Alice Roberts: Our Hospital Through Time

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.