Learn about the bones in our basement!

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Bones in the Basement

When you come to visit the Benjamin Franklin House, you will see a collection of bones on show in the basement. You may be wondering why there are bones in a house, but there is an interesting reason for this.

Ten years ago when the builders were digging up the garden of Benjamin Franklin House, they found lots of bones buried. Finding these hidden bones was very exciting for many reasons. 

When Benjamin Franklin lived here in the 1700’s, a man called William Hewson was married to the landlady’s daughter, Polly. William was a surgeon and an anatomist, and he was famous for his experiments, especially looking at how blood goes around the body. He ran an anatomy school at the house for 6 years, and taught his pupils all about the human body.

In the 17th and 18th Centuries people wanted to learn more about medicine and how to prevent illness, which was causing many men and women to die at a young age. Disease was spread by dirty living conditions and because many of London’s graveyards were overcrowded many people were dying of illnesses. Special doctors had to investigate what was causing all the illness and as they did not know as much about the body and scienceas we do now, they had to explore the subject differently.

These doctors were known as ‘anatomists’ and their job was to cut open dead bodies and see if there was anything strange in the different parts of the corpse. These surgeons would also drill the body’s bones so that they could study them. These dissections would be done in a theatre and people would pay to watch.
There was a high demand for dead bodies, as the only people that could be used for investigations were criminals that had been executed. From this need, some men began working as ‘body snatchers’ and would dig up the bodies of people that had recently died. It was illegal to do this but they were paid well for this and so lots of people began to ‘rob’ graves of bodies. William Hewson was one of the doctors that would have paid a body snatcher so tht he could perform experiments.

There were over 2000 human and animal bones found in the garden of Benjamin Franklin House. Archaeologists decided that the bones were left over from when William Hewson had finished his anatomy classes. They could tell that they were left from then because the bones had certain holes and cuts drilled in them and they also found glass slides, similar to the ones William Hewson used. Finding these bones has been very important and exciting as it is very useful to study the bones from a long time ago. We can tell many things, such as the diseases and diets of people from centuries ago.