History series which sees skeletons of everyday people from across the ages analysed in staggering detail, opening new windows on the history of our Ancestors by literally revealing the person behind the skeleton.
Mummified Child:
This time the team heads back into a dark corner of the 19th century, to a time when corpses were turned into trophies and children were sold by the inch. Their subject is the bizarre mummified body of a child. Sue and the team pick up the trail that leads to body snatching, serial murder and anatomical science in darkest Victorian Britain. Can they give our boy a home, a face, or a name?
Mummified Child:
This time the team heads back into a dark corner of the 19th century, to a time when corpses were turned into trophies and children were sold by the inch. Their subject is the bizarre mummified body of a child. Sue and the team pick up the trail that leads to body snatching, serial murder and anatomical science in darkest Victorian Britain. Can they give our boy a home, a face, or a name?
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TVTranscript
00:00Britain's finest unit for forensic investigation is embarking on a new and groundbreaking mission.
00:13They're experts in human identification, using the full arsenal of modern technology.
00:21But now, for the first time, they're applying these skills to bodies from the long, distant past.
00:30It's very exciting for us to be able to take the skills that we use on a daily basis
00:35and apply them to look at historical skeletons to see just how far we can go.
00:41Forensic anthropology, facial reconstruction and painstaking research will open new windows on history
00:49as dramatic personal stories emerge from long forgotten bones.
00:55Historical research is allowing me to investigate people's experiences at different times throughout history.
01:02We certainly had a nasty crack to the top of his head. That must have been so painful.
01:08So we've got the face, the facial reconstruction, and we've added some textures.
01:13Fantastic. That is just superb.
01:17This time, the cold case team is heading back into a dark corner of the 19th century
01:24when corpses were turned into trophies and children were sold by the inch.
01:30This is really horrible.
01:33Their subject, the strange, mummified skeleton of a child.
01:38Its brain has been removed, its blood vessels filled with wax.
01:43A child who deserved a better fate.
01:46Can they give him back a home, a face, a name?
01:55This is History Cold Case.
02:14The Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification, part of the University of Dundee.
02:20The forensic unit is about to take on a challenging new case surrounding an extraordinary set of human remains,
02:26the mummified skeleton of a child.
02:30Its identity is a mystery.
02:34For Professor Sue Black, leader of the cold case team, this is much more than just a set of bones.
02:39It's the start of the story.
02:43With her colleague, Dr. Xanthi Mallit, she begins with the first observation of the body.
02:48Boy to the camera.
02:55This is the mummified skeleton of a child.
02:59Boy to the camera.
03:07Isn't he lovely? He's beautiful.
03:10The skeleton was donated by a colleague.
03:13Sue thinks it's over 100 years old and is some sort of anatomical specimen,
03:18dissected for the purposes of display.
03:24A very good friend said, you know, I brought you a present.
03:27And I thought, well, you know, chocolates would have been nice.
03:30Champagne would have been fine, but, you know, this is what we get as a present.
03:36Probably a little boy, somewhere around about eight.
03:41And I have to say, I've never seen anything like it before. I really haven't.
03:46To transform the body, the top half of the skull has been sawn off
03:50and the chest prized open to remove internal organs.
04:00But some of the blood vessels are still preserved, carefully filled with a waxy resin.
04:07Is he naturally mummified? No, I don't think so.
04:12Because if you can see, see these red bits that are sort of poking out here?
04:16These are resin.
04:18And this is a process that's called perfusion,
04:22where you place a substance into a vessel to make it stand out so that you can see it.
04:28Until well into the 19th century, anatomists and surgeons
04:32commonly dissected and preserved human bodies as part of their training.
04:36A specimen like this one could have been used as a teaching aid.
04:40But look at the cross, look at the flow and the line of that.
04:44Very artistic.
04:46And when you hold him, lift him up, it's really quite...
04:49It's pretty solid, isn't he?
04:51Well, it is, but it's really rather impressive
04:55that that's how he would be hanging, looking like that.
05:00Sue never forgets that her subjects were once living people.
05:04There is a sadness in the case.
05:06There is no doubting there is a sadness.
05:09This was somebody's son.
05:11This little boy did have a mum.
05:13Whether he had a dad at home or not, we don't know.
05:16But he certainly would have had some family.
05:19But did anybody care enough for him?
05:22I don't think so.
05:24We don't know, but he certainly would have had some family.
05:28But did anybody care enough when this happened to him?
05:31We don't know.
05:33I need to know who he is. I need to find that out.
05:36He needs that respect.
05:45The initial examination confirms only the basic facts.
05:49He's a boy, probably around eight years old.
05:52Can the cold case team discover anything about who he was,
05:55where he came from, when he lived,
05:57and, of course, how he came to be hanging on a wall as some macabre display?
06:10Sue calls the first briefing.
06:16This is what's been rather affectionately become known
06:20as the problem child of our department.
06:22So it's a little boy between six and eight.
06:25Dr Wolfram Meyer-Augenstein will hunt for chemical signatures
06:29in the boy's bones, which could reveal information
06:32about where he lived and what kind of life he had.
06:36Dr Caroline Wilkinson will perform the important task
06:40of giving the boy back his face.
06:42Is there enough face there for you to do something with?
06:47Yeah.
06:48What about the fact that there's still some soft tissue on a nose
06:52and his ears are still there?
06:54You can see one of the blood vessels.
07:00Sue thinks the red wax found in the boy's blood vessels
07:03could provide crucial physical clues in the case.
