The last weeks of Charles Byrne’s life were nightmarish. Known as the Irish Giant, the seven-foot seven-inch man from Ulster had made his way in 1782 to London, where he earned money by exhibiting himself as a freak. By the end of that year tragedy was overtaking him. He was addicted to alcohol and suffered from the painful effects of a pituitary tumour in his brain, the cause of his gigantism. The accrued savings of his 22 years of life — around £700 — had been stolen in a Haymarket pub.
Even in this condition, Byrne was allowed no dignity. The city’s anatomy schools were eager to dissect his body as a scientific prize. Among these circling vultures, none was more determined than the aptly named John Hunter, eminent surgeon, anatomist, and collector of organic specimens both animal and human.
A horrified Byrne had already rejected Hunter’s offer to buy his corpse and, in a final, desperate bid to escape the surgeon’s saws, asked his friends to encase his body in lead and sink it in the English Channel after he died. But Hunter managed to pay for the cadaver to be secretly removed from its coffin and transported to his home in Earl’s Court. There he boiled it down to its bones and reassembled it as a skeleton. “I lately got a tall man,” he hinted to a friend some years after.
The surgeon’s vast collection of pickled creatures and body parts would later become the nucleus of London’s Hunterian Museum. But last month, when the Hunterian reopened after a lengthy closure, the Irish Giant had been tactfully removed from display. After almost 250 years, John Hunter’s flouting of a dying man’s wishes is catching up with him.
There are, of course, many museums that display the remnants of people wrenched from their graves — or of those never allowed to lie down in them. Stories such as Byrne’s raise uncomfortable questions about this practice. When, if ever, do human remains cease to be human? Does the sanctity of death end at the borders of our own culture and era?
These issues have arisen before. Thirty years ago, the South African government demanded the return of Sara Baartman, a Khoisan woman who in the early-19th century was paraded around Europe, only to be dissected after her death and displayed in a Paris museum until the Seventies. But the morality of displaying human remains has become more broadly contentious in recent years.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe