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could only say a few babyish words. She probably died of tuberculosis and may have suffered from a genetic condition called ‘Seckel syndrome’. After her death, the showman who had been exhibiting her attempted to sell the body to anatomy schools but she ended up in Hunter’s Collection. The child’s father turned up to retrieve Caroline’s body only to find dissection was already underway and he went away again in extreme distress.

EXHIBIT THREE
    The double-headed Bengali child skull. Crystal Gallery, Bay 110, Shelf 2.
    This boy’s skull – or skulls – is both amazing and disturbing. The name of the child concerned is unknown but he was born in Bengal in 1783 and lived for about 4 years with two skulls and two faces fused together on top of one another. The upper skull faces backwards. The two different heads did not synchronise emotions and possibly the movements of the features of the upper head were reflex only. Apparently the eyes in the upper face never shut, even at night, but kept constantly moving, even when the normal head was asleep, and the upper mouth salivated when the lower mouth was fed. The child, it is said, had been thrown by the horrified midwife into the fire after its birth but was rescued, although with an injured eye and ear. The parents exhibited their child for money during its life but he is said to have died from a cobra bite aged 4.
    The man who founded the Hunterian Collection, collector/anatomist/ consorter with grave-robbers, John Hunter, embodied some of the best and some of the worst aspects of the new eighteenth-century scientific attitude. His thirst for knowledge was tremendous and was allied to his huge capacity for hard work. However rationality tended to overpower emotion and empathy. Clearly the pursuit by Hunter (and others) of giant Charles Byrne caused Byrne real distress. Also animals suffered badly at Hunter’s hands. He conducted some exceedingly weird experiments such as implanting a tooth in a cockerel’s head (the result is to be seen in the Collection), and multitudes of other animal experiments. He was a bit of a Dr Moreau. In his defence he also experimented on himself and, for example, infected himself with syphilis so he could rigorously observe its effects.
    We now live in a time where reparations are made for cultural insensitivity, including scientific insensitivity. Aboriginal remains have been returned to Australia and Native American remains have been returned to the United States.
    We know that Byrne wanted to be buried in the ground but strongly suspected that he would be grave-robbed, hence his desperate plan to be buried at sea as the second-best option. Is it perhaps time to accede to Byrne’s wish, brazenly thwarted by Hunter, remove him from the glass case where he continues to be gazed on after death as he was throughout his life, and bury him in the ground in Ireland where other members of his family lie?
    1)   On 10 May 1941 a World War Two bomb led to the loss of thousands of the exhibits in the Hunterian Collection. They were strewn all over the street outside the building, leading to the bizarre spectacle of pickled body parts being taken away on stretchers.
    2)   In 1998 42-year-old Anthony-Noel Kelly, a butcher turned artist, was jailed for 9 months for macabre activities connected to the Royal College of Surgeons. Kelly had always been ‘obsessed with death’ (his words) and had been given permission by the College to sketch body parts there. Instead he paid a lab technician £400 to smuggle out actual body parts from over 40 human bodies. The grisly haul was wrapped in black bin liners which were then placed in a rucksack and taken on London Underground trains to Kelly’s studio. This went on for over a year. Kelly made moulds of the parts, including human heads, and mounted an exhibition. The Inspector of Anatomy attended the exhibition and called in the police who discovered two heads, legs and a torso at a flat and buried in a