07:07This resin, this wax, when you mould it,
07:10so if you take a little bit out and you put it in your fingers and you smell it...
07:13My father was a cabinetmaker,
07:15so constant smells of linseed oil and waxes and those sorts of things.
07:19It smells like the inside of my father's furniture van.
07:22So it must be oils or wax of some kind.
07:24Xanthi's task is to get out on the road
07:27to gather evidence from historical records and experts in other fields,
07:31starting with the history of anatomy.
07:35But where do you get a seven-year-old, eight-year-old boy from?
07:39At what point in history have we got access to children
07:43that we could do that to?
07:45And my mind's automatically taken back
07:47to when the anatomists had access to bodies
07:50that were coming to the anatomy departments from the poorhouses.
08:03Bizarre, as it seems to us today,
08:05Sue knows that the display of human bodies
08:08was once considered perfectly acceptable.
08:11If I'm going to put money on any of this,
08:13I could see him late 1800s, even into the early 1900s.
08:19The cold case investigation will focus on three key areas.
08:23The history.
08:24Where does our boy fit into the strange story of human dissection?
08:30The body.
08:31They will do stable isotope analysis on his bones
08:34and test a sample of resin used to preserve his blood vessels.
08:38And facial reconstruction will hopefully give him back his identity.
08:51Xanthi's first stop will be a museum collection
08:54she's heard may have some specimens that could shed light on the boy's story.
08:59I've no idea, really, whether he's literally one in his own
09:04or whether there are more like him somewhere.
09:06So I'm going to go to Edinburgh and see if I can find some evidence
09:10as to how unique he might be.
09:19Edinburgh's Surgeons Hall Museum
09:21has housed artefacts belonging to the Royal College of Surgeons in Scotland
09:25since 1804.
09:30Here, Xanthi's meeting curator, Andrew Connell,
09:33who wants to show her a bizarre collection
09:35donated by the pioneering Scottish anatomist, John Barclay.
09:42Oh, look at that.
09:48Oh, wow.
09:49Now, that is a young child.
09:52Now, these are from the Barclay collection.
09:57John Barclay donated his collection to the college.
10:01Beautifully done. Look at that, all the tiny vessels.
10:04Is it possible to pick him up?
10:06If you like, put on a pair of gloves
10:08and almost baby-like, if you just support him under his spine at the back.
10:19On his death in 1826, Barclay left more than 2,500 specimens,
10:24some of them children, just like our cold case.
10:32He's quite beautiful, isn't he?
10:34Mm.
10:36Again, the soft tissue of the face has been left intact, hasn't it?
10:41The nose and ears, primarily, in this case.
10:45He's amazing as well.
10:50Many of these specimens have waxy resin in their blood vessels,
10:54just like our boy.
11:01There's one exhibit in particular that catches Xanthi's attention.
11:06Oh, wow.
11:08He's really, really interesting, very similar to our boy,
11:11except he's got less soft tissue on his face, but visually he's very similar.
11:16Do you want me to show you our mummified boy?
11:18Sure, if you wanted to display a particular posture.
11:21There we are, that's our young man.
11:23Let's have a look at the window here.
11:25Right.
11:27Well, certainly I can see similarities between them.
11:30I think, in terms of when he would have been dissected and naturally mummified,
11:36that might be quite a similar match.
11:381702.
11:39Wow.
11:47So, the Dundee case isn't the only surviving specimen of children
11:50whose bodies were turned into exhibits.
11:54But confirming the date and provenance of the Dundee mummy
11:57will involve a lot of hard science.
12:00DUNDEE
12:10For Sue, the next step is to take detailed measurements of the child's bones.
12:15And something doesn't add up.
12:18What I think is happening here is that the top half of the body,
12:21the teeth and the collarbone, are telling me this is a child of a Bidate.
12:25The other parts of the body, so the long bones,
12:28are telling me that if this was a normal child,
12:31then they're going to be much younger, they're going to be five.
12:33I can't believe those. Those are going to be wrong.
12:36He's got short little limbs, short little legs and short little arms,
12:40simply because there's been some disturbance.
12:43There's something going on.
12:51The boy is several centimetres shorter than he should be for his age.
12:55To see if she can discover why,
12:57Xanthe arranges for him to be scanned at a hospital just up the road.
13:02The remains of a mummified child aren't what they're used to.
13:16The CT scanner takes a series of x-rays that can be built up into a three-dimensional picture,
13:21allowing us to see inside the child's bones.
13:26The data will hopefully reveal why the boy is significantly stunted in stature,
13:32as well as forming the starting point for Caroline's facial reconstruction.
13:39Oh, look at that.
13:41Wow.
13:48With the scan complete, the images of the boy's leg bones
13:52provide Sue with a big clue about events in his early life.
13:56I've got on here now the foot and the lower end of the tibia and the fibula,
14:01which is just down at the ankle joint.
14:03And that very dense white line is where the bone is growing.
14:07But if you look above it, you can see just a ghostly white line that runs across above that.
14:12And there's another one above it, and another one above it, and again and again.
14:16These are the Harris lines.
14:18And what they tell us is that when that bone was growing, for whatever reason, it went into a stutter.
14:25And so that rather than laying down bone and getting bigger, it's gone into a stutter,
14:30and it leaves behind a line of dense white bone.
14:34And this is telling us that this child has gone through episodes of either malnutrition
14:40or episodes of disease or something that will affect his growth.
14:46And it would be very easy to fit that picture into the workhouses of the 1800s, very, very easily.
14:53It's really rather sad, isn't it?
