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.”
