It's not every day that you walk into a room full of dead people. At Skeletons, which runs throughout the summer (and, crucially, the school holidays: skeletons + children = hours of blessed peace), the impact of 26 long-departed souls excavated from the bowels of London is made even stronger by the deliberate starkness of the show. This is not just an exhibition of bare bones, but an exhibition stripped bare of all unnecessary embellishments. There are no fancy interactive displays, no distracting gimmicks; just a serious and considered attempt to reveal the many historical, social and medical secrets that the soil of our capital city holds.

All credit must be given to the show's curator, Emily Sargent, who has managed if not the impossible, then the extremely tricky: a show that probes the most intimate recesses of human existence, but refrains from crass voyeurism. However decrepit these remains may be, there is still a strong sense that they were once living, emoting people.

The room is filled with identical glass coffins, each one containing a skeleton. The bones, some tobacco-coloured from the soil, others the more traditional skeleton shade of ivory, others stained bluey-green by the metal of coffins, stand out on black backgrounds. Some are partial, some complete, some tiny, some so large that they seem ready to jump out at you. They are at once unnerving and compelling. Each one has a detailed label that lists the burial site, the period and approximate date, age and sex. There follows the pathology, and any other information of note.

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For example, the skeleton of an 11-year-old child recovered from a burial ground in Chelsea reveals residual traces of rickets, as well as serious problems with his or her teeth. Rickets can be caused by lack of sunlight; could the child have been sickly anyway, and therefore kept indoors for long periods, leading to a vitamin D deficiency? Chelsea was an affluent area even in the 1700s, so it is unlikely that the child would have suffered from malnutrition.

At the other end of the scale, both social and medical, is another 11-year-old, this time found in Spitalfields, from the burial site of the Priory and Hospital of St Mary Spital, itself built on the site of a Roman cemetery (from which some of the older skeletons in this exhibition come). Dating to around 1400, this poor unfortunate suffered from congenital syphilis, and the skeleton shows terrible damage to the bones of the skull and face, and deformed arms and leg bones. The precise date of this child's birth has yet to be established, but the results may prove significant in the debate about whether syphilis was brought to Europe by Columbus, or native to our shores.

The exhibition traces a geographic and socio-economic arc from the West of London, through the City and out into the traditionally more deprived areas of East London. The skeletons betray their origins: from Chelsea Old Church comes one William Wood, an affluent butcher whose bones carry all the trademark signs of the good life: a high protein diet and knee strain from being overweight. Wood died in 1842 at the ripe age of 84.

Meanwhile, over in St Brides, the skeleton of a man from around the same period has a right elbow fused solid by tuberculosis, numerous broken ribs and a smashed nose, as well as a nasty dental abscess in his right jaw. The legacy of a life in the workhouse?

Again, the remains of a young girl retrieved from the Cross Bones cemetery in SE1 for paupers and prostitutes shows evidence of two common afflictions associated with extreme poverty: syphilis and rickets. The poor girl would have had open ulcers on her face, and legs curved by malnutrition.

Perhaps the most touching is a young woman from Chelsea who died with a 22-week-old foetus in her womb. The tiny bones of the unborn child are all there - one of the smallest skeletons recovered in British archeology.

For anyone with an interest in human life, this is a compelling show. Added poignancy is given by Thomas Adank's photographs, inevitably mundane, of the various burial sites as they now appear: an anonymous housing block in place of Cross Bones; a branch of Pizza Hut where once Merton Priory stood.

Skeletons: London's Buried Bones is at the Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, NW1 (020-7611 2222) until Sept 28. Free entry

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