15:01These Harris lines tell us that his bones stopped growing more than once during his childhood.
15:08If he was among those living in the workhouses set up in the 1830s,
15:12he could easily have lived in squalid conditions, barely surviving on starvation rations.
15:21Many who entered the workhouse died.
15:24And shocking as it may seem, the bodies often ended up on the anatomist's table.
15:37It would be a pitiful end for a small boy.
15:41But despite the emotional tug of the case, Sue has to keep her professional distance.
15:48My job as a forensic scientist is to be able to provide objective evidence.
15:55If I become involved personally in the case, I start to have my own opinions,
16:01that somebody should be found guilty, that somebody needs to pay for this,
16:05then I am no longer an objective scientist and I should be removed from that arena.
16:21In Edinburgh, historian Owen Dudley Edwards is showing Xanthe a chilling example
16:26of a place where corpses of the poor were taken.
16:36Now, we have to be very careful here.
16:40Very slowly.
16:42This is very dark down here.
16:44Isn't it? Isn't it nice?
16:47Nice?
16:48He's taking Xanthe into what was once a secret tunnel underneath the University of Edinburgh
16:53where dead bodies were brought in under the cover of night.
16:57This is where they would have been snuck in, basically.
17:00Yes, well, the fact was that there was great hostility among the ordinary people of the city
17:07because they believed the doctors were killing the poor to cure the diseases of the rich.
17:15So this tunnel existed and the bodies would be taken in secretly by night on the ground
17:23that if it were what the crowd didn't know, it wouldn't trouble them.
17:27Despite public hostility, it seems that the harvesting of bodies was all perfectly above board.
17:35In 1832, the government had passed the Anatomy Act
17:39which made it legal for anatomists to claim any unclaimed corpse from the workhouse.
17:44But is our boy's story really so simple?
17:47Was he donated to an anatomist for dissection under the chilling edicts of the 1832 Anatomy Act?
17:57The Story of Xanthe
18:05Xanthe is following a new lead to London.
18:08The historical picture that's beginning to emerge for the boy is pulling her deeper into his story.
18:13You're dealing with forensic cases.
18:15All your training tells you to remain objective and to actively not engage with the person you're looking at
18:22and their history and their story.
18:24We're getting to know the little mummified boy a little bit more now
18:27so you find yourself wondering how he would have lived and you're engaging with him on a personal level.
18:41Xanthe is heading to the Hunterian Museum in London,
18:44home to Britain's largest collection of human and animal specimens.
18:49Simon Chaplin is showing her an extraordinary set of exhibits.
18:53We're surrounded. There's three and a half thousand specimens here.
18:56These are all the work of John Hunter.
18:58And John Hunter was an anatomist, obviously did a lot of dissection.
19:03He was an anatomist, he was a surgeon, he was a teacher of surgery and anatomy
19:07but he also had a much wider interest in natural history.
19:11John Hunter was an 18th century celebrity.
19:15John Hunter was an 18th century celebrity
19:18who entertained the London elite in his salon in Leicester Square.
19:22He was so influential, the Bishop of Durham donated his own rectum to the collection.
19:36Some of Hunter's preservations were mummified, others pickled in alcohol.
19:41Like this rare specimen of an unborn horse.
19:50But Simon Chaplin let slip something that could really shake up the investigation.
19:56This is our little boy. There you go.
20:00The pose in this one is unusual.
20:02The raised hand is something that occurs quite often and it harks back to earlier anatomical textbooks.
20:08Oh that's interesting, we haven't found anything about the position of the hand yet
20:12and that's one of the things we thought was probably really key about this individual
20:15so that's really probably an earlier specimen.
20:17Well it reminds me of 17th and early 18th century anatomical textbooks
20:23where anatomical figures were often shown with one hand raised in a kind of classical pose.
20:29Could this be evidence that our boy in fact lived before
20:32sourcing bodies for dissection was made legal by the Anatomy Act of 1832?
20:39More clues lie in a book by John Hunter's brother, William, from 1784
20:44which points to how widespread the appetite was for human specimens.
20:51And he says here, I must likewise earnestly recommend it to every student
20:56to make and collect as many anatomical preparations as he can.
21:00And he goes on to say what preparations, what specimens, a student to have
21:05and he says they should have a preparation of all the blood vessels in their natural situation
21:11and two preparations of the trunk of a child.
21:13In other words, exactly the kind of preparation that we've been looking at.
21:16Absolutely, yeah.
21:18What Simon reveals is just how sought after these specimens were
21:22before the Anatomy Act made the supply of corpses legal
21:26and they could fetch huge sums.
21:29I want to show you an amazing collection of auction catalogues
21:32from the late 18th, early 19th century.
21:35What we have here is the catalogue of anatomical preparations,
21:39the property of a surgeon who has declined lecturing in about 1769.
21:44And if we look down here, we can see a whole subject in a wainscot case
21:49glazed with the arteries completely injected and dissected
21:52and then lot 67, a child with the arteries injected
21:56which sold, according to the annotation here, for £6.
22:04If he'd been sold today, our boy could have fetched £8,500.
22:14In life he might just have been a boy with a bleak future ahead of him
22:18but in death he could have been a very valuable commodity.
22:27Back in Dundee, Caroline begins the painstaking job
22:30of reconstructing the child's face.
22:33She's reconstructed the faces of the dead from Ramses II to Bach
22:37but the boy represents a new and different challenge.
22:43The first thing that I do is I look at the baby's face
22:46and I look at the baby's eyes and I look at the baby's eyes
22:49and I look at the baby's eyes and I look at the baby's eyes
22:52And that's a new and different challenge.
