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Anna Sayburn checks out some Southwark skeletons

Halfway through viewing most special exhibitions at Dulwich, the bony finger of mortality taps you on the shoulder. Nothing to do with the paintings, usually, just tiptoeing past the candle-lit mausoleum, with the gallery founders’ mortal remains mouldering away inside.

I’ve always found this memento mori rather bracing. Working in the field of medical journalism, I’m also fascinated with the human body and all its workings. So when the Wellcome Collection opened an exhibition of skeletons, just round the corner from my office, you couldn’t keep me away.

As I soon discovered, it’s one thing glancing at a marble tomb, and quite another gazing down at real corpses, their flesh stripped away by the centuries, exposing the reasons for the aches and pains their owners lived with.

The skeletons come from all over London, and are usually stored in the Museum of London. Southwark is well-represented, with several bodies from the notorious Cross Bones cemetery in Redcross Way, SE1 (see picture). Cross Bones was established in unconsecrated ground, for the disposal of what were euphemistically called ‘single women’, in the 17th century, but went on to give a final home to all manner of Southwark paupers.

One of these single women, probably in her early 20s, demonstrates with horrible clarity the diseases of her trade. A pocked, roughened skull was a clear sign of advanced syphilis. The woman’s sparse, rotten teeth and rickety leg bones point to childhood malnutrition. The wretchedness of her condition is hard to imagine.

Her companions from Cross Bones also inspire pity. There’s an infant, with paper-thin skull, whose swollen elbow joints show signs of smallpox. And an older man, his skeleton devastated by prostate cancer metastases. A shattered pelvis and spine, and a broken hip, suggest death may have come as a relief. By contrast, the bones of those who died of the Black Death show no signs of the disease that finished them off in a brisk four or five days.

It’s a gloomy exhibition all right, even if one of the Chelsea skeletons does belong to a butcher who died at 84 of ‘decay of nature’ while showing all the signs of good living.

The design of the exhibition is austere, rather beautiful, with each body laid out on a bed of black sand, in a tranquil glass and wood case. Dotted around are colour photographs of the sites where the bodies were excavated – a tube sign, a row of houses – as reminder that London life carries on above ground, oblivious. Memento vivi, if you like.

Skeletons: London’s buried bones is at the Wellcome Collection, Euston Road, until 28 September.

Photo of ribbons at Cross Bones graveyard by Anna.