GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #870: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, SERIAL KILLER?

Is it possible we have a serial killer on the $100 bill?

 

"The law does not prevent our obtaining the body of an individual if we think proper; for there is no person, let his situation in life be what it may, whom if I were disposed to dissect, I could not obtain." --Astley Cooper, anatomist.

For a while before the American Revolution one of our forefathers, Benjamin Franklin, lived in London at what is now a museum unsurprisingly called the Benjamin Franklin House. During renovations in the 'Nineties, the workers found in the basement around 1,200 bones belonging to 15 individuals. Human remains. Understandably they went to the law, but the coroner figured out many of them were more than a hundred years old, some even older.

It's not out of question that they dated back to when Franklin lived there. And so a lot of people started wondering if Franklin was a serial killer. I vaguely remember this news from back then, and I remember thinking, well, Franklin was a scientist. I'm sure he was sciencing up some cadavers. I doubt he killed anyone.

It turns out, I was right. But it wasn't Franklin who was studying the corpses for anatomy purposes. It was William Hewson, an anatomist who taught privately in Franklin's house. In fact Franklin helped Hewson become a member of the Royal Society at the time. But there's still a legal issue with Hewson's lessons. Studying anatomy (involving dissection, of course) was illegal back then. So it's no surprise that Hewson buried his materials in the basement when he was done with them.

Hence the need for resurrectionists. These are the people who robbed graves to deliver fresh corpses to doctors who wanted to dissect them for science. It was good money. So good that decades later a couple of assholes named Burke and Hare decided, hey, why wait for people to die before stealing their corpses? Let's just . . . kill them and get paid!

The world has a funny sense of humor. While Hare may have escaped to Ireland, throwing Burke thoroughly and without question under the red double-decker bus, Burke wound up getting hanged, his corpse turned over to an anatomist for dissection itself.

It's even funnier when you realize that back then robbing graves WASN'T A CRIME. Here's a quote from Ruth Richardson on the topic: ". . . exhumation was not technically a crime or theft; for although dead human bodies were in fact bought and sold, in the eyes of the law a dead body did not constitute real property and therefore could neither be owned nor stolen." It would be nice to know which Ruth Richardson the article meant, but they named her without naming why she's important. I think it's the professor of psychology they meant, and the footnotes you're going to glance through at the end of this seem to support that.

London authorities suspect there are more bones, but it's not a priority. It's pretty obvious that Benjamin Franklin was not a serial killer, that it was all Hewson's anatomy lessons in a time when anatomy lessons were not legal. All the same, I found this quote interesting. Marcia Balisciano, the director of the Benjamin Franklin House, said, "If you keep digging down in London, you can find anything--Roman remains, Viking remains or anything." Here in America we're not going to find much if we dig down. The original City of Chicago is still under the current City of Chicago, for instance. You'll find the ruins of native cultures around my area, but they're usually just arrowheads because the people who lived here were nomadic. But in the St. Louis area there was a fucking huge city hundreds of years before Europeans started building shit here. The original name of the city is lost, but archaeologists called it Cahokia after the tribe who lived there. I'm sure there's a ton of stuff to find when digging in that area.

One more thing I want to bring up. Hewson studied anatomy under the Hunter brothers, but I want to talk about John Hunter in particular. Check out this dazzling quote from one of my source articles:

John Hunter was known for collecting cadavers with medical abnormalities. Ruth Richardson writes of his collection containing, “monstrous births (animal and human) in bottles, the skeletons of physical freaks, a cast of the brain cavity of Dean Swift’s skull, death masks, murderers’ skeletons and relics, and all sorts and conditions of medical prodigies – feet, heads, internal organs – pickled or dyed to show their peculiarities to better effect.” ³⁷ 

One such example of this was the body of Charles Byrne. He had a tumor that caused him to be abnormally tall, measuring 8 ft. 4 in. by the time of his death. He was part of a traveling exhibition using the title of “The Irish Giant.” ³⁸ When he died at age 22, he wanted to be buried at sea so anatomists would not be able to dissect him but, John Hunter was able to obtain his body for approximately £500. After he was dissected, his skeleton was placed on display. ³⁹ According to the Royal College of Surgeons, when the Hunterian museum reopens,“…Charles Byrne’s skeleton will not be displayed…but will still be available for bona fide medical research into the condition of pituitary acromegaly and gigantism.” ⁴⁰

1. Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute (London: Routledge & Kagan Paul, 1987), 64. 
2. James Quinn,“Byrne, Charles,” Dictionary of Irish Biography, last modified October 2009, https://doi.org/10.3318/dib.001320.v1. 
3. Alexandra Topping, “‘He did not want this’: one man’s two-decade quest to let the ‘Irish Giant’ rest in peace,” The Guardian, January 14, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/jan/14/he-did-not-want-this-one-mans-two-decade-quest-to-let-the-irish-giant-rest-in-peace. 
4. Royal College of Surgeons of England, January 11, 2023, “Hunterian Museum to reopen at Royal College of Surgeons of England in March 2023 after five-year closure and £4.6 million development,” accessed March 27, 2023, https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/news-and-events/media-centre/press-releases/hunterian-museum-reopening-2023/.

Those are numbered incorrectly because Blogger won't let me renumber them. But they're the footnotes in order, in case you were interested.

So John Hunter was essentially the Mutter Museum before we had the Mutter Museum. Interesting.