22:55The first thing that I'll do when I look at facial reconstruction
22:58is to go through and make records, take measurements
23:01specifically with this one I want to try and establish
23:04which is the soft tissue and which is the hard tissue
23:06because that's quite difficult to see on the CT data
23:09especially around the nose where we've got quite a lot of preserved, mummified soft tissues.
23:15I think it can be important to try and see this as a living person
23:19because obviously there's been quite a lot of dissection that's been taking
23:24place and there's been quite a lot of conservation of the tissues and one of
23:28the nice things about doing a reconstruction is we should be able to
23:31see him as a living individual again and that will as well give him back some
23:35some dignity because obviously this is relatively undignified.
23:42It will take several more weeks before Caroline can fully reconstruct his face.
23:49At a team debrief, Xanthi updates the others about her discovery.
23:54She thinks that the anatomical books from London and the mummified children in Edinburgh
23:59could point to the boy being a much earlier specimen than they first thought.
24:03To find out more about him, we went over to the Royal College of Surgeons Museum.
24:07Which one? Edinburgh.
24:09And what we found was they have a number of mummified children over there.
24:13Oh, do they? Yeah, and this is one of them.
24:15And this is a little child. He's probably, I would say, two to three years old.
24:20These are pre the Anatomy Act.
24:23Do tell.
24:28Everything will depend on forensic tests to pin down an accurate date for our boy.
24:34The results of radiocarbon dating a sample of the boy's leg bone proved inconclusive.
24:41But could they gain any information from analysing a sample of the waxy resin found in his blood vessels?
24:50So are we saying there's a possibility of getting almost like a signature out of the resin?
24:58Possibly. That could match it to the person who did it?
25:01That's interesting. Which is going to be the next date.
25:06It's a long shot.
25:08A small sample of resin will be subjected to mass spectrometry to decipher its chemical make-up.
25:20At the Hunterian Museum in London, Simon Chaplin has offered to donate a sample of resin from one of John Hunter's own specimens,
25:27to see how it compares with the resin in our boy.
25:34Oh, OK.
25:36So this is an ox heart from John Hunter's collection.
25:39So from the 18th century, it's been injected.
25:42We've found that these extrusions are still quite pliable.
25:45We've taken two specimens here for testing.
25:49Xanthi also needs to pinpoint the ingredients used in the various recipes for resin developed by anatomists.
25:57Simon provides the first piece of the jigsaw in a 220-year-old book.
26:04Here we have, this is Thomas Pohl's Anatomical Instructor, published in 1790.
26:11And then here, what we have is the recipe for a coarse injection, to make a red coarse injection,
26:20the kind you would need for injecting the blood vessel.
26:22Exactly, yeah. Exactly as in our mum and my child, OK?
26:24Yellow beeswax, 16 ounces. White resin, 8 ounces.
26:28Turpentine varnish, 6 ounces. Vermilion, 3 ounces.
26:32And these were very expensive artist pigments that they were using.
26:35Oh, I see. Oh, OK, so these would have been readily available to most people.
26:39If expensive ingredients, they still would have been available to the students and the doctors.
26:43They would have gone along to a colour shop, the kind of place that sold artist supplies, and they would have bought them there.
26:49Oh, I see. Oh, fantastic.
26:55More research leads to 15 different recipes for resin.
26:59The 15 recipes share 13 common ingredients.
27:11And she's found an artist supply shop which still stocks the ingredients used by anatomists two centuries ago.
27:24She's meeting colour man Nicholas Wold.
27:28I'm not sure how you'd say that. Isinglass? Isinglass. Isinglass.
27:31Yes, fish glue. Fish glue? Fish glue. OK.
27:35It comes from the bladder of sturgeon. OK.
27:38Also, yellow beeswax.
27:42Oh, wow. Actual little pellets.
27:46Oh, it's definitely beeswax, isn't it?
27:50So that's our vermilion. Wonderful colour.
27:53It's a poisonous pigment.
27:55What does carmine look like?
27:57Wow.
27:58Which, again, is an absolutely stunning colour.
28:01That's really vibrant. Paraffin wax, Japan wax, all of these things.
28:05Would definitely have been available.
28:07Gumboj? Gumboj. Gumboj.
28:10Oh, wow. Look at that.
28:12Oh.
28:13Gamdamar, which is used for making varnish.
28:19OK.
28:21That one.
28:23Thank you very much.
28:25Thank you very much.
28:27Armed with all the ingredients,
28:29Xanthi can now organise the chemical analysis of our boy's resin.
28:33The results might just be able to pinpoint
28:35when and where he was originally preserved.
28:50In Dundee, our child's face is beginning to come back to life.
28:55Well, the first thing we needed to do, obviously,
28:57was to add the missing bit of the cranium.
29:00And what we've done there is we've taken in a template
29:03of a similar aged ethnicity skull
29:07that we already have in our database
29:09and have morphed that to fit this skull,
29:12to fit with the contours of this skull.
29:14What I've also done is to copy the missing area
29:17of the superorbital bone on the right-hand side
29:20and flipping it and putting it above the right orbit.
29:23Also, just because it looks a little strange,
29:26I filled the hole that's on the frontal bone on the forehead there,
29:29which was a mounting hole.
29:31With the skull complete,
29:33Caroline can start adding some of the facial features.
