The working life of Museum of London

Over the past month the osteology team has completed the analysis of over 700 skeletons from the Catholic mission of St Mary and St Michael, Lukin Street, East London, who died between 1843 and 1854. This has involved collecting vast amounts of data from each skeleton including bone measurements, age and sex estimates, the presence and absence of certain traits and anomalies and descriptions of pathologies. All of this information was entered onto a relational database.

The next stage of the project is to extract this information in order to examine the results obtained and begin to build a profile of what the cemetery population was made up of. Some of this information can be used to tell us the overall age ranges of people, how many suffered from a particular illness or disease, the average height of the population and if there is anything to suggest certain individuals may have been related.

A large proportion of the skeletons recorded displayed evidence of broken bones including over 70 individuals with healed fractures. Other signs of trauma included healed injuries to the bones of the skull, dislocations of joints and indications that some had undergone surgery or autopsy. To help us better understand these fractures and try to tell if they were the result of an accident or possibly violence it is often helpful to have the bones X-rayed. This allows us to look inside the bones and see how well a fracture may have healed and estimate how long ago in a persons life the break occurred. Previously X-rays were taken and developed using a similar method to film photography. After being exposed onto special X-Ray film, the images were developed using a series of chemicals. This could be a time consuming method that meant large samples of bone could not be X-rayed.

Last week I took a collection of the fractured bones to the Department of Radiography at City University, London. The radiographers there have kindly allowed us to use their state of the art digital radiography machines. This equipment uses special X-Ray plates that can be immediately downloaded onto a computer. These digital images can then be manipulated, moved around, lightened or darkened and measures of bone length and fracture angles directly taken. This allows for a greater number of images to be taken and in much less time.

The results clearly show a variety of fractures, many of which were well healed and would have occured much earlier on in a persons life. These images, along with the bones themselves will add to our understanding of what life was like for the people buried in the Lukin street cemetery and give some indication of the hardships and dangers they may have faced during their everyday lives in the Victorian period.

Photos: See photos of the MoLAS osteology team on our Flickr pages