Bones of Contention
be buried in a lead coffin at sea in an effort to keep out of John Hunter’s
clutches” (Moore 2006: 26). Upon his death a contingent of Irish colleagues set the burial arrangements in motion and cast his coffin into the
sea at Margate.
Unbeknownst to the funeral party, Byrne’s corpse was not in the coffin.
Instead, Hunter had bribed an undertaker to swap it for dead weight and
arranged for its covert conveyance to his home in a cart (Taylor 1874:
404-406). Hunter promptly reduced the corpse to its bones and packed
them away (Ottley 1839: 78). Four years later when rumour and speculation had died down he revealed to interested parties that he was now in
possession of a major addition to his specimen collection. Careful not to
connect the remains to Byrne, he described the new piece as the skeleton
of a “tall man” (Taylor 1874: 406-407).
Medical Research
Charles Byrne’s skeleton has been at the centre of a significant body of
medical research. Whilst it is now known that the presence of a growth
hormone secreting pituitary adenoma prior to epiphyseal fusion will result in gigantism, the purpose of the pituitary was entirely unclear at
the time of Byrne’s death. Prior to the Georgian period Galen and Vesalius had speculated that the pituitary discharged mucus into the nose
(Welbourn 1990: 89). Francois Magendie, born in the year that Byrne
died, concluded instead that the pituitary was a cerebral lymph gland that
functioned to discharge waste products from the brain into the blood;
this remained the dominant medical understanding when Pierre Marie
described acromegaly in 1886 (Bergland 1965: 268).
In 1902 a hormone system had been postulated that suggested a theoretical link between pituitary tumours and acromegalic gigantism (Bayliss
1902). It was in this context that American neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing began to take an interest in the Charles Byrne skeleton. Cushing’s
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