To escape your dirty, miserable life as a Londoner in the 1800s you might have cheered yourself up by visiting the Hunterian Museum to gawp at the curiosities displayed there. You’d have seen the preserved skeletons of human oddities like dwarfs, giants, conjoined twins and still-born quintuplets (pictured). You’d also have seen hundreds of cases containing exotic zoological specimens like tiger tongue, vulture head, sloth fetus and gorilla penis. Over the past two hundred years the collection has been built up, then devastated by bombing during the war, and more recently renovated and upgraded. We went to have a poke around this little-known wonder room …
| The museum was founded by Victorian surgeon/body-snatcher John Hunter who, as well as being the British Empire’s preeminent expert on anatomy, was also the world’s most unscrupulous collector of peculiar corpses. |
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This is the skull of the two-headed boy of Bengal. According to news reports in the 1790s, the boy was in pretty good health except for the fact that his skull was fused to a parasitic head which had its own brain, face and emotions. When one head slept, the other one was awake; when one smiled, the other cried. The boy was four years old when he was bitten by a cobra and died. The body of the two-headed boy was dug up, despite protests by his family, and later acquired by the museum.
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The smaller skeleton is that of Caroline Crachami, a primordial dwarf better known as the Sicilian fairy (even though she was actually Irish). Standing 19 inches tall and weighing less than five pounds, she was a sensation on the sideshow circuit. People would pay a shilling to pick her up, feed her a biscuit and watch her do a little dance. One day in 1824, after being handled by over 200 people, the tiny girl collapsed and died. Again, her remains were taken against her family’s wishes.
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These are five-month-old quintuplet foetuses from a premature birth in Blackburn, Lancashire in 1786. Two were still-born, the other three died shortly after delivery.
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 This is the pustuled face of a child who died from smallpox in the late 1700s.
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 The Hunterian Museum is inside the Royal College of Surgeons at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It’s open Tuesday to Saturday from 10am to 5pm. Admission is free. |
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January 30th, 2008 @ 15:32
Reader Comments
January 30th, 2008
3:38 pm
Medical schadenfreude is dope!
January 30th, 2008
3:45 pm
Maybe the Sicilian fairy died from eating 200 biscuits? That amount would be an OD for such dainty little thing.
January 30th, 2008
4:09 pm
It’s like the Mutter Museum, kind of.
Ny the way - to escape your dirty, dreary, miserable life as a Londoner now you put on a track jacket and stab a guy.
January 30th, 2008
4:50 pm
this is amazing. this might be the best museum ever -better than that german loser who plastified bodies and cut them up on TV while dressed as a pedo Van Helsing and had a huge exhibition in Truman’s Brewery. this looks REAL.
January 30th, 2008
6:27 pm
I bet that other head on the Bengalese kid was a real asshole.
January 30th, 2008
11:31 pm
fuck, this shit is amazing, i’m going there tomorrow!!
January 30th, 2008
11:45 pm
Medical schadenfreude is the dopest.
January 31st, 2008
12:20 am
the only amazing thing is the conjoined head boy.
the primordial dwarf is old news, the discovery health documentary is pretty fabulous, where i get to see a primordial dwarfette shop for clothes and fall in love at her 13th birthday with a 16 year old primordial dwarf.
can you put that on the cute show? please?!
January 31st, 2008
10:46 am
the hunterian is a treasured part of our heritage… watch the brain surgery videos — incredible!
January 31st, 2008
8:06 pm
mutter museum in philly has the exact same stuff, in the original building (from the 19th century) and it’s only a $15 bus fare. go…..
February 4th, 2008
7:37 am
The parasitic head thing is tooooo much. i saw a whole oprah on it about the first ever baby to survive the un-congoining operation in egypt. They had to get rid of twinny cos he was making big baby have heart attacks and then they buried the head and called it islam, but only after it’s death (to give it dignity) so for the whole episode they just referred to parasitic twin as “later called islam” like that was it’s weird name. so now every time a friend gets a pimple or something is wrong we call it “later called islam”