(tense music) ♪ (Tori) Human bones can hide the most shocking of secrets.
(Carla) Oh, my God, she's been killed.
(woman) She's been killed violently with a sword.
(Tori) Stories of slaughter, sacrifice, and disease.
(woman) Success was built on the broken bodies of children like these.
(Tori) Crimes covered up for hundreds or even thousands of years.
Somebody could've committed this murder and then jumped ship and never brought to justice.
I'm Dr. Tori Herridge, and I'm leading a team examining some of the UK's most mysterious archaeological burial sites.
There are so many unanswered questions.
Let's cut to the chase, is it a fertility ritual?
With bones as our only witnesses, mortuary technician Carla Valentine will help identify what happened to the bodies.
(Carla) To me, this is the most fascinating find.
(Tori) While archaeologist Raksha Dave gathers crucial evidence from key experts.
(Raksha) A line of small children's heads, that's absolutely bonkers!
(Tori) Across the length and breadth of the UK, we will reveal the way our forebears lived, loved, and died.
(Carla) What sort of hopes and dreams did she have in her head?
What was she planning on doing with her life?
(Tori) People long forgotten... Makes you wonder what brought her here.
...until now.
♪ (dramatic music) Today, St. George's in Bristol is a concert hall, but for more than 100 years, it was a parish church.
So, when plans were drawn up to build a cafe and heritage center on part of the old cemetery, archaeologists were called in.
♪ It's a small site, but even so, Avon Archaeology uncovered the remains of 384 people.
It's more than they were expecting, but not unusual for a city burial ground in use over several decades.
It's when they start to examine the bones that they begin to find something curious.
Skulls cut open and bones sawn apart.
But why?
What is going on at this cemetery?
(solemn music) With the help of osteoarchaeologist Heidi Dawson-Hobbis, we are going to examine the bones of three of those people.
♪ -So this dig was in Bristol?
-Yeah, that's right.
It took place next to what is now St. George's Concert Hall.
It used to be a church, and they were excavating the cemetery alongside.
So what sort of era were these graves from?
Well, they dated from between the 1820s into the 1860s.
Now Heidi, when you've got a cemetery in the 19th century in the heart of Bristol, you can really start to dig into that city's past.
Yeah, so the 19th century is a really interesting period.
And so we've got three different skeletons to have a look at, and we'll start with this very small one.
(Tori) Oh, it is tiny!
♪ (Heidi) So this is a young infant, so to look at the age of death on this one, mainly use the dentition, so you can see we've got some teeth.
From the dentition and looking at the formation, I've aged this one to about nine months of age.
(Carla) And do we know the cause of death of the baby?
(Heidi) Yeah, so again, often when we're looking at skeletons, we don't have evidence that tells us how they actually died, but we do have some interesting features on this individual.
So particularly on the skull, we have evidence for a craniotomy.
(Carla) Oh, this is this piece here.
(Heidi) That's right.
(Tori) So when you say "craniotomy," that just means cutting into the skull, yes?
And that's a surgical procedure.
Are you saying that this little baby had had surgery on his skull?
(Heidi) So, for this one, I'm suggesting it was postmortem, so not surgery during life.
(Carla) Do you know, I would agree with that, Tori, because if you look here, you can see that the bone has been cut quite deliberately and sharply.
And you can see-- see those tiny little nicks just in the bone?
That looks to me just like when we do a postmortem examination of the head and we have to reflect the skin back from the scalp, so we use a knife just to sort of cut through some of those more tougher tissues, and it leaves these little parallel scratches that look exactly like that.
(Tori) But wouldn't you do something similar if you were doing head surgery?
How can you be sure that this is postmortem?
(Heidi) Yeah, so we have some other evidence on this infant as well.
So if you look here, can you see these ribs have all been cut through?
So they've all been sawn through.
And also the right clavicle, so this is the collarbone, that also has quite a neat cut through it as well.
(Carla) So these cuts, again, very consistent with this idea of a postmortem examination, an autopsy where we would remove the sternum or the breastbone, which would have some ribs just along here and cut right the way through those ribs, lift that away in order to access the organs to look for cause of death and any of the signs of disease.
(Tori) And disease seems critical, actually, because when you think about it, the 19th century, there were plenty of diseases around that could've killed a little baby like this.
I'm thinking like measles, diphtheria, typhoid, and all of those things do not leave marks on the bones.
