LAST UPDATE | 11 Jan 2023
THE HUNTERIAN MUSEUM at the Royal College of Surgeons of England has decided to stop displaying the skeleton of a 7 foot 7 Irishman when the museum reopens next month.
Charles Byrne was born in Derry in 1761 with an undiagnosed benign tumour of his pituitary gland, an adenoma, which caused acromegaly and gigantism.
Byrne grew to be over seven and a half feet, or 2.31 metres, tall and made a living exhibiting himself as the ‘Irish Giant’ at shows in Britain.
From 1786, three years after Byrne’s death, until 2017, his skeleton was on display at the museum despite growing pressure to bury the body at sea in accordance with Byrne’s wishes.
In a statement today, the Royal College of Surgeons of England said that Byrne’s skeleton will not be displayed any more due to ‘sensitivities’, but it will still be available for ‘bona fide medical research’.
The museum’s board of trustees have been discussing the ethical concerns related to Byrne’s skeleton since the museum closed for renovation in 2017.
The Hunterian Museum was named after John Hunter, a distinguished surgeon and anatomist who bought Byrne’s body shortly after his death.
“It has been said that to prevent his body being seized by anatomists he wanted to be buried at sea. Before Byrne could be buried, Hunter intervened, paying Byrne’s friends £500 for his body,” the museum’s statement read.
“Three years later Hunter displayed Byrne’s skeleton in his Leicester Square museum and part of it is shown in the background of the portrait of Hunter by Joshua Reynolds.”
“John Hunter and other anatomists and surgeons of the 18th and 19th centuries acquired many specimens in ways we would not consider ethical today and which are rightly subject to review and discussion.”
The museum also said that keeping the body for research rather than holding a burial at sea “could allow greater understanding of the causes of pituitary acromegaly and gigantism”.
This portrait will be on public display in the museum for the first time in over two hundred years.
Dr Thomas Muinzer, a law lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, has campaigned for Byrne’s remains to be released since 2011.
In a joint statement today with fellow campaigner and academic Len Doyal, the pair said:
“We are delighted to hear the news that the battle that we and others have fought to have Charles Byrne’s skeleton removed from the Hunterian has finally be won.”
“There was never a coherent argument for the Museum to do otherwise, given Byrne’s explicit decision for his body not to fall into the hands of John Hunter for fear of what then precisely happened.”
They added that they could see no justification for the Hunterian to retain the skeleton for research.
“It is entirely unclear what further research the Hunterian has in mind. Our suspicion is that the museum still wants medical students simply to see the skeleton in private, which again would go against Byrne’s documented wishes.”
“Byrne’s wishes should at last be honoured and his skeleton should be buried at sea, we think with great fanfare!” the statement concluded.
In 2017 Muinzer told The Journal that he disagreed with the Royal College of Surgeons’ claims that there is still a scientific case to be made for retaining the remains.
He argued that there is already a full DNA record on file, that a number of extensive studies had been done, and that it was now possible to make a full scale replica to replace the skeleton.
Many other people with the same conditions as Byrne have donated their bodies to science for research purposes, meaning that there is no scientific reason to keep Byrne’s remains when it was against his wishes, Muinzer said.
The museum previously disputed whether a burial at sea was what Byrne had wanted, saying that no written records of this exist, however today’s statement seems to acknowledge that the museum’s founder intervened against Byrne’s wishes.
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