original structure while repurposing the casemates and laboratories into 11 exhibition galleries. A herbal garden was established outside, connecting the building's medical heritage to the Chinese traditional medicine practices that have always run parallel to Western clinical care in Hong Kong.

The museum occupies 10,000 square feet across three tiers, and its galleries cover the full arc of Hong Kong's medical history. The Lui Hac Minh Gallery addresses the territory's deep familiarity with tuberculosis, which shaped public health policy for most of the 20th century. The Hong Kong College of Radiologists Gallery traces the development of diagnostic imaging. A gallery devoted to the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals tells the story of the charitable medical network that served the Chinese community from the 1870s onward, often in tension with the colonial government's own health agenda. An exhibit on bound feet confronts one of the more painful intersections of tradition and bodily harm, presented without flinching. A game room and the Gordon King Lecture Theatre round out the facilities. Entry is charged at 20 Hong Kong Dollars per person.

The museum sits at 2 Caine Lane in Sheung Wan, one of Hong Kong Island's older neighbourhoods, where the streets climb steeply away from the harbour toward the Mid-Levels. The building's location on a hillside was not accidental: colonial-era public health thinking placed bacteriological facilities away from dense residential areas, where the risk of contamination could be managed. Today the neighbourhood has layered different histories over each other: dried seafood shops and herbal medicine traders coexist with boutique hotels and art galleries. The red-brick building with its herbal garden stands as one of the most legible remnants of early colonial Hong Kong's institutional landscape. It is a short walk southwest from Sheung Wan MTR station.