(Carla) Infant mortality, at this point, was very high, but with all of those deaths, would we expect to see a lot of autopsies on infants and in adults?
On infants this age, it's really rare that we see evidence for postmortem interventions.
Generally, thinking about adults in a cemetery site, maybe one or two craniotomies, but at St. George's, what's really interesting is that we've seen 13 craniotomies so far.
-Thirteen?
-Thirteen, yeah.
(Tori) That's a huge number.
Something unusual is happening... (Heidi) Yeah, so something really interesting is certainly going on at this site.
If we can find out who these people are and the stories behind their deaths, then maybe we can find out what's happening at St. George's, and I think we should start with this baby here.
(soft music) ♪ Raksha has come to Bristol Central Library, where archaeologist Joss Davis is researching the identities of people buried at St. George's.
The baby we examined was discovered buried alone in a large family vault.
Could this be a vital clue to discovering who he was?
♪ (Raksha) I'm really interested in the little baby that was excavated, though.
Do we know much about him?
We do, yep, from the ledger slab that sat over his vault, we know that he's called Edmund Chambers Moutrie and that he died on the 11th of October, 1833, aged eight months.
Putting a name to a person that you've excavated is quite something, isn't it?
It just suddenly brings them alive.
Yeah, it makes them a real individual.
(Raksha) So do we know very much more about Edmund?
(Joss) We do, we've got his burial record, which tells us that he was buried on the 17th of October, so six days after he died, and that he lived at College Green.
(Raksha) And what about the rest of his family?
(Joss) Well, we can go back and find his baptism register where it says that-- it actually gives his birthdate, so he was born on the 29th of January of the same year and that his parents were James Burton and Eleanor Moutrie and that his father was a music seller.
(Raksha) Music seller?
What kind of music were they selling?
Well, if we look at an advert from the local newspaper, it shows that James Moutrie had a musical repository on College Green, gives us the address as 30 College Green, and that he sold musical instruments of every description.
I've just found this today in the library that gives us a depiction, exactly what College Green would've looked like in the 1830s and '40s.
-That's pretty phenomenal.
-You can actually see here... -Oh, look at that!
-...the musical repository and musical circulating library with the name J. Moutrie over the door.
(solemn music) ♪ (Raksha) That's spectacular.
I mean, look at that, it is a very grand place.
♪ -Was Edmund the only child?
-No, he wasn't.
We actually went back to the parish registers and looked for other children with the same parents' names and found that he was actually the youngest of eight.
-Gosh.
-He had seven older brothers and sisters.
(Raksha) He's buried by himself in a family vault and there's all of these brothers and sisters, a mother and father, and they're not with him.
Why is that?
It seems, from later censuses, that the parents at least moved to Bath.
So they just literally upped sticks and went and never came back to Bristol?
(Joss) No, left the family vault with just the one child in it.
Gosh, that's a tragic story.
We do wonder if maybe it was so sad that they didn't really want to be reminded of it and maybe not reuse the vault again.
(Raksha) Do we know how he died?
Because he's had a craniotomy.
Do we know the reason for that?
Unfortunately, we don't.
Unfortunately, death certificates only start in 1837, and because he died before that in 1833, there's no death certificate for him, so we have no idea how he died.
-It's a complete mystery.
-Yeah.
♪ (Tori) Here's the ledger, it says, "Sacred to the memory of Edmund Chambers Moutrie who died October 11th, 1833, aged eight months."
Really interesting for me, because I don't usually get a name to go with the skeletons that I'm working on, but also I'm thinking, now we have a name, I guess we've got some historical information.
Is this too early for a death certificate or-- (Tori) Yeah, it's 1833, death certificates come in 1837 onwards, so it's just too early to have that piece of information, so you're still left with the mystery as to why this little baby had this postmortem dissection carried out.
Carla, you must've performed, I guess, hundreds of autopsies across your career.
(Carla) I think it's probably in the thousands now.
(Tori) So you've got this postmortem dissection.
Would you be confident in saying this is consistent with an autopsy?
Absolutely, I mean, the cuts are identical, really, to what I'd expect.
The only issue is that we don't really know what the intention behind the cuts is just by looking at the bones.
(Tori) It all comes back, I guess, to how likely it is in 1833 that somebody would've requested an autopsy for their child.
(mellow music) To find out if autopsies were being carried out in the 1830s, Raksha has come to meet Professor Corinna Wagner of Exeter University.
