Cold Case - Mummified Child
Category
π
LearningTranscript
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 Β£6.
22:04If he'd been sold today, our boy could have fetched Β£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.