29:36Now, with the eyeballs, we can import spheres
29:41of approximately the right size,
29:44which is about 22mm in diameter for someone of this age,
29:48In order to recreate the nose,
29:51I've taken measurements of the width of the nose
29:53and some measurements of the nasal aperture.
29:55So what I've then been able to do is to import a nose model
30:00and alter it to fit this particular skull.
30:05And we can also see in profile
30:09that we use those two tangents
30:13to tell us the most projecting point on the nose.
30:19We can see by the angle of them
30:21that this individual would have a concave nasal root,
30:24which means a curve, an upward curve to the nose,
30:27which is also very common in individuals of this age.
30:30Most children have little upturned noses.
30:33I think you can start to see what he's going to look like.
30:36So as soon as we start to see some of his facial features,
30:39then we can look at him as a boy rather than a specimen.
30:46Caroline now needs the results of Wolfram's stable isotope tests,
30:50which could confirm the theory that the child was malnourished.
30:53It doesn't give us any information about facial features.
30:56It won't make any difference to the shape of the face,
30:58but what it will do is enable us to choose
31:01which tissue depth data to use,
31:03whether to use emaciated, normal, or overweight.
31:06And I'm waiting to find out that.
31:12The analysis involves sampling a small section of the boy's leg bone.
31:18Wolfram is particularly interested in the relative values of isotopes
31:22of nitrogen and carbon found in the collagen part of the bone.
31:27Called stable isotope testing,
31:29this process can reveal crucial information about a person's background.
31:36Largely it can say, where did someone come from?
31:39It can then tell us perhaps something about their diet.
31:42What sort of diet they had.
31:44Were they herbivores? Were they carnivores?
31:46Was it a mixture of that?
31:48And when you know the diet,
31:50then that gives you some indication of a social status as well.
31:53So really those are the three things.
31:56The geography, where the person comes from,
31:58a bit about the diet,
32:00and then we can infer from that maybe a bit of the social status.
32:04While Wolfram hunts for answers about the boy's diet,
32:07Xanthi continues her mission.
32:09Now armed with a third sample of resin from the Edinburgh mummies
32:12prepared by John Barkley,
32:14she's come to Northumbria University
32:16where all three samples of resin will be tested.
32:20Hello.
32:21Hi.
32:22Pleased to meet you at last.
32:24I was hoping you can tell me a little bit about the waxy resin
32:27that we took out from the mummified child through his arterial system.
32:30The 13 ingredients she picked up in the artist's supply shop
32:33will provide the baseline samples for the mass spectrometer.
32:43Meanwhile in Dundee, Sue and her student Scott
32:46use some of the ingredients to actually recreate the waxy resin
32:49from an 18th century recipe.
32:52They're cooking up a mixture of beeswax,
32:54pine resin and turpentine.
32:56It may be the first time this has been done in a couple of centuries.
33:01Perhaps if we do it very gently.
33:03Gently?
33:04Yeah.
33:07So that it's a slow and gradual process.
33:10And then at the very last minute,
33:13what we're going to do is put the vermilion in.
33:17Ooh, look!
33:18Ha!
33:19Ooh!
33:21It does look like vermilion.
33:23Ooh!
33:25It does actually look very like blood.
33:27You can see why they've used that, can't you?
33:30Thomas Pohl's book of 1790 also advises on the best sort of body to use.
33:38And it says, for this purpose, which is injecting,
33:41adult subjects are seldom used.
33:44Oh, how interesting.
33:45On the account of the difficulty
33:47in completely filling the vessels with injection.
33:50So the suggestion there is that to do this article,
33:53it's normally done on children.
33:57Sue isn't content with just making up a recipe.
34:00She wants to inject it into a blood vessel and see how it works.
34:05In this case, it's a pig's aorta from a local butcher's.
34:10If we try and suck it up...
34:14OK.
34:15It is a bit...
34:16If you can...
34:18Leave that.
34:19If you can hold up the aorta,
34:23let's see if we can inject it in.
34:25Now, watch, because it might be quite hot.
34:31Let's just try... Ooh!
34:33If we can get a flow going.
34:42You can feel that hard and quick lifting towards the bottom.
34:44Excellent.
34:45You're not burning your fingers, that, are you?
34:47In terms of the injection, that's not going to take much more
34:49because it's right at the top there.
34:54And then it says, yep, let's just put it in cold water now.
34:56OK.
34:57Which is what's supposed to solidify it.
35:00I don't think it'll need much help, to be honest.
35:02No.
35:04It's quite hard, yeah.
35:05It's quite hard.
35:06If you take a plug of it out, for example, look.
35:11That's the sort of thing that we were finding inside his blood vessels.
35:15It does work.
35:24The last of the forensic tests are now in,
35:27so Sue assembles the team.
35:35Wolfram has drawn a blank in terms of pinpointing where the boy comes from,
35:39but has found something exciting from the nitrogen values in the bone sample.
35:46A long story short, all the nitrogen values point at somebody
35:51who had definitely not a protein-deficient diet.
35:56Whether the protein came from lots of cheese and whatever,
35:59cream cheese or lots of milk, I don't know.
36:02That's interesting.
36:03Or whether it came from meat or fish or poultry,
36:06but it was definitely not meat-deficient.
36:08So this is not a porpoise diet, is it?
36:10Unless the diet in arms houses, in porpoise houses, was much better.
36:14No.
36:15No, no, no.
36:17Such a protein-rich diet means our child is unlikely to have lived and died in a workhouse,
36:23and it would follow unlikely to have been the victim of the 1832 Anatomy Act.
36:28The stunted growth that Sue discovered in his bones could have been a result of disease.