♪ (Corinna) Autopsy was more common than we probably think.
You would have autopsy in the case, for instance, if there was a coroner's inquest, if the family wanted to know what happened to their brother, sister, child.
They might request that a surgeon perform an autopsy.
So, yeah, there's a whole culture of autopsy in the 19th century.
(solemn music) (Raksha) We have a case of a small child, eight months old, baby, and the baby's had a craniotomy.
How likely is it for a baby to go through that process of having an autopsy?
(Corinna) The parents could want to know what happened to their child.
People are aware of what medicine can do, and so they will request that a surgeon perform an autopsy in order to answer questions about what happened to their child.
♪ (Raksha) So what about the people?
What was public opinion surrounding autopsy?
(Corinna) It was varied.
So you had people who were religious, and because of their beliefs, they didn't want to have a body that was fragmented or that had parts missing and therefore would not be whole at the time of resurrection.
On the other hand, you had people who were very interested in the way science and medicine was moving forward and how there were new treatments and new knowledge about disease.
We talk about closure, but people in the 19th century also wanted closure.
An autopsy gave answers and an autopsy also gave them closure.
(soft music) (Tori) Our little baby, Edmund Moutrie, he's had a craniotomy, his skull has been cut into, a thoracotomy, his chest has been opened, and the mark on his skull, they're all consistent with an autopsy.
I would say so, definitely.
But of course, Edmund isn't the only one.
That's the mystery of this place, there were so many craniotomies.
(Tori) Yeah, 13 just in St. George's Cemetery.
There is something unusual about the cemetery itself.
♪ St. George's is a marvelous building, but it's this graveyard here that was of interest.
(man) So this graveyard was open from circa 1820, and the last date that we had a burial recorded was in the 1880s, but that was after the graveyard had officially closed, but there's a reason for that, which is that there were private vaults on the site.
How many graves were there in this area?
Was it just here?
(Kevin) So this is the lower terrace of three.
Within this area, we found in the region of 150 burials, and they were stacked on top of each other, so this area had been quite intensively used.
In one of the graves, we had 11 burials stacked one on top of the other.
(Tori) So then, of course, you walk through the graveyard.
(Kevin) And then around here, you'd encounter the first wall into the second terrace, you come up steps, and the new building, in fact, pretty much sits on the second terrace, which we're moving through now.
Where we're stood now would be the back of the second terrace, so if you imagine behind me another wall rising up going to the top terrace of the site.
And where we're stood here, we actually found that there were these brick-built vaults here, and the great thing for us about that is that the ledgers clearly related to the people who were buried within those vaults.
(solemn music) They were pretty much the size of a coffin.
Typically, they were about two meters deep.
(Tori) Two meters deep and then the size of an average coffin, so this was basically a precut grave, therefore you could buy a family plot in.
These are a wealthier type of individual for sure, because you had to have been of means to have bought a vault.
Yeah, if you were buying a vault, you had the money to buy it.
You've got names, so you know, you know the kind of people who were buried here.
We do!
In fact, across the site, we had a range of occupations from military officers through to bakers.
We had someone who was a minor celebrity in his day, a guy named George Cumberland who was friends with William Blake, a patron of the arts.
-Middle class, affluent... -That's right.
(Tori) ...and then, of course, you come to little Edmund Moutrie, who was just a baby when he died, but was buried in one of these vaults.
In fact, broadly, around where we're stood right now.
(Tori) You sort of think, you know, you describe those vaults as being the size of an average adult coffin, and it was just him.
You open up that massive vault and you look down, you would've seen those tiny bones.
It must've just been quite moving.
(Kevin) Most archaeologists have excavated human remains, but typically you can maintain some sort of distance, and we tried to do that on this site, but there were instances where that became hard.
There was one particular burial, which also happened to be a child, where, as we cleared back, we could see that there were buttons from their clothes still left and they traced out the shape of a double-breasted jacket, so you could see that they were actually-- the kind of clothing that they were buried in, and it was hard not to imagine, you'd look at it, and you would be thinking, "Oh, it's a military-style jacket, was it their favorite?
Were they buried in their-- -in their best," yeah.
-In their best clothes, yeah.
Everything you're telling me is fascinating, but what I was hoping to find out was something about this graveyard, something about the people who were buried here that might explain why there was such a high proportion of postmortem dissections.
(Kevin) There is a high proportion of postmortem dissection, but the evidence to why doesn't come from the ground.
