I think it's doubly perverse that we don't respect one dead man's wishes about what should happen to his body - but another dead man, John Hunter, apparently gets to decide what happens to all of his former property (including Byrne's remains) for perpetuity.
I'm not a fan of wills, endowments or sticky laws enacted by long dead people. The living should decide the matters of the living. But when it comes to the remains, I think we should make a good faith effort to respect their former inhabitant's wishes.
After reading the article, I think they should be put out to sea as per his wishes.
Yes the man is long dead and yes the bones are no doubt medically interesting. But they've had them for two centuries. Why not one final positive gesture to end the chapter?
When you die, your stake in society and anything corporeal vanishes with you. Only the living ought to have a say. Dealing with the last wishes of the deceased in a decorous manner is done mostly for the benefit of their remaining relatives and relations. After two centuries, these too are guaranteed to be dead.
If we were to let society be beholden to the wishes of the deceased indefinitely, then by now you wouldn't be able to turn a corner without running into some permanent grave or memorial. The point is that there are no relevant stakeholders remaining for these bones to be put out to sea; just a romantic notion of 'fulfilling his wishes'.
> When you die, your stake in society and anything corporeal vanishes with you. Only the living ought to have a say.
If so, we should defy John Hunter's wishes first. Why should his property claim to stolen bones, and contracts regarding their use, matter more than Byrne's wishes? Because he was rich?
it's true that fulfilling his wishes has no point for him (at least not from our viewpoint among the living). It has a point for us, as a general phenomenon.
That man saw the writing on the wall and it turns out he was right. So we have to think about people in the same situation today, or other people. How do we respect them and their wishes when they are gone? Those who live now they see how we treat those who pass, and act and feel accordingly. A little bit of respect might go some way towards a more peaceful coexistance and a happier life while we are alive.
Dead people don't care what happens to their remains. Any offended relatives are likely long dead. BUT there are plenty of people alive today who'd want to know the state can be relied upon to uphold the law about what happens with their body.
The majority of dead people from two centuries ago held views and wishes for society diametrically opposed to how many live their lives now — either because of religious dogma or simply a lack of understanding of things we do understand now. Are we going to cherry-pick which of their wishes are just and which completely bonkers in hindsight?
Yes we are going to use our current values to guide our actions.
We will use our current values to define taste, justice, and cultural behaviour. We will try to look at the actions of the past with understanding and we will try to think what people in the future might think as a lens to consider our own current situation.
And we'll laugh at anyone who tries to argue philosophically about definitions of right and wrong.
It's not about arbitrary wishes anyway. It's about respecting people's remains and a decent burial, which are rather timeless values (if we look backwards in time) even if customs vary.
This is not always true. People have treated mummies and the remains of people declared as saints quite differently than regular people. Occasionally people say we should rebury for the principle of the thing but in general that doesn't seem to happen.
Personally I find the first part, ie respecting peoples remains, as being the critical thing.
I'm gonna have to point out the obvious here, that most mummies and saints weren't regular people to begin with so they continue to be treated as such.
Saints also implies catholic who feel a certain type of way about how remains should be dealt with.
The reason they can't do what he wants is that there's a legal requirement to keep the collection "complete", even though the remains were stolen.
It was stolen.
"Before Byrne could be buried, Hunter reportedly bribed one of his friends to secretly swap the corpse for dead weight and bring the body to him. Four years later Hunter put Byrne’s skeleton on display."
So a great, illegal, injustice was done and you're defending it because you didn't read the article.
What the museum should do is get a legal ruling that the remains were not legally Hunter's property so cannot be part of the collection and follow the wishes of the dead man AND what should have happened at the time.
I say put the bones to sea at once. If a legal ruling is required, let it come after whoever ghoul who would sue for breach of Hunter's testament has turned up.
All the more reason to dig up all the cemeteries in the world, use the soil for fertilizer, and build low-cost housing on the land. Nobody to complain but the dead...
This is common in the Netherlands were people got tired of paying the absurd costs of burial. Cremation is much more cost effective. A lot of cemetery's are closing down.
Consider that Muslims need to have an everlasting gravesite!
I guess, he was another great example of somone, whos living rights got trumped by experimental sciences and societies interest. Never let a peaceful death deter science.
>“I can’t take it anymore,” cried Ouchi. “I am not a guinea pig.”
>But at his family’s insistence, the doctors continued their experimental >treatments even as his skin began to melt from his body. Then, on Ouchi’s 59th >day in the hospital, he had a heart attack. But his family agreed that he should >be resuscitated in case of death, so the doctors revived him.
While the doctors and scientists were doing experimental things to keep him alive, it was at the instance of his family.
I think of wills as more of a practical matter. If we got rid of them, the elderly would just give their stuff away before they died, to the same end. Oh! But what about those that die unexpectedly? It would be unfair to them since they didn't get that opportunity. And primates have an overdeveloped sense of fairness. So we have wills.
