This story was originally published through Undark and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
In the spring of 1782, a 7-foot-7-inch guy known as the Irish Giant arrived in London, advertising himself in the newspapers as a “modern colossus” and “the greatest herbal interest ever seen. “During his 14 short months in London, the wonderful forest giant enjoyed admiration and wealth. But he drank too much and kept his fortune of around $130,000 in today’s money on his person. These riches were stolen from his pocket while he was in a bar near Charing Cross Crossing. She drank more and became ill. He would soon die, either from the tumor that had accelerated his growth, or from alcohol, or from tuberculosis.
When Charles Byrne nearly died, he feared that his corpse would be seized by surgeons and dissected. In fact, he was so worried that he arranged for his friends to bury him in the sea. Meanwhile, brilliant Scotland-born surgeon John Hunter had amassed a vital anatomical collection, adding specimens he had painstakingly prepared from his own dissections. In 1783, when the Irishman died at the age of 22, Hunter recovered the body, probably bribing the undertaker or the culprits for tracking the coffin. .
For more than two hundred years, London’s Hunterian Museum has presented this monumental skeleton as the crown jewel in John Hunter’s collection. The discoloration spots are still visible in some places, such as on the ribs, perhaps the marks of the master dissector running in a hurry because of the worry of being discovered.
Recently, the gallery has been tormented by objections that Byrne opposes his will to die. A 2011 article in the BMJ called for the Irishman to get a correct burial, prompting a flurry of answers from both sides of the question. The Hunterian has been closed since 2017 for renovation, but has not agreed to prevent the skeleton from appearing. Instead, the gallery issued a non-binding statement in October 2020 that “an update of plans for all exhibitions at the new museum will be published in due course. “course. “
Obviously, museums still don’t know what to do with specimens like Byrne’s. Last January, Harvard University presented a committee to make a decision on how to handle the remains of some 22,000 more people in its possession, adding another 15 people of African descent who lived through American slavery. The demanding situations related to such calculations are innumerable: the sheer volume of human remains in museum collections, the difficulty of figuring out where many of those remains come from and, of course, the imperative of striking a balance between the education price of the remains and the duty of respect for the dead and their like-minded cultural groups.
Human remains, when ethically received from voluntary donors, can foster a significant legacy for the dead while allowing researchers and museum enthusiasts to enrich their understanding of the human experience. The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, for example, exhibits the skeleton of Harry Raymond Eastlack. . Eastlack was born in Philadelphia in 1933 with an incredibly rare disease that affects only one in 2 million births. This condition, known as progressive ossifying fibrodysplasia, or FOP for short, caused its structure to expand more leaves and strands of bone in reaction to minor injuries, slowly blocking several of its joints in place.
As he neared his death, when he was not yet 40, Eastlack told his sister Helen that he wanted to donate his body to science. After his death in 1973, his skeleton was transferred to the Mütter Museum. Every year, Hélène came here to pay tribute to him. His remains were also exhibited at meetings for scientists and doctors reading FOP, helping them better understand the disease.
In 1995, Carol Orzel, also affected by FOP, saw Eastlack’s skeleton while attending such a conference. She also made the decision to donate her frame, as long as her jewelry was displayed with her. Their bodies express their interest in science and their preference for other people to perceive what they have experienced, a testament to the meaning of such a gift when it is voluntary.
However, at TooArray, museums have exhibited remains received unethically, without explaining why they did so to visitors. These troubling manifestations are connected to the collection of remains for medical studies without consent, a practice that has targeted marginalized team members and stubbornly resisted. change.
In the United Kingdom, at the time of Charles Byrne, anatomists were legally allowed to dissect executed criminals, under the Murder Act 1752. This was later replaced by the Anatomy Act of 1832, which instead granted access to the unclaimed bodies of the hostile and destitute. When the source of legally available bodies was exhausted, anatomists in the UK turned to grave robbers, known at the time as resurrectionists.
As with so many medical misdeeds in history, those thefts exploited the poor. People with resources hired guards, bought intruder-proof coffins, or paid for those they enjoyed to be stored in so-called dead houses until they were rotten enough to be dead. to anatomists and therefore for burial.
Taking human bodies without consent would possibly look like a macabre medieval relic long gone, but it’s not. New York State, for example, only passed a law blocking the use of unclaimed corpses by medical schools in 2016. And last year, it emerged that anthropologists at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Museum had preserved bones that most likely belonged to two young men who died in the 1985 police bombing of a townhouse in Philadelphia, the culmination of a black organization called MOVE.
The bones had been entrusted to Alan Mann, an anthropologist at the university, for forensic identification. But Mann and a colleague, Janet Monge, kept the remains for more than 30 years, reading them for training and making them go back and forth among them. the Penn Museum and Princeton, without obtaining the consent of members of the MOVE family. At one point, Monge manipulated the bones in front of the camera for an online course.
When ownership of the bones was revealed by anthropologists, the University of Pennsylvania apologized and the remains were returned to relatives for burial. that is, atrocious.
The incident came just weeks after the Penn Museum announced it would begin painting to repatriate its collection of more than 800 skulls amassed by 19th-century physician Samuel G. from nearly and sending letters around the world to obtain them; he also used them to verify and advance his racist theories. Talking about our history of racism is important, but it’s hard to see why we want sick people to be given ten skulls. just do it
Thanks to the vigorous advocacy of indigenous groups, a federal law enacted in 1990 required the remains of Native Americans to be returned. However, the extent of progress over the past 30 years depends on who you ask: museum curators or indigenous groups, many of whom are still waiting for the remains of their ancestors. Some museums have pledged to return as many ethically problematic remains as possible, adding non-indigenous remains, for repatriation and burial, but completing these paintings can be time-consuming and laborious.
Whenever museums exhibit human remains, they deserve to incorporate debates about consent and respect for the dead into their exhibits. If they cannot be transparent and their choices, then they will have to make sure that the remains are repatriated or that they get their final rest. position in a respectful manner, for example by burying them on the site of a monument that recognizes the history of the looting of tombs. Pretending that there is no challenge is not acceptable.
We owe more to the other people who, like Charles Byrne, did not ask, and almost did not want, to spend an eternity exposed.
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