That would have to come from elsewhere.
(soft music) ♪ (Tori) St. George's is actually quite a small site.
It's very steep and divided into three terraces.
-Like this?
-Yeah, just like that, and they've each got distinct character, so at the top, there's mostly single graves.
In the middle, you get these burial vaults, of which, actually, little baby Edmund was buried in one of those, and then in the bottom, you have stacked burials, one on top of each other.
So what kind of people were buried in there?
(Tori) Well, for the most part, it's a pretty affluent parish!
There's aristocracy, there's professional, middle, and upper classes, of which, actually, the Moutries fitted in there.
They're professional middle class, too.
So if they had money, then perhaps they were able to pay for a private autopsy.
(Tori) Yeah, it's certainly possible.
Certainly, as far as Edmund is concerned.
What about the other people that you've worked on in the cemetery?
(Heidi) So, we have here an elderly male, aged to about 50-plus.
(Carla) You called him a male, so I'm assuming we don't have a name for him?
(Heidi) No, so I don't have a name for him, but I can show you where he was buried.
So he's skeleton 160, and as you can see, he's down in the lower terraces -of the cemetery.
-Ah, now that is interesting, because Kevin told me that the way the cemetery panned out is that the majority of the named individuals come from the middle and the upper terraces.
And they seem to be richer people, and Kevin has suggested, tentatively, that the lower-terrace people may be poorer members -of the community.
-Now, is Kevin right?
I mean, what can you tell from how this man lived his life?
(Heidi) Yeah, so there's quite a lot of markers that indicate this individual had quite a hard life.
He's got quite marked muscle markings, particularly on the upper arms.
He's also got degenerative joint disease of the lower spine, so we certainly have evidence here for potentially manual labor, quite a hard life.
We also have some evidence for trauma and potential infection.
So the lower leg on the right side, we can see some fusion between the tibia and the fibula, but then a more marked area of trauma is we have a broken arm on the left side.
And actually, as you can see, the ulna, the bone in the lower arm, has actually fused that elbow joint together.
(Tori) It's completely fused together!
There's no way he'd be able to move his arm.
Like this, his arm would be stuck in position like this.
(Carla) And would that be painful, too?
(Heidi) So that certainly would have been painful at the time that he did it.
It probably shows some sort of infection got in there as well, it's kind of caused that amount of fusion.
(Carla) And you did say that he'd had a hard life.
I'm guessing not a particularly easy death.
I mean, I'm seeing here some clear evidence of having cuts into the skull or a craniotomy.
-Is that right?
-Yup.
So again, as we saw with baby Edmund, here we have another craniotomy.
Here we've got quite a clumsy looking effort, though.
Rather than being sawn through neatly, -it's kind of broken away.
-Absolutely, and then add that to the fact that that looks as if there are these little skip marks, so where the blade has kind of skipped across the bone.
It makes me think it was either done in haste, which has its own reasons, or it was done by somebody who didn't know what they're doing, but clearly very different to what we saw with baby Edmund.
(Tori) Yeah, this looks to me like you're describing quite a botched job.
I mean, is there any other evidence of sort of botched postmortem examination?
(Heidi) Yes, we have some more evidence of postmortem examination, so we have the cut ends of these ribs on this side, but interestingly, while they're nice and neat on this side, here we don't seem to have those neat ends.
(Carla) This, to me, looks very like somebody has tried to remove the sternum, the breastbone, and then perhaps they've been showing someone what to do?
So then the person less experienced has come along and done it on the other side, and they've gone a little bit too wide of the mark, maybe.
(Heidi) And then the final thing we've got is if we look at the left side of the pelvis, can you see we've got quite a neat cut down here, but we also have another false start here as well -of another cut?
-This is so intriguing, because you've got quite a different situation to what we're seeing in baby Edmund, so we've got this little middle class baby who's died and been autopsied, but then our guy here who's older, maybe poorer, his postmortem investigation seems to be a series of botched attempts, and possibly there may be more than one person's handiwork here!
Who is doing these autopsies?
(mellow music) ♪ Raksha is off to meet Professor Kate Robson Brown, an expert in biological anthropology at Bristol University.
She may have the answer.
♪ (Kate) At the same time as burials were taking place in St. George's Cemetery, just 10 minutes' walk away, there is a really quite substantial hospital, the Bristol Royal Infirmary.
