He Would be Turning in His Grave… if He Had a Grave to Turn in!

21 Jul 07

I have just discovered the following fact within Daniel Hahn’s The Tower Menagerie…

The skeleton of the “Irish Giant,” Charles Byrne, is still at the Hunterian Museum*, despite having been acquired illegally (at some point in the eighteenth century) by the museum’s founder, John Hunter! While Byrne still lived, Hunter had offered to pay him for the use of his body post mortem, but Byrne had refused. Not one to be troubled by the mere trifle of consent, however, Hunter had, on the advent of Byrne’s death, made an “arrangement” with the person who was to dispose of the body, and thus the cadaver of this extremely tall and therefore anatomically fascinating man came into the possession of the museum.

I do declare that this fact is most scandalous! I concede that one cannot be made to account for the transgressions of the past, particularly when such transgressions occurred a century or more ago, but surely now, in these (supposedly) enlightened times, this vertically enhanced Irishman should be given the burial to which he is entitled?!

I warrant that he should!

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* now contained within the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and not to be mistaken for the other Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, which was founded by John Hunter’s brother, William.