Our Hospital Through Time with Alice Roberts | Preview (5)

St Bartholomew’s Hospital is one of the most extraordinary institutions in the world: the oldest hospital in Britain still operating on its original site, and today a global leader in cutting-edge medicine.

This series has unprecedented access to both its modern wards and its private archive – a unique collection spanning nearly 1,000 years of medical history, unseen anywhere else.

Leading the series is Professor Alice Roberts, whose expertise as an anatomist and historian places her at the heart of this journey. From brutal early surgery to robot-assisted operations, she reveals how centuries of risk and innovation shaped modern medicine.

In this first episode Professor Alice Roberts heads to Barts’ extraordinary archive, which holds almost 900 years of fascinating and priceless artefacts from the history of the hospital. She’s given special access to one of their most precious items dating back to 1137 – a document for a grant signed by Barts’s founder, a courtier called Rahere, still bearing its original wax seal.

Across the courtyard in the high-tech King George V Building are ten state-of-the-art catheterisation laboratories, where a crack team of cardiologists use minimally invasive technology to save the lives of thousands of heart patients a year.

Many of the most urgent cardiac emergencies within the surrounding 200 square miles are rushed straight into Barts. We follow the team as they spring into action on the latest case, using a live x-ray feed to identify a blocked blood vessel, and to guide a tiny stent into the heart.

Although a routine part of medicine today, x-rays weren’t always so well understood. Alice heads to the Pathology Museum to investigate their grisly history, discovering the amputated fingers of early practitioners who got too close to the radiation.

This technology is now used safely by Barts to treat cancer. Down in the basement, army veteran Terry is having radiotherapy treatment for a tumour on his eyelid. The hospital too is receiving treatment – its oldest part, the North Wing, which boasts a grand Great Hall and a magnificent staircase, is undergoing a £9.5 million restoration. We follow the contractors as they painstakingly rebuild the 250-year-old slate roof.

Nowadays Barts has a bed for all their patients, but allocating them isn’t always an easy task, as Head of Clinical Site Management Jason Morley-Smith demonstrates when a rush of cardiac emergencies arrive. Alice meets historian Ruth Goodman who reveals how early patients might have slept on the floor and finds out how the Victorians made wipe-clean beds they could assemble like jigsaws to combat diseases like cholera.

Alice heads back to the archives to see an original copy of The Surgeon’s Mate - one of the earliest English manuals for surgery dating back to the 1600s. She heads to The Old Operating Theatre to test its advice for herself, re-enacting the gruesome amputation of a poor woman’s gangrenous limbs.

Our Hospital Through Time with Alice Roberts begins this February on 5.