Over a prolonged period of time, the medical staff in the hospital are trying to understand cause of death through the autopsy process and starting to formalize that.
But also developing medical training for new generations of doctors who are based in the Southwest who don't now have to go up to London.
(Raksha) So we've got a couple of examples of craniotomies in the people that we're looking at, and one is extremely neat, but one is quite clumsy and very jagged.
Is there any explanation for this?
The surgeons practicing at this time are incredibly skilled, and my expectation would be that the very good examples of postmortem practice that you're seeing are maybe that same cohort of medical professional.
However, everyone has to learn.
(soft music) All medical students would have had the opportunity at some point in their training to get hands-on learning both through dissection and postmortem practice.
(Raksha) So it's highly likely that our people in our local cemetery are having this procedure done at the Bristol Royal Infirmary?
(Kate) Yes, it's very, very likely that the people who have craniotomies from the St. George's collection had undergone postmortems to establish cause of death, for example, after their deaths in the BRI.
♪ (Raksha) Could the fact that the BRI is a teaching hospital be key to understanding what's going on at St. George's?
♪ (Tori) Kate also said that they were doing medical dissection as well as autopsy.
(Carla) And this is the thing, though, isn't it?
It's quite difficult to differentiate between the two.
When we talk about medical dissection, we could just be looking at the structure of the body, but when we discuss autopsies specifically, you're looking for a cause of death.
Yeah, so this skeleton might help us kind of to expand on that discussion and think about that a bit more.
This is another individual that came from that lower terrace.
He's aged to between 25 and 35.
He was actually a smoker.
He has some notch marks on his dentition, which indicate where he was clenching a clay pipe between his jaws, and then we also have some of this postmortem autopsy evidence across the body as well.
So we have craniotomy.
He's also had the thoracotomy, we have the cut rib ends again.
But another feature that we haven't seen before is we have a cut across the tibia and the fibula.
(Tori) Basically, he's had his leg amputated.
Yeah, so this very much looks like an amputation.
♪ (Carla) Amputations were really very common, weren't they?
They were carried out quite a lot for things like broken bones, is that right?
(Heidi) Yeah, so we do also have some evidence for amputations both healed and unhealed from this cemetery site.
So we have an elder male who has had an amputation on the femur, and that's healed really nicely.
And in fact, they even found parts of his prosthetic leg within the grave with him.
We also have a female with an unhealed amputation, and this was of the upper arm.
But the difference between her and this male was that the part of the arm they'd removed was not buried with her, so it was not found in the grave.
Whereas here, we actually have the lower limb and the foot have been placed back in position -with this individual.
-And what we can see from them is that they--I mean, they look all right to me, so if you think about doing an amputation on someone, whether it's because they've fractured their bones or because they've got, I don't know, sepsis and gangrene and all of these different reasons, surely we'd see something on these bones -that remain in the grave.
-Yeah, so there's no evidence here for any kind of fracture or trauma, there's no swelling that we'd associate with a bad infection to kind of cause this amputation.
(Tori) Which is just bizarre, 'cause why on Earth would somebody want to amputate a seemingly healthy limb?
(piano music) To answer that question, Raksha has traveled to London, where in 2006 archaeologists excavating a hospital graveyard made a shocking discovery.
♪ (woman) Some years ago, the Museum of London Archaeology excavated a cemetery of a London hospital in Whitechapel, and we found about 260 coffins in which were around about 173 people and 460-something parts of people.
So some coffins would just contain a single burial like you'd expect, and some of them contained lots of bits of person.
So were you, like, really perplexed, you're like wondering what is going on?
Yeah, it was a very unusual set of circumstances to work out what was in each coffin, but we were able to look at the patterns and see that things had been cut up in certain ways, and that helped us work out why they might have been cut up.
(Raksha) So how can you tell the difference between an autopsy and a dissection then on human remains?
There's no kind of clean cut-off line between the two, really, but if you've just got a craniotomy and cut through the chest somewhere, maybe one or two cuts somewhere else, then that would tend to suggest you're looking at an autopsy.
Whereas, if you've got lots of cuts perhaps in unusual places around the body, then that might suggest you're looking at dissection instead.
So what about dissection and surgery, how can you tell the difference there?
Because I'm presuming, at that time, when surgery was being performed, that quite a lot of them didn't really survive.
(Natasha) Absolutely, and that's one of the things at the Royal London was that they were practicing surgery, so some of the cuts are in the same places that you would expect to see them.
