Between 1637 and 1697, thousands of bodies were buried beneath a historic hospital in Milan. Designed to accommodate the dead as they decomposed, the crypt of the Ospedale Maggiore was used until the limited space and foul smells forced the hospital to find another place to deposit its dead.
But the bodies beneath the Ospedale Maggiore, more commonly called the Ca’ Granda hospital, haven’t been forgotten, however. Since 2010, a team of researchers from the University of Milan and the Fondazione IRCCS Ca’ Granda Ospedale Maggiore Policlinico has worked to recover and study the contents of the hospital’s old crypt, all in an attempt to uncover more about the people and medicine of 17th-century Milan.
“The study of their remains aims to give back a general identity and a story to each of these persons,” the team wrote in a 2022 study, “and [to] examine [the practices] and therapy of this exceptional hospital.”
The Creation of the Ca’ Granda Crypt
When Ca’ Granda was founded in 1456, its mission was simple: to provide assistance to the sick and the injured in the city of Milan, and particularly to those of the poorer classes. For centuries, the historic hospital fulfilled that mission, aiding patients with any manner of ailment. In fact, the hospital long served as a model for medicine in Europe, earning a reputation for its innovative treatments and therapies.
In the 1600s, a crypt was built beneath a church on the hospital grounds, which would ultimately be crowded with thousands of corpses. Comprising 14 chambers, all around 7 feet tall, the crypt covers a total surface area of over 3,900 square feet.
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How Were the Dead Deposited?
Initially, the crypt was meant to contain the corpses as they decomposed into skeletons, at which point they would be carried to another cemetery area at the hospital. But the cool conditions of the chambers and the difficulty of moving their contents meant that the bodies stuck around instead of decaying, making it necessary to close the crypt in the 1690s.
Today, researchers suspect that there are around two million bones inside the crypt, intermingled with ceramics, coins, and clothing. While the lower layers of the chambers contain articulated skeletons from single individuals, the upper layers contain a muddle of bones from many patients — a result of the continued use of the crypt between 1637 and 1697 and of the many attempts by the hospital to accommodate more and more corpses.
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What Do the Dead Tell Us?
Since 2010, researchers have analyzed over 300,000 bones from the crypt’s chambers. Their assessments have shown that the bones belonged to male and female patients, both young and old, many of whom showed signs of damage on their skulls and teeth. Indicative of periods of stress, sickness, and malnutrition, these signs suggest that the majority of corpses buried at Ca’ Granda came from the poorer classes of Milan, confirming that the hospital’s treatments were truly available to all.
The injuries represented in the crypt are diverse, as are the diseases, which include dental conditions, joint conditions, and syphilis. Unsurprisingly, signs of surgery and autopsy are seen among the bones and are interspersed with traces of other treatments, too.
Indeed, chemical studies of the chamber’s contents from 2015 and 2021 suggest, for instance, that the hospital may have treated its patients with heavy metals like lead and mercury. Meanwhile, an analysis from 2023 found traces of cannabis consumption in some of the crypt’s corpses, while a similar study from a 2024 article supports their consumption of coca, a psychoactive plant that is today processed into cocaine.
In their 2022 Medical History study, the researchers stress that these chemical traces can be compared to the hospital’s written sources to recreate the range of treatments that were available to Milan’s poorer classes.
“The examination of these skeletons,” the researchers state in the study, “provides a glimpse not only of this specific hospital but also of an ancient era.”
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Article Sources
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Sam Walters is a journalist covering archaeology, paleontology, ecology, and evolution for Discover, along with an assortment of other topics. Before joining the Discover team as an assistant editor in 2022, Sam studied journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