36:35No one was immune to the epidemics like whooping cough and measles
36:39that raged through the population.
36:42The news that our boy was well-nourished
36:44means Caroline can press on with recreating his face.
36:49From my point of view, in terms of the amount of tissue depth
36:52we can use for the facial reconstruction,
36:55then the best thing for me to do is to use the average.
36:58There's no point in using a maciator.
37:00No.
37:01It's now time for Xanthi to drop her own bombshell.
37:06She's got the data back from the tests on the resin in the boy's blood vessels.
37:11We sourced a sample of the Barclay Collection and the Hunter Collection
37:15so they actually could compare them.
37:17They gave you a sample?
37:18Yes.
37:19Good grief.
37:20Yes.
37:21Well done.
37:22So we had more than just the recipe to go on,
37:24because there would have been some variation as people kind of tweaked it,
37:27just like any recipe.
37:28Absolutely.
37:29So the Hunter material's all in London?
37:31London.
37:32The Barclay material?
37:33Edinburgh, yes.
37:34So out of the two that they were compared to, it was Hunter that was the closest.
37:39Good grief.
37:40But it was close enough that it could have been a slight variation on Hunter's own recipe.
37:45So, I mean, long shot, but it could have been on Hunter himself that did the actual dissection.
37:51So when you go to the Hunterian Museum, is there something else that matches this?
37:56No.
37:57So what you could be looking at, for argument's sake,
38:00if we were absolutely going to take this to the limit,
38:02is the first and only example belonging to the Hunterian Collection.
38:09Surviving?
38:10Yeah, possibly.
38:11Outrageous.
38:12Yes.
38:13That makes it very, very important.
38:15Yeah.
38:20So our boy could be one of the first examples of this kind of specimen.
38:25And the result that his resin is similar to one of John Hunter's recipes
38:29would place our boy in a time well before the 1832 Anatomy Act made obtaining bodies legal.
38:38We're looking at late 18th century, early 19th century in London.
38:44Yeah.
38:45An anatomical specimen.
38:46Yeah.
38:47A child that's not particularly undernourished.
38:51We're not looking at a, probably we're not looking at a poor house child.
38:54No.
38:55What's happening in London on the anatomical scene at that time?
39:00Before the Anatomy Act.
39:01Before the Anatomy Act?
39:03There was no legal way of obtaining children.
39:07Was it illegal?
39:09That's the question.
39:11You need to speak to somebody who has a good understanding of the anatomical society
39:18within London of that time, a good historian.
39:23If our boy was illegally sourced to be experimented on, this is a major turning point.
39:30What's happening in this case is that we thought this is going to be a post-1832.
39:35No, it's not.
39:36It's a pre-1832, completely different set of evidence,
39:40completely different path that we want to go down.
39:43So you can't predict when something is going to change.
39:46And this case has given us quite a number of twists and turns
39:50that we just simply couldn't have anticipated.
40:00Does a boy, well-nourished and from London,
40:04point to an even darker side of the history of anatomy?
40:08Is he a victim of a period when the demand for dead bodies far outstripped the legal supply?
40:21When the grave robber was society's bogeyman?
40:25When the grave robber was society's bogeyman?
40:46Xanthi's about to find out.
40:56She's back in London at the Royal College of Surgeons
40:59where she's discovered that they have first-hand evidence
41:02that bodies like our boy's were stolen.
41:07She's meeting archivist Louise King.
41:14OK, so this is a diary of a resurrection.
41:18This is a diary of a resurrection.
41:21OK, so this is a diary of a resurrectionist from 1811 to 1812.
41:27It just covers a few months.
41:29And a resurrectionist would have been...?
41:31A grave robber, essentially.
41:33OK.
41:35February 2nd.
41:37Went to look out, met at five in the evening,
41:41went to the Green, got seven large and three small and three foetus.
41:45Same night, went to...
41:49Wisegate? Something like that.
41:51Four large and two small.
41:54Took them to Bartholomew's.
41:56So he's going and basically digging up graves,
41:59taking seven large, so seven adults, I guess,
42:03or seven large children.
42:05No, I think large he tends to use for adults, yeah.
42:08Three children and three foetuses.
42:10So he's looking probably for newly buried, newly covered graves.
42:14As I understand it, they had lookouts
42:17who would let them know that there had been burials.
42:20A new burial, and what was potentially being buried.
42:23It's almost like a shopping list,
42:25and then taking them to hospitals for the dissection.
42:28That's right, yes.
42:29And this is the only book of its kind like this?
42:32As far as we know, yes, it is.
42:34Oh, how odd, isn't it?
42:36Just saying, like, seven large and three small.
42:39Yeah.
42:41Oh.
42:43It's a fantastic piece of evidence.
42:46But this diary is just one man's account.
42:50To find out more,
42:51Xanthi must immerse herself in the world of the resurrectionist.
42:55Will she be able to place our boy in this dark
42:58and largely unexplored chapter of British history?
43:02MUSIC PLAYS
43:08In Dundee, armed with the information that the boy had a healthy diet,
43:12Caroline is beginning the process of adding flesh to the bone.
43:18I've placed these pegs on that represent the tissue depths.
43:22Now, because we found out that this individual wasn't emaciated,
43:25didn't have a starvation diet,
43:27we've used contemporary seven-, eight-year-old measurements
43:31from a British population.
43:33And that really helps us, after we've done the muscle structure,
43:36to put the correct amount of tissue over and above the muscles.
