The dying wishes of Charles Byrne to be buried at sea will not be fulfilled, with the Hunterian Museum at England’s Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) retaining his remains since the skeleton of the Irish giant has finally been removed from its controversial display at a British museum prior to its reopening later this year, per Irish America.
Museum chiefs say the remains of Byrne, who suffered from acromegaly and gigantism, are ‘an integral part of the Hunterian Collection and will be available for bona fide research into the conditions’.
Byrne was born in Littlebridge near Lough Neagh in the north of Ireland in 1761.
He grew to a height of 7′ 7″ and in the last years of his life, made a living exhibiting himself as the ‘Irish Giant’ in Edinburgh and London.
Before his death in 1783 at the age of 22, Byrne is reputed to have said that he wanted to be buried at sea in a lead coffin to stop his body being used for scientific research by anatomists.
However, the surgeon John Hunter, who befriended Byrne before his death, paid the Irishman’s friends £500 for his body before he could be laid to rest.
Three years later, Hunter put Byrne’s skeleton on display at his Leicester Square museum as part of his collection of anatomical specimens.
The RCS acquired Hunter’s collection in 1799 and Byrne’s skeleton has been on display at the college’s Hunterian Museum for much of the time since then.
The museum closed for renovations in 2017 but ahead of its reopening, museum trustees and RCS bosses revealed Byrne’s remains would no longer be exhibited.
In a statement, the Hunterian board said that Byrne and other anatomists of the time ‘acquired many specimens in ways we would not consider ethical today and which are rightly subject to review and discussion’.
Dr Thomas Muinzer of the University of Aberdeen, who has long campaigned for Byrne’s remains to be removed, welcomed the decision.
‘After over a decade of intense campaigning from many people, it’s wonderful the @HunterianLondon has finally recognised the ‘insensitivity’ of the display of Charles Byrne’s remains!’ he tweeted.
‘The next step — the burial he wanted — would be even better…’
In April 1782, he moved on to London where he was billed as the ‘Irish Giant’. Those who visited Byrne were impressed not only by his height, his huge hands, feet and voice ‘like thunder’, but by his gentle, refined manner.
He was a huge celebrity, in every sense: the King and Queen and the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire were all eager to meet him. His appearances earned him more money than he could have dreamed of.
He managed to save £770 — worth around £100,000 today — all of which he kept in his pockets. But one night, after drinking in a pub, he found that his life’s savings had been stolen.
Devastated by the loss of his earnings, lonely, homesick, and racked with pain caused by his condition — he was still growing — Byrne turned to drink.Visitors began reporting that the giant was bad-tempered and unkempt.
Author Sylas Neville, who met him in July 1782, described how ‘he stoops, is not well-shaped, his flesh loose and his appearance far from wholesome’. Ticket sales slumped and Vance abandoned him.
Byrne was desperate to avoid being carved up by the anatomist’s knife or put on display after his death — an ignominious fate usually reserved for criminals.
He requested that, when he died, his body would be sealed in a lead coffin and buried at sea, off Margate in Kent, to prevent it being dug up.Byrne died on June 1, 1783 aged only 22.
At the time, a newspaper reported: ‘A whole tribe of surgeons put in a claim for the poor departed Irishman, surrounding his house just as harpooners would an enormous whale.’
