Alice Roberts: Our Hospital Through Time (Channel 5)
Witch-hunting, train-travelling, treasure-digging or grail-seeking, Alice Roberts has either been cloned by AI or she is the busiest presenter on television.
The pink-haired professor is as happy fronting a Mediterranean travelogue, such as Roman Empire By Train on Channel 4, as she is exploring the supernatural on Lost Grail and Witches Of Essex for Sky History, or nipping round the year’s best archaeology excavations on BBC2’s Digging For Britain.
Now she reminds us that she also has degrees in anatomy, medicine and surgery, as she compares the past and present of St Bart’s hospital in London, which dates back to the 12th century. Our Hospital Through Time had her joining in a reconstruction of a gruesome operation carried out at Bart’s in 1638, during the reign of Charles I.
The unlucky patient, Ellin French, was a servant in a wealthy London household, who was accused of theft. Indignantly protesting her innocence, she declared: ‘If it’s true, let my fingers and toes rot away.’ Thief or not, that’s exactly what happened. By the time she collapsed in the street, Ellin had gangrene in both legs and all her fingers.
The chief surgeon, wielding a curved knife and a short saw, explained the trick was to whip off a limb (without anaesthetic) and bandage the wound so quickly that the victim didn’t bleed to death.
I must have been watching too much Silent Witness, because it was almost a disappointment to realise that the patient on the operating table was simply an extra with black make-up on her limbs, and not an elaborately constructed facsimile of a gangrene victim. No legs were sawn off — it was all just mimed.
Alice Roberts (pictured), the pink-haired professor compares the past and present of St Bart’s hospital in London for her new Channel 5 show
BBC2’s A House Through Time brings history alive by tracing individual stories and, with the ghastly tale of Ellin French (who did survive, at least for a few months), Prof Alice seemed to be following that pattern.
But she kept flipping forward to the modern day, reporting on the hospital’s work with cardiac and cancer patients, as well as renovations on the historic buildings.
This could have been interesting too, if more time had been spent introducing the personalities. Instead, we met them briefly, sometimes just stopping for a chat in a corridor, before moving on.
It was all too much for one episode, and it lacked structure and theme. Part-time travel, part medical documentary, it ended up being neither.
Historian Ruth Goodman revealed anyone brought to Bart’s in the Middle Ages would have slept on the floor, on beds of rushes. Herbs such as wormwood, a powerful poison, were scattered around to kill the fleas and lice.
It wasn’t until fireplaces were introduced, during Tudor times, that the hospital went to the trouble of providing beds… because chimneys create a draft at ankle level. I never realised that was why humans stopped sleeping on the floor.