Aired: 2/18/2026
This episode looks at Barts' extraordinary archive, a contemporary cardiac emergency, the grisly history of x-rays, and a gruesome 1600s gangrenous limb amputation.
Aired: 2/25/2026
Alice Roberts uncovers the hospital's past and reveals how centuries of medical innovation continue to inform life-saving work in the modern day. She joins surgeon Henrietta Wilson as she prepares to use a million pound surgical robot to remove a cancerous lung tumour. Also, Alice recreates a grisly 17th-century operation on a 'patient' suffering from an enormous bladder stone.
Aired: 3/4/2026
Alice Roberts investigates how Barts came perilously close to collapse in the 1500s. As Henry VIII turned the country upside with his marriage to Anne Boleyn and his break from the church in Rome, he confiscated the hospital's property leaving it penniless. In the modern hospital, cameras follow patient Maxine who is receiving a stem cell transplant from her son.
Aired: 3/11/2026
Alice meets a 24-year-old cancer patient who has come in for urgent treatment, comparing the high-dose chemotherapy drugs he is given to those available in the apothecary shop set up in Barts in the 1600s. She also looks back at the Great Plague of 1665, asking medical historian Lesley Smith how modern-day medics would have dealt with the patients that arrived at the hospital.
Aired: 3/18/2026
Aired: 3/25/2026
