WRITING here last week about "Irish giants", I was (silently) struck by the contrast between recent high-profile campaigns for the return from museums of Australian aboriginal remains, and the apparent indifference towards the fate of Charles Byrne, whose 225-year-old skeleton is still on show at the London College of Surgeons.
To be sure, there are differences between the two issues. Byrne's was an isolated and rather unusual case, whereas the numbers of aboriginal or other indigenous remains in collections abroad run into thousands. Also, unlike Irish giants, aborigines whose bodies ended up overseas had done nothing while alive to attract the attentions of anatomists.
It could be argued that, in having his freakish bones displayed at the Surgeons' Hunterian Museum, Byrne is continuing the career from which he made a good living, the short while he lasted.
One the other hand, most of the tribespeople whose remains are in museums and universities at least have anonymity. By contrast, Byrne has both a name and a life-story - the last part of which is well documented. According to all accounts, he died - in 1783, aged 22 - so much in fear of dissection that he requested burial at sea to thwart the inevitable grave-robbers.
Did nobody in Ireland care that his wishes were so flagrantly disregarded?, I wondered. Step forward Michael Brennan from Mayo, who has written detailing his one-man campaign to have the poor giant's wishes belatedly respected. Michael first heard about Byrne on an Open University programme in the 1980s. It struck a chord because he too had gone to England as an economic migrant, at a similarly young age. And if he wasn't a giant himself, he was "over six-foot-sic", tall enough to feel some empathy.
So the story lingered in his memory and when, two decades later, Michael saw the success of campaigns to repatriate aboriginal remains, he decided it was time somebody spoke up for the giant. He wrote to politicians on both sides of the Irish Sea, as well as to the College of Surgeons itself, which duly considered his request. But last February, a meeting of the museum trustees decided against releasing the bones for burial; and there, so far, the matter rests.
The UK amended its Human Tissue Act a few years ago to allow for the return of such bodies, and the Hunterian's policies recognise this. In the case of unnamed remains, only geographic providence need be proved. For named persons, however, the request must (1) come from a "close relative" and (2) not be counter to the wishes of the deceased.
The problem is that, as far as is known, Charles Byrne has no identifiable descendants. But one might think that this deficiency is outweighed by the extent to which his skeleton's display disrespects his known wishes. Even at the time of his death, the interest in his body caused scandal. Four days later, the Morning Heraldreported that "the whole tribe of surgeons put in a claim for the poor, departed Irish giant, and surrounded his house just as Greenland harpooners would an enormous whale".
It was John Hunter, the most famous of the collectors, who secured the prize; with the help of some Judases in the giant's retinue. Here is one description of the episode, from a recent book entitled With Words and Knives — Learning Medical Dispassion in Early Modern England: "In the knowledge that John Hunter and other anatomy teachers wanted his body for a specimen, Charles O'Byrne [sic] begged his friends to bury him at sea in a lead coffin. . .Hunter found out which public house the watchers of the body were drinking in as the coffin was being made [and] bribed the undertaker with £50 if he would agree to the body being 'kidnapped' as it travelled from London to Margate. . .The eventual price for the corpse of the poor giant was a staggering £500 - which Hunter had to borrow from a friend.
"[He] had the body transported by hackney coach to his country place in Earls Court while the giant's so-called friends placed paving stones in the coffin and buried it at sea. Hunter was concerned that the theft of such a famous corpse would be quickly publicised and, instead of a leisurely dissection, he sliced the body up and dropped it into a huge copper boiler to strip the flesh from the bones quickly. As a result, the skeleton was, and is, brown."
Hunter was so proud of having snatched the body that he had part of the skeleton included in his 1786 portrait by Joshua Reynolds. And his enthusiasm for collecting oddities was further immortalised by the museum named after him, when it inherited all his treasures, including the ill-gotten ones.
Museums can argue that aboriginal remains were and are of genuine scientific interest, given Australia's long isolation from the rest of the world. In fact, some of the compromises reached on their repatriation recognise this - the release of bodies sometimes being1 preceded by "data collection", including photography, measurement, and DNA and isotopic analysis.
But Byrne's skeleton would appear to be an object only of the vulgar curiosity from which he profited in life. The museum could make a copy of it; and viewers would hardly be worse off for not seeing the real thing. Then the giant's tortured bones could be finally consigned to the deep, as he asked, two-and-a-quarter centuries after their unsustainable growth, complicated by drinking, cost him his life.
fmcnally@irish-times.ie