A London museum faces potential legal action over the skeleton of an Irish giant it is keeping for “medical research”.
Campaigners have asked Westminster council to intervene under the Public Health Act to help them bury Charles Byrne, who died in London in 1783.
The 7ft 7in tall Byrne earned a living exhibiting himself for the public but turned down offers to sell his own corpse in advance of his death. He even arranged to be buried at sea so that he would not fall into the hands of body-snatchers.
His funeral party intended to put him at rest off the coast near Margate but during a stop in a pub en route his body was stolen and the coffin, which was laid to rest beneath the waves, was filled with stones.
Surgeon John Hunter paid for the body and the skeleton was then put on public display for more than two centuries at London’s Hunterian Museum, which displays anatomical specimens.
It will no longer be on view when the museum reopens next month following a five-year redevelopment of the Royal College of Surgeons HQ in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
However, the museum has refused to repatriate the remains, saying it will keep the skeleton “for bona fide medical research into the condition of pituitary acromegaly and gigantism” — the condition that made Byrne so tall.
Campaigner Mary Lowth, a GP and legal academic, has worked with a barrister on the case and thinks there is a legal and moral case for the museum to allow Byrne’s remains to be buried as he wished.
She said Westminster, which is home to the museum, could bring a case under the 1984 Act “seeking to bury a corpse that nobody else intends to dispose of”. She added: “There is a duty, mainly described in common law, to dispose of the dead in a timely and decent fashion. It falls on the next of kin but if they do not assume the duty it falls on the local authority”.
A spokesman for Westminster said it had received the request which would be reviewed by the council’s legal team.
Ms Lowth said: “We do not permit the remains of people to be used for research or display, no matter how important that research, without their consent because we respect our dead and treat them as people not things.”
Byrne’s story inspired Dame Hilary Mantel’s 1998 novel The Giant, O’Brien. Before her death last year she said it was “time Charles went home”.
A spokesperson for the Board of Trustees of the Hunterian Collection and the Royal College of Surgeons of England said: “At the time of responding, we have not received any communication regarding legal action relating to the skeleton of Charles Byrne. If we are approached about such action, we will of course engage with the process fully.”
