Royal Autopsy S01E01 - King Charles II

Professor Alice Roberts explores possible reasons for the death of King Charles II, the King known for his love of fine dining, theatre, and women, who died in February 1685, aged 54.

She reveals that superstition lay at the heart of 17th-century medicine and instead of helping to cure their King's convulsions and discomfort, his doctors may well have hastened his painful death, with their slavish devotion to purging the body of toxins using a variety of outlandish emetics and enemas.

Did King Charles die of natural causes, did he inadvertently poison himself with his penchant for mercury experimentation, or was it his own doctors' violations that killed him?