London’s Hunterian Museum is about the life and work of John Hunter, eighteenth-century anatomist, scientist and surgeon, who is best-remembered for turning the field of surgery from a grisly hobby into a systematic science. The majority of the museum’s creepy exhibits are of the specimens he worked on or that he bought from others. Oddly, it’s a very popular place for a date.
After I’d been walking around for a short while, I remembered where I’d heard of John Hunter the surgeon before: Hilary Mantel’s strange, beautifully written, eerie, unsettling, and sad novel, The Giant O’Brien.
And after I’d remembered that, I came across this specimen.
This is the Giant, O’Brien — Charles Byrne (1761–1783). He travelled from Ireland to London in order to earn money as a freak, and Hunter became obsessed with being able to dissect him when he died. Charles, aware of this, made arrangements for his body to be sealed in a lead coffin and be shipped back to Ireland when he died, but Hunter intercepted it, and got his hands on him.
There’s one line from the book that, whether accurate or not, sums up John Hunter’s obsession, and the grisly state of the surgical profession of the time.
“Be advised that for the corpses of young children I pay by the inch. For the first foot, one shilling. Thereafter, ninepence per inch.”
I don’t know where Hilary Mantel got her inspiration for her book from, but standing in front of this poor man’s body, still held up as a freak two hundred and fifty years after his death, I am not surprised she was inspired.
