It’s not every day that a British Prime Minister is assassinated, but that’s exactly what happened to Spencer Perceval in 1812. It’s not particularly common to come face to face with a man who shot a Prime Minister either – but you can at Barts Pathology Museum, where the skull of Perceval’s assassin, John Bellingham, has been adopted as a mascot.
After being hanged for the murder, Bellingham’s body was taken to St Bartholomew (Barts)’s hospital for dissection – a common fate for 19th century criminals, helping to make up the desperate shortage of cadavers at London’s medical schools, which was otherwise supplemented by obliging ‘Resurrection Men’: bodysnatchers. Since then, his skull has remained in the hospital’s collections – and today Bellingham sits in a glass case (kept company by several other historic specimens including skulls labelled as a ‘Roman legionary’, ‘early Briton’, and probable ‘Norman soldier, killed at Hastings), his name neatly written across his forehead, looking out over the extraordinary displays that call the museum home.
These collections comprise some 5,000 medical specimens suspended in glass jars, which cluster around the edges of a high-ceilinged Victorian room, arranged over three mezzanine levels linked by a spiral staircase. Tucked away in a corner of the hospital grounds, the museum is not usually open to the public except for during special events – and it was one such event that brought us there tonight,
Kate Mayfield and her glamorous assistant. There’s a picture of Bellingham’s skull on the front of her lectern.
Kate Mayfield, author of The Undertaker’s Daughter, took us through the history of the human heart, from ancient Egyptian religion where the hearts of the dead were weighed against the feather of truth to determine whether the deceased would be allowed to enter the afterlife, to temple-top Aztec rituals where still-beating hearts were cut from the chests of sacrificial victims.
We heard about medieval love magic and its more sinister stalker-esque side, dipping into how necromancers tried to use demons to compel reluctant lovers to do their will; royal funerals where body and heart were buried in different locations (a tradition that endured until George II, who died in 1760); and how the heart emoji was the world’s most commonly-typed character last year. It was a dark and winding tale, and utterly absorbing.
Equally enthralling was the time we were given to wander the specimen cases, glass of gin punch in hand. Their contents were a mixture of the toe-curling and the terribly sad: a fascinating, poignant, insight into the lives of the individuals they had once belonged to. More wince-making was the case of ‘foreign bodies’ that had been extracted from various human innards – truly, the mind boggles.
Barts’ other main claim to fame is its link to Sherlock Holmes – both the original and Cumberbatch incarnations. In Conan Doyle’s books – specifically, in A Study in Scarlet – it is in one of the hospital’s laboratories that Dr Watson first encounters Holmes: a tall, thin figure experimenting with chemicals to find a better way of detecting human haemoglobin in bloodstains, who then goes on to thoroughly freak out the good doctor by deducing all kinds of impossible minutiae about his life. And in the more recent BBC adaptation, the hospital roof takes the place of Reichenbach Falls for Holmes’ ‘fatal’ leap.
A stone’s throw from St Paul’s Cathedral, this is a fascinating place to explore. The hospital itself is swimming in history, its walls pockmarked by bomb damage from the Blitz, and mounted with a memorial to Scottish icon William Wallace who was hanged, drawn, and quartered in the adjacent square, and with a wealth of astonishing buildings nearby – but that’s a topic for another post.
More information
Opening hours: The museum is only open to the public during special events, but these are fairly frequent, and include talks, taxidermy, and art shows – you can find out more about these on the museum’s website, or on Twitter.
Address: 3rd Floor Robin Brook Centre, St Bartholomew’s Hospital, West Smithfield, EC1A 7BE
Website: www.qmul.ac.uk/bartspathology
Twitter: @BartsPathology (Bellingham’s skull, the museum’s mascot, also has a Twitter account: @BellinghamSkull)
Nearest tube: St Paul’s or Barbican.
Twins on Tour 