If someone's, for example, having their foot cut off, you might cut through the bottom of their tibia in a very particular place, and it could be quite difficult to tell the difference between someone practicing that and someone doing it for real, if you like, but when we have lots of tibia all cut in the same place all in the same coffin, then that might suggest that we're looking at a class of students practicing that particular technique.
(Raksha) So they're running an anatomy school then, essentially.
How were they doing this?
So the anatomy classes seem to be run with probably groups of students sharing the same bodies and possibly working on the same parts of those bodies sort of week by week.
We have coffins that look like they've got more legs in than anything else, for example.
The bodies themselves, we had some consistency in the way they were cut, and it looks like they may have been portioned up into sort of two or three parts to give to different groups of students at the same time.
One of the reasons for doing that would've been that this is before refrigeration, so you had to work quite quickly, because the bodies aren't going to last for very long, and you had to have your classes in the colder months.
(Raksha) It's really fascinating that you can see the physical evidence archaeologically to how they're actually running the school, -it's fantastic.
-Yeah, it's absolutely amazing to be able to see the bones cut in the same way as you can see described in the text at the time and to understand why they're doing that, because they're trying to learn about a particular structure or practice a particular surgical technique.
(solemn music) ♪ (Tori) What Natasha told Raksha about the Royal London tallies perfectly with what we're seeing here -on the bones.
-It really does!
We've got these false starts, which show that somebody a bit amateur was working on the bones, and even some sets that look like they've had like two or three people working on them.
Students and teachers, and the BRI is a teaching hospital, and you put that together and suddenly our young man starts to make sense, particularly the amputation on his lower leg.
(Carla) Because, of course, why on Earth would you amputate a healthy leg?
What we're possibly looking at here is somebody who was practicing.
We may be looking at a medical dissection.
(Tori) When you think of the number of examples of this kind of practice at the Bristol Royal Infirmary, at the Royal London, it makes you ask, "Why so many?
And why now?"
(soft music) (Raksha) In the first decades of the 1800s, the medical profession was undergoing huge transformation.
Surgeons working in operating theaters, like the one at St. Thomas's hospital were performing increasingly complex operations.
Oh, this is a very evocative space, isn't it?
I mean, I can see why they call it a theater.
Getting hands-on practice of dissection became an essential part of medical training.
(woman) In the early 19th century, there's increasing interest in looking at the body itself.
Performing dissection becomes part and parcel of medical training, and that's why the dead body becomes a central piece of teaching material.
But the supply with bodies is a constant source of conflict, and the government actually brings in the so-called Murder Act.
So if you've committed a particularly heinous crime, part of your punishment will not just be that you're being executed, but also that your body will be dismembered and dissected.
But even that still isn't enough to satisfy the ever-growing demand for bodies.
Increasingly, they have to resort to other means of supplying their schools.
(Raksha) When you say "the means," what do you mean?
(Anna) Well, this is, of course, where the very contentious practice of body snatching came in.
(eerie music) Either the medical students and teachers themselves or third parties would go out to cemeteries and obtain dead bodies.
But they increasingly outsource it to professional body snatchers, people who make a living obtaining bodies for medical schools.
The solution that the government came up with was to make the bodies of the unclaimed poor available for dissection.
If you died in a public hospital and you either had no family to claim your body or your family was too poor to pay for a proper burial, in that case, your body would be made available to the anatomy schools.
So hang on, first, it's criminals and now it's the poor.
So what did people think about that?
Many people were outraged about the Anatomy Act, because they said, effectively, we're being punished for being poor.
Unfortunately, despite the fact that the Anatomy Act raises the numbers of available bodies because it's no longer executed criminals, it's unclaimed poor bodies, but still, those rising numbers still don't keep up with demand from anatomy schools.
(somber music) In London alone in 1828, there were around 700 medical students, and between them, those 700 students dissected just under 600 bodies.
Those numbers are huge and that's just London alone, but there are other anatomy schools around the U.K. at that time.
Absolutely, absolutely.
There are anatomy schools also being created at the time to satisfy demand for medical study in places like Bristol, for instance.
♪ (Tori) I was astounded about the sheer numbers of medical students, 700 students in 1828 -in London alone!
-Absolutely.
I mean, the way that students were learning anatomy and all these new schools sort of popping up all over the place, it was a case of supply and demand.
And these bodies had to come from somewhere.
Yeah, and that meant people resorted to all kinds of activity, like body snatching, for example!
