This is going to hurt!

Professor Alice Roberts explores the sometimes gruesome history of one of the world's oldest hospitals

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With fellow historian Alannah Gilmour

For more than 900 years, the doctors at London hospital St Bartholomew's have treated every disease and medical condition from the Great Plague to Covid, while surgeons have progressed from performing grisly amputations before the invention of anaesthetics to completing complicated heart procedures that are done remotely using computer X-rays and a delicate catheter tube.

"Barts is the oldest continuously operating hospital in Britain on the same site," says historian and medic Professor Alice Roberts, who presents Our Hospital Through Time, a six-part documentary on the famous medical centre.

"I find it incredible that we have got this hospital today that is still on the same site as the Norman hospital from the 1100s. What is extraordinary about this series and what really does mark it out from anything I've seen about medicine and the history of medicine on television is that we are covering the contemporary hospital, modern treatments with modern patients going through those treatments and we are exploring a lot of history that is Barts' history.