GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1010: THE AGREED UPON FACTS

 As much as I love history, there's an unfortunate side to the beast. It's plagued me since I discovered how interesting history really is, but it wasn't until Gore Vidal that I discovered the perfect phrase for the problem. History is the "agreed upon facts."

The nature of history is kind of dubious. We have all sorts of records, from newspaper articles to journals kept by historical figures. We have a treasure trove of this stuff. But the problem is, what if these primary and secondary sources lied? What if they had skin in the game and decided that history should remember this version of events over another version of the events. To say nothing of the problems of the relativity of perception . . .

I hate to do this, but Mark Twain is just such an instance. A lot of his stories were actually news articles. He just lied to sell more papers. And that really is how newspapers began, more as tabloids than anything else. Twain wasn't the only one playing fast and loose with truth, so how can we trust any of these documents in said treasure trove?

Thankfully there are corroborating sources, but more or less we have to figure out which of these things we can agree upon as facts. That bothers me a great deal. Memories of college return to me. Ghastly things creeping through my head. "What is truth?" it asks through a sewer of a mouth. "What is Truth?" it answers itself. The horror.

It also means a lot of history gets swept under the rug as unimportant to the big picture. So I'm going to put a few quotes here you most certainly never heard during your school years. I'm pretty sure any teacher who dared tell you about it would have been tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail. Let's start with John Adams. If you'll recall I mentioned that a few of the Founding Fathers were Deists, a euphemism for atheists. John Adams was not one of them, but he had some interesting words in regards to religion. For those who believe this is a Christian Country(TM), you may want to avert your eyes.

“This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.”
– John Adams

We discussed Benjamin Franklin a little bit in GF #1000, but here's a deeper look at his opinion of the Constitution that you never read in a textbook.

In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other. I doubt too whether any other Convention we can obtain may be able to make a better Constitution. For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an Assembly can a perfect production be expected? It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our enemies, who are waiting with confidence to hear that our councils are confounded like those of the Builders of Babel; and that our States are on the point of separation, only to meet hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another's throats. Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure, that it is not the best.

How do I know that these men said these things? I don't. Not to a certainty. And a lot of people wish they hadn't said anything of the sort. But enough people agreed on these facts. I'm sure most would call it revisionist history (a phrase I dislike), but to be fair, a lot of people worked really hard to make sure we didn't encounter these quotes in the course of our regular lives.

The root of the problem is lying. I forget the movie's name, but there was a flick about a world where people were incapable of lying, not even little white lies like, "I'm fine," or "You look great," or etc. I don't advocate for that kind of world, but to quote Metallica, "When a man lies, he murders some part of the world." But, since you come here for class, I'll dig back further into the vaults. I'll leave you with a quote from Montaigne:

Lying is a hateful and accursed vice. We have no other tie upon one another, but our word. If we did but discover the horror and consequences of it, we should pursue it with fire and sword, and more justly than other crimes.

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.