And the public outcry that followed was so extreme that it led to an entirely new act of Parliament.
(Carla) It did, but the poor, it seemed, were then being punished because of the fact that they were poor and they were being delivered to these surgeons.
(Tori) The outcry does not go away.
Now, all this is happening at exactly the same time as St. George's Cemetery is in use.
Are these people being buried there?
(soft music) ♪ Nationwide, surgeons were resorting to illegal means to procure bodies.
Teaching hospitals were carrying out illicit postmortem dissections.
Could that also be the case in Bristol?
Is it possible that the cuts we are seeing on the bones from St. George's were also carried out without the consent or even the knowledge of the families of the deceased?
♪ Raksha's been doing a bit of digging around and found a book on the history of the Bristol Royal Infirmary that may just have the answer.
♪ (Raksha) I want to show you this advert, it's an advert for a reward.
(Tori) It says 50 guineas reward.
-That's a lot of money.
-A hell of a lot of money, and it's all to do with body snatching.
So it says here, "On the night of Friday last or early on Saturday morning, the churchyard of the parish of St. Augustine was entered and the corpse of a female, which had been interred on the preceding morning -was taken up and stolen."
-So literally, her body was dug up the morning after she was buried.
-Yeah.
-And I'm seeing here St. Augustine's.
Now I know that church is just a few hundred meters away from St. George's.
So we're in Bristol, really close by to St. George's, roughly the same time period, body snatching is happening.
(Raksha) Yeah, and then the story gets better, because somebody says here, "I have seen in the possession of one of these former teachers of anatomy a huge labeled bunch of large keys by which he could have access to any churchyard in Bristol or its immediate neighborhood."
(Tori) Literally, the people working in the BRI, some of them had keys, keys to the churchyards.
They just let themselves in and helped themselves.
(Raksha) Exactly, so I think somebody's like aiding and abetting them.
(Tori) So these teachers, these anatomy teachers at the BRI are in on it.
Now, who were those teachers?
There is one name that regularly crops up, and it's a character called Richard Smith.
He kind of boasts about it.
It says, "We played the part of Resurrection Men," so body snatchers, "and procured subjects in succession.
In doing this, we have more than once got ourselves into awkward scrapes," that's how he describes it.
"And one night, Mr. Robert Lax and the writer narrowly escaped being shot."
(Tori) He seems like he has absolutely no compunction about the fact that he's ultimately desecrating the grave of somebody who could be someone's loved one.
People care about these things.
They care to the extent they put 50 guinea rewards up for the return of the body.
Quite incredibly, he turns out to be the head surgeon of the BRI between 1797 and 1848.
(Tori) Which is exactly the same time period that the St. George's burials are taking place over.
So we have this evidence of body snatching in Bristol in and around St. George's, and this Richard Smith guy is in the thick of it.
♪ The burials at St. George's show no sign of having been disturbed, but if Richard Smith and his colleagues were capable of body snatching, what else were they doing?
Raksha is on her way to meet anthropologist Kitty Marryat, who first became interested in Richard Smith when anatomical specimens he had collected were discovered in a storeroom at the BRI in 2016.
♪ (Kitty) This museum was his personal collection.
He used it for teaching, he used it as a kind of reference for his own work, and then when it was in the hospital, it was used as an educational resource.
So he actually wrote his name on this one, so we know this was one of his patients, and it says, "Mr. Richard Smith, Bristol Infirmary," and then on the back, rather more than three millimeters thick.
'Cause you can see, there's a lot of thickening -of the bone here.
-Yes.
What was Richard Smith actually like?
So he was senior surgeon at the BRI for a very long time, and he was quite a prominent figure in Georgian Bristol.
So he was a Freemason and he did a lot of talks and wrote newspaper columns.
He was very interested in theater in Bristol, and this seems to have kind of translated a lot into his character.
He is described as kind of very loud and he was fond of telling kind of obscene stories about things that happened to him.
That's quite funny, isn't it?
He's like this upstanding character, this man about town in Bristol, but he's also involved in body snatching as well, isn't he?
(Kitty) Yeah, this was very necessary, because the supply of bodies for medicine was completely insufficient, so they did have to do things like body snatching or sneaking into the dead house.
(solemn music) The bodies would go into a dead house in the infirmary if the patient died in the hospital, and they would bribe nurses to get access or kind of sneak in and perform dissections.