43:40So the next thing is to import each of the facial muscles
43:45and distort it and deform it to fit this particular skull.
43:49Caroline uses haptic, or tactile, technology
43:53that allows her to mimic the experience of building a face from clay.
43:57A mechanical arm gives her the sensation
43:59of feeling the surface of the head she's reconstructing.
44:03When you touch something on the computer screen,
44:05it gives you this, what's called haptic feedback.
44:08So, in other words, you can feel what you're touching on the screen.
44:11It enables you to do things with speed,
44:13but also look back at what's underneath as well,
44:16which is something you can't do with real clay.
44:18Once you've put a muscle in place,
44:20you can't then have a look at the bone underneath again.
44:22So this system allows you to constantly check what you've done.
44:26So it's kind of exciting working with new technology like this.
44:32Having placed all the muscles, she can now add the tissue.
44:36Everything she's done so far
44:38is based on the scientific information the team has gathered.
44:43I'd say that the areas where there's most artistic interpretation
44:47will be the final additions related to age and texture and colour and hair
44:52and all those details that we don't know from the sculpt.
44:56The facial reconstruction is almost complete.
44:59Caroline is on the verge of showing us the face of our boy.
45:18In London, Xanthi's digging deeper
45:20into the sordid history of the grave robbers.
45:23She's come to the very heart of the city to meet author Sarah Wise,
45:27who spent five years researching the world of the resurrectionists.
45:31What I'm hoping that Sarah might be able to give me some insight into
45:35is how common this was.
45:37I mean, if she's got any information which could help us,
45:40that's what I'm hoping for,
45:42and just lead us down that path
45:44where he's learning more about his identity, really.
45:49Sarah wants to show Xanthi a London street
45:51that runs from the Old Bailey to Smithfield Market.
45:57This was the centre for a lucrative trade in fresh corpses
46:00driven by demand from nearby medical schools.
46:07Every student going through the schools
46:09needed at least one body to practise on,
46:11so the demand was high.
46:15Some of the corpses were mummified for display.
46:21So why have we come here specifically?
46:23This whole stretch really was the centre of the resurrection trade
46:27north of the river in London in the early 19th century.
46:31I'm just going to take you up here and show you St Sepulchre's church.
46:35And in 1791, they were so worried about the amount of corpses
46:39that were going missing from the graveyard
46:41that used to be over the back
46:43that they did what many people, even in small villages,
46:47they'd club together and by themselves construct a watch house.
46:53So this watch house looked out over onto the graveyard of St Sepulchre,
46:57which was at the back.
46:59So it was specifically to stop the resurrectionists
47:01coming in and stealing bodies.
47:03That's right, but unfortunately a watch house
47:06was really only as useful as the man who was running it.
47:10And one of the other reasons that body snatching
47:12was able to flourish for so long
47:14was that a lot of the sextons, the watchmen, were corrupt
47:19and for significant payment would, well, not just turn a blind eye,
47:24but would open the gates and help.
47:26That's really grim, isn't it? It's really vile.
47:28It's absolutely horrible.
47:36Across the road is the reason why this graveyard was particularly at risk.
47:40So over on the right we've got St Bartholomew's Hospital,
47:43which was one of the largest teaching hospitals in London
47:47and very much in need of as many bodies
47:51that the body snatchers could supply them with.
47:54So much so that the porters would leave hampers,
47:59large hampers, outside or within their courtyard
48:03for the snatchers to run over, pick up the hamper
48:06in order to bring their corpses from here over to there.
48:11Because this was the site of the Fortune of War pub,
48:15which was the major meeting place and safe house
48:19for body snatchers north of the river.
48:23All that remains now is a chilling inscription.
48:26The landlord used to show the room where, on benches round the walls,
48:30the bodies were placed, labelled with the snatchers' names,
48:34waiting till the surgeons at St Bartholomew's could run around and appraise them.
48:39Oh, wow. This was not exactly underground then, was it?
48:43It was very out in the open.
48:45So this was a good lucrative trade?
48:47Very much so.
48:54But was our boy simply stolen from a graveyard?
48:57Or was his fate even darker?
48:59In a former Resurrectionist pub next to Smithfield Market,
49:02Sarah reveals just how far some body snatchers were willing to go.
49:06I'd like to show you a document.
49:08It's a confession taken the day before his execution
49:12from a very prolific body snatcher called John Bishop.
49:17The document explains how Bishop and his accomplice
49:20lured a 14-year-old boy from the Smithfield pub back to his house.
49:24We lighted a candle and gave the boy some bread and cheese
49:27and after he'd eaten, we gave him a cup full of rum
49:30with about half a small vial of laudanum in it.
49:33That's a tincture of opium.
49:35Oh, OK. Was it illegal then?
49:37Laudanum wasn't at all illegal.
49:39In fact, many people in the 19th century used it quite openly and respectably
49:43as a sort of tonic or pick-me-up or, you know, some sort of relaxant.
49:48The boy quickly passed out.
49:50We took him directly, asleep and insensible, into the garden,
49:54tied a cord to his feet to enable us to pull him up by
49:57and then I took him in my arms
49:59and let him slide from them headlong into the well in the garden
50:03whilst Williams held the cord
50:05to prevent the body going altogether too low into the well.
50:09He was nearly wholly in the water of the well,
50:12his feet just above the surface.
50:14Williams fastened the other end of the cord around the paling
50:17to prevent the body getting beyond our reach.
50:20The boy struggled a little with his arms and legs in the water
50:23and the water bubbled for a minute.
50:25Oh, this is really horrible.
