![]() ![]() After Hunter’s death in 1793 the collection was purchased by the government for the Royal College of Surgeons, who opened the Hunterian Museum and displayed Byrne there. 5 Then, in 1788, he exhibited the articulated, skeletal Byrne as the pride of his anatomy collection. Hunter skeletonised Byrne’s body in his cellar and hid him for 4 years, fearing challenge by Byrne’s friends 4 or even, given growing public anger regarding bodysnatching, the public. The coffin put into the sea, unknown to his friends, was full of stones. When the friends stopped overnight at a tavern en route, the undertaker removed Byrne. 2 His friends duly took the coffin to Margate (on the English coast), but Howison had bribed the undertaker. Hunter had hired a man called John Howison to follow him around but Byrne, knowing that he was dying and determined to avoid dissection, ordered a lead-lined coffin and persuaded ten Irish friends to promise to bury him at sea. The anatomist John Hunter wanted Byrne’s corpse for anatomisation and display, 1 but Byrne had refused to sell it to him. On JCharles Byrne, an Irishman with acromegaly, died at 12 Cockspur Street, London. ![]()
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