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Description: A look at the hidden burial locations spread around London that have been revealed during recent building developments.
Phone: 0207611 2222
Website: www.wellcomecollection.org
Email: info@wellcomecollection.org
Trains: Tube: Euston 
Body of work: an intimate and unsettling glimpse of our diseased past
It is not often that you get to peer over 26 glass cases with bodies in them but that is what happens at Skeletons at the Wellcome Collection.
Even though their precious cargos and carapaces of feature and flesh have gone, here are the bones from men, women and children, from Roman to 19th century burial sites around London, from pits for plague and prostitutes.
Smartly arranged in an east-west fashion (but not all pointing the same way, perhaps to remove any Christian inference), they all have their physical offences described on annotated cards.
And there are a lot of things wrong with this lot, quite apart from being dead. Tuberculosis, osteoporosis, rheumatoid arthritis, rickets, syphilitic ulceration; myeloma, smallpox and (of course) the black death.
What strikes one is that they lie, in various pleasing shades of brown, from dark tobacco to sweet sherry, like so many rustling leaves, their jaws dropped in welcoming grins. One is stained bright green by copper leached from the old Mint.
Not all the identified illnesses are easy for the layperson to spot on the bones themselves. The 11-year-old riddled with syphilis had cheesy holes in its leg bones that must have been excruciating; while femurs bow-twanged by rickets would have caused monkey-like waddles in its several vitaminstarved victims. But the poor bloke who had survived an arrow lodged in his spine died, unfairly, of the plague.
A pleasantly deep, almost nutbrown, solid-looking chap with a "pipe facet" between his jaws (where he had clamped a clay pipe year after year) has teeth so white that they should have had their own show.
Is the tiny 22-week foetus skeleton scattered in the cusp of its young mother's bony groin like a broken nest of weak twigs the most moving? Perhaps.
This small exhibition is intimate and unsettling.
Skeletons is at the Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, NW1 (020 7611 2222; www.wellcomecollection.org) until 28 September. Daily Tue-Sun 10am-6pm (Thurs until 8pm, Sun from 11am).
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
Here is one that begs to be put together with the Crypt exhibition in the local Camden Church. Walking around there a week or so ago with husband who gets impatient should we take too many steps, finding it was difficult for him. So he missed that the Wellcome was endowed by the Friends (Quakers). But he began to get the point when confronted by the artist's work in the catacombs of the crypt.
We then went into the exhibition: I have always had a great curiosity about the stories that bones can tell...so has he, but he had to do some heavy reading first. Grounded in the "Romance" languages, I did not. I tend to pick up people as I go, I cannot keep quiet in the presence of these ghosts who call me across millenia.
He was more reverential than I.
But our reactions were typical of our circumstances: he wanted to punch every man in the mouth for what he has done to the women and their children. I wanted to also kick them where it hurts and break their legs, just as they had done to the disabled woman's skeleton.
The students who are the custodians of both exhibitions were fascinated by our reactions. But then, I am a bumpy ride!
- Carlyle, U.K.
