The Hunterian Museum — Stolen Bones & Surgical History

The Hunterian Museum in London is an anatomical history repository founded by surgeon John Hunter, notable for acquiring controversial specimens including the stolen skeleton of seven-foot-seven-inch Charles Byrne. After Byrne died at age twenty-two in 1783, Hunter bribed an undertaker to steal the body, which he displayed secretly at first and later publicly. In 2023, the museum finally removed Byrne's skeleton from display due to its unethical acquisition.

London · from the walk “Secrets of Lincoln's Inn Fields” · audio ~4 min · Generated

Hunterian Museum, 38-43 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PE

How did the Hunterian Museum in London acquire the skeleton of Charles Byrne?

Welcome to Lincoln's Inn Fields... and the Hunterian Museum. Behind these grand walls lies a collection born not just from science... but from obsession. And theft.......... This museum carries the name of John Hunter, a Scottish-born surgeon who arrived in London in seventeen forty eight to work at his brother William's anatomy school in Covent Garden. Over twelve years, Hunter was present at the dissection of more than two thousand bodies. He became the most celebrated surgeon of the Georgian age, treating the likes of Prime Minister William Pitt and the economist Adam Smith. But Hunter had a dark side. He was a regular customer of the so-called resurrection men... grave robbers who delivered stolen corpses to his back door under cover of night.......... And here is where it gets truly chilling. In seventeen eighty two, a young Irishman named Charles Byrne arrived in London. Born in Littlebridge in the north of Ireland in seventeen sixty one, Byrne stood over seven feet seven inches tall, a condition caused by an undiagnosed pituitary tumor. He became a celebrity, billing himself as the Irish Giant and charging half a crown for people to gaze at him. But his health was failing... and the anatomists were circling. One newspaper wrote that "the whole tribe of surgeons put in a claim for the poor departed Irish Giant" like whalers surrounding an enormous catch.......... Byrne knew what awaited him. On his deathbed in June seventeen eighty three, at just twenty two years old, he begged his friends to seal his body in a lead coffin and bury it at sea. But Hunter... Hunter had other plans. He bribed the undertaker who accompanied Byrne's companions. When the group stopped at a tavern along the route, the undertaker switched Byrne's body for paving stones. The coffin sank into the sea. The body went to Hunter. He then boiled it in a copper vat and pieced together the skeleton. For five years Hunter kept his trophy secret, only hinting to his friend, the naturalist Joseph Banks, that he had "lately got a tall man."

...... And here is a detail most people never hear. Hunter's own house in Leicester Square is thought to have inspired Robert Louis Stevenson's Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde! The building was actually Two houses joined together. The elegant front on Leicester Square received wealthy patients by day. The shabby rear entrance on Castle Street received stolen corpses by night. Respectability on one side... horror on the other. The Perfect model for fiction's most famous dual personality.......... Today, after more than two hundred years on public display, Byrne's skeleton has finally been removed from view. The museum acknowledged in twenty twenty three that the manner in which it was acquired was unethical and against his wishes. But his bones remain here, in storage, and the debate over whether to grant Charles Byrne the sea burial he desperately wanted... continues to this day.

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