Forget ‘great men’ – infection and disease are the really important forces in the development of humankind, believes public health specialist Jonathan Kennedy
Barts pathology museum is usually open to the public only by special appointment. But today, I’m in luck. I find myself with an unexpected open sesame in the form of Dr Jonathan Kennedy, the director of the MSc and iBSc global public health programmes at Barts and the London Medical School, and while he has his photograph taken up on one of its mezzanine floors, I’m free to wander around alone. (At least, I think I’m alone; the museum is nothing if not ghostly.)
On the same site as the hospital in the City of London, this purpose-built, glass-roofed Victorian building is home to about 4,000 medical specimens, the majority of them displayed on open shelves. Every part of the body is represented and every kind of illness and injury – though tracking down a particular condition can be tricky for the non-medical. When I finally find the gnarled, yellow spine of a patient who suffered from tuberculosis – I was after something that speaks to Kennedy’s new book, which is about infectious disease and its effect on human civilisation – it’s largely down to luck. The vertebrae in question just happen to be next to the museum’s most famous exhibit: the skull of John Bellingham, who assassinated the British prime minister, Spencer Perceval, in 1812.