50:28They tricked this little boy, they got him drunk, partially drunk,
50:32they drugged him, they drowned him.
50:34Yes, and consequently they had an extremely fresh body
50:38to start touting around to the surgeons the next morning,
50:41which is exactly what they did
50:43and it's exactly what led to their arrest.
50:46Unfortunately, it was not the first time they'd behaved in that way.
50:51James May, who was his co-defendant at the Old Bailey,
50:55he shouted across to Bishop,
50:57you're a bloody murdering bastard
50:59and you should have been topped, i.e. hanged, years ago,
51:02which indicates strongly that May believed
51:05that Bishop had been murdering for years.
51:08And the other strange thing, Xanthi,
51:10is that the body was in fact noted
51:13and the word that was used was stout.
51:15This boy was not sort of emaciated, he hadn't gone hungry.
51:19Oh, that is interesting.
51:22Wow.
51:27Records prove that Bishop snatched up to 1,000 bodies
51:31and he and his gang may have murdered many more
51:34than the three victims he confessed to in and around Smithfield Market.
51:38MUSIC PLAYS
51:48The panic unleashed by the Bishop case of 1831
51:51highlighted the disappearance of thousands of children,
51:54many of them as young as our boy.
52:09I had no idea that the area surrounding Smithfield Market,
52:14where all of the meat trades take place,
52:16this is the centre of the human meat trade.
52:20Children were being sourced here literally for murder
52:24to furnish the anatomists.
52:27And it's a shocking and horrifying end for these lives.
52:39MUSIC CONTINUES
52:44Whatever the fate of our eight-year-old child,
52:47once handed over to the anatomists,
52:49he quickly became faceless and anonymous.
52:54But the team is about to give him back his identity.
53:01MUSIC PLAYS
53:08MUSIC CONTINUES
53:19The team's forensic evidence and historical research
53:22have revealed that our mummy is an eight-year-old boy
53:25who they believe died in London before the Anatomy Act of 1832,
53:29which made acquiring dead bodies legal.
53:33He was well nourished, but he had lived through periods of ill health.
53:37He was either a freshly buried corpse dug up by grave robbers,
53:41or he was murdered like the boy in the Bishop confession.
53:50It's like he picked up this boy, took him home and killed him.
53:53Yes. Wait till he got a bit sleepy.
53:56Yeah. Chuck him in the well.
53:58I just think it's getting more tragic as we go along this story.
54:01It started out as an anatomical specimen,
54:03and then we kind of realised it was, you know... Illegally obtained.
54:06..it was a boy and it may have been illegally obtained,
54:09and now it's looking more likely it's a murder and...
54:12All for the sake of an anatomical specimen.
54:15But that's anatomy's history. I know.
54:17It's just this particular case, I didn't expect it to head in that direction.
54:21But were you ever going to have a happy outcome
54:24with a dissected seven-year-old?
54:27Anatomy has a very, very murky past.
54:32And we know it's got a murky past.
54:34And ultimately, I think he's a representation of that murky past.
54:41The time has come for Caroline to reveal the final piece of the jigsaw.
54:45So we've got the face, the facial reconstruction,
54:48and we've taken that and added some textures.
54:51We've been given quite...
54:54..not neutral, but common hair colour and eye colour,
54:58and references from that period of time in terms of hairstyle have been used.
55:03OK, so this is just a still.
55:07MUSIC PLAYS
55:19Makes you a very nice-looking boy.
55:32That's good. I like that.
55:37But the reveal and the end of the investigation
55:42presents the team with a dilemma.
55:45We've got to decide, I suppose, what we do with him now.
55:49And I think there are three choices that I can see.
55:54It remains in the department...
55:57We've never been happy with that.
55:59..under circumstances which I don't think are appropriate.
56:02We ask the Hunterian Museum or whichever
56:05whether they would be prepared to house the specimen appropriately,
56:09but with a full story as to how this has unfolded.
56:14Or we decide he goes back into the ground.
56:17Maybe we have an opportunity here to educate people about that darker side.
56:21Do you want him to become an educational specimen?
56:23Oh!
56:25Oh, now you make me sound really hard.
56:27I don't like display cabinets.
56:30I never really have, I must admit.
56:32So if we have any doubt...
56:34We bury him. Then you bury him.
56:36Then I think our decision is that he should be buried.
56:39Would you have felt the same before you saw his face?
56:42Yes. It wouldn't have made any difference.
56:44Because I do feel very, very strongly about human remains
56:48and I do feel very strongly about their display.
56:51And as an anatomist, I feel a responsibility.
57:01After more than 170 years,
57:03the History Cold Case team has given our eight-year-old boy
57:06back his face and his dignity.
57:09For Sue, the case of the mummified child can now be closed.
57:20I think the fact that in this case we've gone from something
57:23about which we knew absolutely nothing
57:26to a point now that we can almost pinpoint him down in time,
57:30that we know which anatomy house he's most closely related to
57:35and we can start to place him within the context of that time,
57:39that's an incredible achievement in a very short space of time.
57:43And I must admit, it's not something that for a moment,
57:46if I'd been honest at the outset,
57:49I didn't think we were going to get very far.
57:51We have gone much, much further than I could ever have anticipated.
57:57This is just about as good as it gets.
58:11Next time, we head back to medieval Scotland
58:14as the team try to piece together the identity
58:17of an extraordinary skeleton unearthed at Stirling Castle.
58:20He certainly had a nasty crack to the top of his head.
58:26Could be our mum. Yes. Ooh, OK.
58:56.