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.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #207: THE MUTTER MUSEUM

For years I've heard about the Mutter Museum. For some backwards reason I thought it was in Germany or possibly Amsterdam. As most of you know I spent the weekend under Mike Lombardo's roof. I don't remember how the subject came up, but he surprised me by telling me that the Mutter was in Philadelphia. We decided to go there the next day.

There were four of us: Kevin Strange, Mike Lombardo, Lex Quinn and myself. I hate driving through cities, and Philly was no exception, but when we approached the Mutter I was in awe. It was totally worth it.

Inside the very first thing we saw was Einstein's brain. I didn't know what I was looking at at first, but someone mentioned it, and I thought HOLY SHIT. This is the brain of the person who is thought to be the smartest person who had ever lived. Already the museum was worth the price of admission.

But there was so much more. I saw a wall of skulls, and many of them had the nationality of who each one belonged to in life. Sometimes it even had the cause of death. Every once in a while there was a name. They have a save-a-skull thing: if you donate enough money you can save one of the skulls and have your name in the Mutter Museum. If I had the cash, I would totally do that. If *you* have the money, click on the link and help out.

There's more. You can see deformities caused by STDs, for example. If you've ever wanted to see a skull altered by syphilis, you can find it here. For some people being surrounded by such imagery of death can be overwhelming. For me it was fascinating. I have no illusions about what happens to us when we die, and to be surrounded by so many examples stimulated me (my brain, that is; get your head out of the gutter).

Then we entered a room that thoroughly impressed me. It described Civil War field amputations. They even have an interactive thing where you can stand in one place and see an animated arm attached to you where your real arm should be. You get shot in the war, and it shows you what would happen. Not too far away from there is a display about Walt Whitman. I know a fair amount about him, but I had no idea that he was a nurse during the war. He'd sit at the bedsides of wounded soldiers, trying to comfort them, and when they died he would write letters of consolation to their families. Very touching.

And then there's the Soap Lady. I'm not going to say much about her. You just need to see her in person. All right, I'll say something. She's a mummy, but she looks like she died in sheer agony. But she didn't. According to science, that's just the way of her natural decomposition. Interestingly enough, they sell Soap Lady soap in the gift shop.

There's a wall of pickled fetuses. There are more than one display for conjoined twins. If you've ever wanted to know what organs look like you'll find displays for them all. I found a gall bladder, which I no longer have my own. And I saw gall stones. Interesting. There is even a colon on display. And yes, I found a hard dick. I usually do. There was a scrotum next to it. Next to that was a preserved vagina.

I was pretty worn out by everything. Not that I was grossed out. No, I was more fascinated than Spock ever was. But walking around that place is pretty wearying for a flop sweater like myself. I had to sit down and rest for a bit. I got to watch everyone's reactions to the displays in that room (which included a boulder of an ovarian cyst). Not a single person was grossed out. I'm proud of them. Their reaction was a healthy interest.

But my favorite display? The one that fascinated me the most? Shit. Photography is prohibited there. Yet I'm sure they know who their most popular attraction is. Upstairs they have a banner of this guy:

Meet the Mutter Giant. Isn't he a sinister looking bastard? That's just the banner. I got to see the real bones, and he's ten times more scary. In life he was seven-six, if memory serves. I'm six-one. The regular skeleton they had next to him was more my height. He also has a dwarf skeleton in there next to him, just for comparison. But the Giant? I cannot describe to you how menacing he is in death. His hands hang by his knees like a gorilla's. Look in his eyes and you see pure malice. He towers over me. Like one of my favorite actors, Rondo Hatton (the Creeper from the old Universal pictures), the Giant had acromegaly. He did not live very long. I'm sure he was a nice guy, but seeing him so many years after his death genuinely creeped me out.

There is so much more at the Mutter. You all need to see it for yourselves. Just don't go down to see the Giant on your own. Something tells me this guy walks around at night after everyone else is gone. Planning.