Which living and how should they have a say? I think most members of society would prefer to live in a society where human remains were treated respectfully regardless of their provenance, if you asked them. Especially ones that aren’t of huge historical value.
I think this is the best take. We can't right all wrongs from the past but this is a good first step about what we can do right now and with the knowledge we have.
> But they've had them for two centuries. Why not one final positive gesture to end the chapter?
Because like almost everything else, medicine has been exponentially improving in the past ~two centuries - meaning the next decade will be much better suited to do something useful with those bones than any that came before.
It would be a shame to destroy those bones, only to regret it 20 years later, as some new imaging or sequencing technique is developed that could be applied to those bones to benefit the living who suffer from related ailments.
Document the bones, laser scan them, create a carbon copy skeleton for display if wanted, drill each bone for samples and after all the required information is gathered, bury his remains like the guy wanted.
Keeping all this information and bone samples is both more ethical and easier than to keep the bones around. If the items from a private collection are supposed to be kept, how does that make a difference if the items were gained illegally. What is stopping someone from stealing items a painting from the Louvre and asking another museum to keep it as part of a collection.
I would like to read a story in a few months how some security guards at the museum were bribed to allow the bones to be 'unstolen' and buried at sea. It would be the best ending to the story.
Fascinating that they start talking about Hunter without explaining who he is for another several paragraphs. I had to search his name in the page just to be sure I wasn't missing something.
Sadly, he enjoyed only one year of voluntary fame before passing away, at age 23. Of what exact causes I do not know, but it is said that he was an alcoholic.
I can't imagine that the physical disorder that gave him his height was painless - and 18th Century Ireland (or London), alcohol was likely one of the least harmful and most effective means of pain relief.
I don't think the classical Greek sculptor Phidias, creator of the so-called Elgin marbles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elgin_Marbles) wanted them on permanent display in England either.
No one is debating that. The question is what do you do with them after the wrong has been done. Which is exactly why the marbles were referred to in this article.
I don't think the parent comment is inappropriate here.
I would imagine that the original creator of the works would prefer that they exist and be protected for as long as possible.
That doesn't mean that they shouldn't be restored to their original context if practical, so it doesn't really change the discussion around their place in the British Museum in any way that I can think of off the top of my head - but it's worth exploring, certainly. If nothing else, it's an interesting thought exercise that could lead to developing additional context and understanding of the time and culture that led to their creation.
It was a low-effort comment raising well-known, politically divisive issue, with little relation to the discussion of a medical museum keeping a skeleton against the wishes of the deceased.
It is equally relevant on any topic involving a museum in Britain, therefore it's irrelevant here.
What's going to happen when the million years advanced AI descendants of Earth want to conduct archeology? To perfectly understand from whence things came?
Undoubtedly capable of breaking our feeble understanding of physics, they'll bend the light cone in reverse and perfectly simulate our precise physical characteristics down to the exacting neural biochemical fluxes in our brains. At every moment in our lives, they'll understand every thought we've ever had - already had and will ever have - better than we ourselves could conceive.
Could we protest being perfectly simulated, reanimated, and unwittingly deallocated?
Maybe that's what we are right now at this very moment. It's not like we'd know.
> and perfectly simulate our precise physical characteristics down to the exacting neural biochemical fluxes in our brains
We'll need a new kind of computer for that, because all current computers can do from a purely mathematical POV is approximate the real world, given their limited memory and limited precision.
There's a good chance that the only way to 'simulate' a human is to physically built one.
I agree that it's quite unlikely, but: just because you can't simulate something exactly doesn't mean that you can't get close enough so as to make no difference.
"Don't worry, our simulated humans differ from their originals by at least 1-2 parts in 1 million, so we haven't really cloned them, no matter what they tell you. Yes, they remember their original lives and behave to within experimental error identically, but due to fundamental measurement uncertainty they're not technically exact copies."
> perfectly simulate our precise physical characteristics down to the exacting neural biochemical fluxes in our brains. At every moment in our lives, they'll understand every thought we've ever had - already had and will ever have - better than we ourselves could conceive.
This assumes that the human experience is deterministic, and that all factors that determine the outcome are knowable. I don't buy either of those assumptions.
There's a book that ends with the distant descendants of humanity using a combination of a "read-only" time machine, advanced bioengineering, and virtually unlimited resources to resurrect every human being to the state just prior to their death - but I'm not 100% sure what it was called, and that was a plot twist at the very end of the book, so even if I'm right I wouldn't be able to share the title without it being a significant spoiler...
I'm not a fan of wills, endowments or sticky laws enacted by long dead people. The living should decide the matters of the living. But when it comes to the remains, I think we should make a good faith effort to respect their former inhabitant's wishes.