Medical bodysnatching
On the 18th century medical profession's attempts to get the body of Charles Byrne, the 'Irish Giant': Already when Charles Byrne was ill, many London surgeons, who had seen and admired him when he as on exhibition, competed to get hold of his corpse for dissection. A newspaper article stated that 'the whole tribe of surgeons put in a claim for the poor departed Irish Giant, and surrounded his house just as Greenland harpooners would an enormous whale'. Most eager of them all was the celebrated John Hunter... Hunter employed a man named Howison to follow Byrne around, in order to be on hand if the invalid giant died. Charles Byrne was aware of Hunter's schemes against him. Like most eighteenth-century people, he had a great fear of dissected.
But after Byrne's death there were some very unclear machinations, and almost certainly several hundred pounds changed hands - and Hunter got his cadaver. Byrne never has had his proper burial; his skeleton still stands in the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, a central attraction:
Image cropped from this larger one on Wikipedia.
The story of Charles Byrne is from the excellent The Pig-faced Lady of Manchester Square & Other Medical Marvels by Jan Bondeson. It has a bit of crossover of material from his Cabinet of Medical Curiosities (mainly in material on Julia Pastrana), but enough difference for it to be well worth one's while to read both.
But after Byrne's death there were some very unclear machinations, and almost certainly several hundred pounds changed hands - and Hunter got his cadaver. Byrne never has had his proper burial; his skeleton still stands in the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, a central attraction:
Image cropped from this larger one on Wikipedia.
The story of Charles Byrne is from the excellent The Pig-faced Lady of Manchester Square & Other Medical Marvels by Jan Bondeson. It has a bit of crossover of material from his Cabinet of Medical Curiosities (mainly in material on Julia Pastrana), but enough difference for it to be well worth one's while to read both.