The giant skeleton, whose height is 2.31 meters, belonged to the Irish Charles Byrne
Photo: Wikipedia
The Hunterian Museum in London has announced that it will remove from the exhibition the famous skeleton of the “Irish Giant”, acquired in 1799. The reason for the removal from the exhibition is the will of the deceased, who tried with all his might to avoid such a fate.
The giant skeleton, whose height is 2.31 meters, belonged to the Irishman Charles Byrne, who suffered from an unknown disease at the time: acromegaly or, more simply, gigantism, caused by excessive secretion of growth hormone (somatotropin ) by the pituitary gland.
During the medical revolution that swept England in the late 18th century, a man of Byrne’s height simply couldn’t go unnoticed by doctors. So the surgeon and anatomist John Hunter, one of the foremost scientists of his day, repeatedly offered Byrne to leave his body to science after death, but the giant did not want his remains to become in object of study.
Assuming the doctor would search for his body, Byrne tried to fool the doctor and arranged with friends that his corpse would be buried in a lead coffin at the bottom of the sea.
Hunter was smarter. After Byrne died of tuberculosis and drunkenness in 1783 at the age of 22, the doctor bribed his friends and got the desired body. Four years later, the skeleton of the “Irish giant” was exhibited in his personal museum, and later acquired by the Hunterian Museum in London (John Hunter’s older brother and mentor, William Hunter, is considered the founder of modern anatomy). , where it remained until recently.
In 2017, the museum was closed for reconstruction, and on January 11, the administration of the institution announced that the updated exposition of the skeleton of the “Irish giant” would no longer be there – it seems that the management decided to listen to public opinion, according to which a person’s remains should be put on public display against their will, it is unethical.
By the way, they say that John and William Hunter were clients of several so-called anatomical murders. Doctors were in dire need of material to compile the obstetric atlas “Anatomy of a pregnant human uterus”, and they did not have a sufficient number of female corpses at different stages of pregnancy.
According to British historian Don Shelton, the Huntre brothers, as well as their main competitor, the physician William Smellie, are responsible for some 40 murders of pregnant women. But this has not been tested.
