Loading titles…
Documentary
Unprecedented access to the renowned hospital's modern wards and private archive.
This episode looks at Barts' extraordinary archive, a contemporary cardiac emergency, the grisly history of x-rays, and a gruesome 1600s gangrenous limb amputation.
Alice Roberts uncovers the hospital's past and reveals how centuries of medical innovation continue to inform life-saving work in the modern day. She joins surgeon Henrietta Wilson as she prepares to use a million pound surgical robot to remove a cancerous lung tumour. Also, Alice recreates a grisly 17th-century operation on a 'patient' suffering from an enormous bladder stone.
Alice Roberts investigates how Barts came perilously close to collapse in the 1500s. As Henry VIII turned the country upside with his marriage to Anne Boleyn and his break from the church in Rome, he confiscated the hospital's property leaving it penniless. In the modern hospital, cameras follow patient Maxine who is receiving a stem cell transplant from her son.
Alice meets a 24-year-old cancer patient who has come in for urgent treatment, comparing the high-dose chemotherapy drugs he is given to those available in the apothecary shop set up in Barts in the 1600s. She also looks back at the Great Plague of 1665, asking medical historian Lesley Smith how modern-day medics would have dealt with the patients that arrived at the hospital.
Patient Maxine, who comes into St Bartholomew's Hospital with a diseased heart valve, inspires Alice to investigate the world of body snatchers and how when the supply failed to meet demand, people took matters into their own hands to provide medical schools with cadavers. She also looks into the history of anaesthetic with historian Lesley Smith and hears about St Bartholomew's first washerwoman, Elizabeth Johnson.
Alice meets patient Matthew who has a rare form of cancer, called neuroendocrine cancer, which affects his nerve and gland cells. Barts is one of a handful of places that offers an extraordinary therapy for this rare disease, known as Peptide Receptor Radionuclide Therapy or PRRT. As lunch gets underway, Alice investigates the history of hospital food.
Presenter
From dangerous explosives and deadly curses that put everyday people at risk, to treasures found in the unlikeliest of ways, each episode digs into the people, the places and historical significance of these discoveries. And sometimes just being in the right place at the right time can make history…because nothing stays hidden forever.
Gosia Duszak unveils her direct written communications with Swaruu of Erra, a Taygetan from the Pleiadian star system. Sharing information and knowledge in various areas of human and extraterrestrial reality in order to give back to the people the knowledge obscured on Earth for millenia. Through these conversations Swaruu uncovers the potential of souls to evolve and escape the 3D matrix that was imposed upon 5D Earth more than 12,500 years ago as the result of an interstellar war, and maintained by the manipulated human collective mind.
