LONDON, UK — Even in death, a body tells the
story of its life. Yellow-stained fingers indicate a
cigarette habit. Bruises on the lower legs reveal the
clumsy stumbling of an alcoholic. Tattoos and
teeth can speak volumes about their owners’
fortunes, losses and loves.
As a pathology technician and former mortician,
Carla Valentine’s career has been about
reconstructing lives and deaths based on such
physical evidence left behind.
It was ideal preparation for her current role as
assistant technical curator at Barts Pathology
Museum in central London.
That’s a benign title for what has to be one of this
city’s most unusual jobs: the daily care of 5,000
human organs and tissues housed in glass jars
and acrylic cases in an airy Victorian atrium in St.
Bartholomew’s Hospital.
The earliest specimens date from the 1750s; the
last were accepted in the 1970s. There are gout-
afflicted toes, punctured scalps and everything in
between.
Since taking over the daily maintenance of the
long-neglected collection, Valentine has
reorganized its shelves and replaced some of the
aging jars, or pots. She’s also made it her mission
to reconstruct the stories of the living, breathing
humans to whom those organs once belonged.
“It’s not just about the science or the humanities,”
says Valentine, a 32-year-old Liverpool native.
“It’s about the people behind the pots.”
Some specimens reveal as much about society as
pathology. The museum holds the gnarled mass of
an 18th-century scrotum afflicted with squamous
cell carcinoma, also known as “chimney sweep’s
cancer.”
That first recorded industrial-related cancer
originated in the scrotum, where carcinogenic soot
became trapped in the folds of skin before
progressing through the groin and abdomen en
route to a painful death.
From a case in the back of the room peers the
skull of John Bellingham, whose punishment for
assassinating Prime Minister Spencer Perceval in
1812 was to be hanged and dissected for medical
purposes.
An opposite shelf holds the jaw of a 14-year-old
boy whose head became trapped in a printing
press in 1886, a relic of Britain’s dark industrial
history.
Some of the specimens provide chilling reminders
of modern medicine’s evolution: a brain violated
with an ice pick in a frontal lobotomy, a stomach
exploded from Victorian-era anesthesia.
Fashion also leaves scars. A tiny mangled foot in a
glass jar belonged to a Chinese woman subjected
to foot binding. The liver of a 52-year-old woman
who died in 1907 bears a prominent dent from a
lifetime of tight corsets.
Others simply offer poignant glimpses into lost
lives. A pair of hands face outward from a case on
the second floor, the wrists delicately encircled
with wire. They belonged to a depressed 59-year-
old mechanic who took his own life in a bathtub.
The fingers still grasp the wire’s end.
Valentine spends most of her days alone with the
specimens. She’s grown fond of many of them,
particularly those whose story she’s pieced
together.
“A lot of them become like people to me,” she
says. “It’s much more companionable than being
out with live people on the Tube,” she adds of the
city’s subway system.
People sometimes contact Valentine to confirm
their belief that certain specimens belonged to
family members. Some ask to visit the organs: an
amputated leg, a hand, several different fetuses.
Although she’s tried, she hasn’t yet been able to
verify the identities in any such cases.
The only catalogue Valentine found when she
arrived was a collection of leather binders dating
from the 1970s. They contain little information for
each specimen beyond an identification number
and sometimes a few dates or notes.
Pathology museums such as the one at St. Barts
used to be common features at medical schools.
The museum was a busy teaching site for a
century, when medical students examined the
evidence of disease and procedures gone wrong.
As teaching technologies changed and
maintenance funds dried up, the room fell into
disrepair.
A 1990s scandal at a hospital where hundreds of
organs were removed from dead children without
the parents’ consent turned the public against the
use of human specimens for teaching. Many
British pathology collections were destroyed.
For most of the 2000s, St. Barts’s three-story
atrium opened by the future King Edward VII in
1879 remained locked, its specimens “untouched
and unloved,” says Paola Domizio, the museum’s
curator.
Valentine was hired two years ago in the hope of
salvaging the collection and eventually opening it
to the public.
She reorganized the neglected and leaking
specimens, repotted some herself and peeled away
the industrial carpet tiles to reveal a gleaming
wooden floor. The museum now occasionally
opens for special events, and there’s an ongoing
effort to raise funds to open it to the public.
British law governs the public viewing of human
remains, and the museum will need a special
license to admit visitors to the whole collection. At
the moment, all specimens less than 100 years old
must be stored on the upper floors, which remain
closed to visitors.
Domizio argues that despite its seeming
anachronism, the collection remains vitally
important to the medical profession.
“Would anyone suggest that a car mechanic qualify
without ever seeing or handling an engine part?”
she says. Disposing of the collection, as many
universities have done, she adds, “would be the
ultimate betrayal of the individuals who donated
their gifts.”
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Despite clear signs that the museum isn’t open to
the public, people knock constantly asking to visit:
former hospital employees who remember the
room’s heyday, curious passersby who have read
about the collection, Sherlock Holmes fans.
The latter can be particularly aggressive. Author
Arthur Conan Doyle set the first meeting between
his famous fictional detective and his sidekick Dr.
Watson in the laboratory of an unnamed London
hospital that many fans believe is based on St.
Barts.
Several weeks ago, an American man dressed
head-to-toe in a Sherlock Holmes costume barged
into Valentine’s office — proof, she says, that
dealing with the living can sometimes be odder
than handling the dead.
“The dead cause me no problems," she says, "and
they never have.”