They would smuggle in outside teachers sometimes or even remove body parts from the coffins, kind of replace the same weight with sand, and then kind of nail it back down so that people didn't know that someone had kind of been in there.
(Raksha) So do you think it was a necessary evil for him because there couldn't be advancement in his medical practice unless he did go -and find these bodies?
-Yeah, definitely.
They were doing all these kind of surreptitious dissections and using all these kind of unethical ways to develop methods of treatment or surgical practice that do benefit us now.
(Raksha) He's a very complicated character.
(Kitty) He is a very complicated man.
♪ (Tori) Richard Smith was an extraordinary character, very flamboyant, somewhat unethical, but there's no doubt he was Bristol's leading surgeon, and he was training up other surgeons in his work at the BRI.
(Carla) Absolutely, I mean, it was a teaching hospital, and maybe it was Richard who was teaching his students the process of dissection on theses skeletons.
But I have to say, I have a bit of problem with the idea that he may have let students loose on a body like young Edmund.
(Tori) Well, interesting you should say that, because look at this from his own notebooks.
Richard Smith's own notebooks, 1833, 20th of September, that is just a few weeks before Edmund died, and he writes about Robert Parsons.
He says, "This boy died, and in his bladder was found another calculus."
-Bladder stones.
-Right, so he's doing some kind of postmortem investigation on a child!
Could Richard Smith have been the person to have done Edmund's autopsy?
(dramatic music) Richard Smith had consulting rooms in his house on Park Street.
I know that's not far from College Green where the Moutries lived.
I've been told both houses still exist, so I've come back to Bristol to see them for myself.
♪ Do you know, I think it's that one there.
♪ Yes, yeah, that one, that one there, I think, is where Richard Smith was living and working in the 1830s.
It's very grand.
That seems to fit with his character.
♪ See, that's St. George's there, which is, what, maybe only 200 meters from where Richard Smith was living, and then all you have to do is look down the hill and you can see the trees of College Green where the Moutries lived.
It's just all so close to each other.
♪ This is it!
This building here is now a Costa, but this is where the Moutries had their shop, where they lived.
It is grand!
I mean, this is serious, serious shop frontage.
They ran a music library from here, they fixed pianos.
If you were somebody, a wealthy person, genteel person in Bristol who was into music, who was into theater like we know Richard Smith was, it is highly likely that the Moutries' shop is the shop you would've gone to.
But of course, it was their home as well.
This is likely the place where Edmund was born, it's probably where he also died, and it's actually quite poignant to think of that, to think of him living there.
If your baby, the youngest child of eight died unexpectedly, and you were familiar with Richard Smith as the preeminent surgeon in Bristol at that time, wouldn't you have asked?
Wouldn't you maybe have asked him if there was any way he could help you find out what happened to your baby?
♪ Look how close Richard Smith's house up here is to the Moutries, they're down here.
Yeah, they're on College Green, he's on Park Street, but effectively, it's just the same street.
They are within walking distance of each other, -aren't they?
-Yeah, they are!
(Carla) What about the circles that they moved in?
Would they have known each other then?
(Tori) I think they're different social spheres.
Richard Smith is definitely upper echelons.
I'm sure, if they weren't friends, that they would've known each other.
(Carla) This could mean that, you know, the Moutries, they may have lost their son, and then approached him because they wanted some kind of closure, they wanted some kind of postmortem examination to find a cause of death.
On the other hand, I would say it may well just be that if Richard knew of them, he knew that they'd lost a child recently, which would mean that there was a good opportunity for dissection and teaching.
(Tori) Mm, that's a much darker reading of the situation, isn't it?
And to be honest, I wouldn't actually put it past a character like Richard Smith.
He's got form on this count.
And it was something that happened -more generally, wasn't it?
-Absolutely.
I mean, this was a pre-consent culture for autopsies, which means that there was no permission to be gained, but it was really more of a case of entitlement and medical paternalism.
These surgeons did need to further their field and they weren't getting what they needed from the government in terms of resources, so there were a lot of, you know, autopsies that went on without people's knowledge.
(Tori) So you see someone like Richard Smith, yes, you may judge his behavior, but at the same time, he was motivated by a desire to understand more, to push forward medical knowledge.
And I like to think that, you know, our team in here, our little baby Edmund, they are part of that learning process.
They are stepping-stones on the way to understanding more about the human body, about disease that 200 years later is saving lives today.
(solemn music) ♪