“Suddenly, I had this huge pile of body parts.”

December 10, 2023 1:39 AM

“It’s something that we’re not supposed to like, we’re not supposed to be interested,” she says of the broad appeal of guts and gore. But she found that thinking about actual bodies in all of their vital carnality really brought the historical characters she had been studying to life. from History’s Five Best Body Part Stories [Nautilus; ungated] [CW: body parts, amputation, gore, history]
posted by chavenet (14 comments total)

Hope the full book includes the afterlife of Einstein's brain.
posted by Paul Slade at 2:03 AM on December 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Chapters:

Emily Wilding Davison’s skull
William Shakespeare’s and Lord Darnley’s skull
Jeremy Bentham’s head
Albert Einstein’s brain
Louis Braille’s eyes
Frida Kahlo’s eyebrow(s)
Tycho Brahe’s nose
Marie Antoinette’s teeth
Charles II of Spain’s jaw
Tatiana Pronchishcheva’s gums
Robert Jenkins’ ear
Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich’s blood
Kaiser Wilhelm II’s arm
Queen Victoria’s armpit
Ignaz Semmelweis’s hands
Galileo’s middle finger
Robert the Bruce’s and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s heart
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s heart
Reinhold Messner’s lungs
Alexis St Martin’s stomach
Jack Kerouac’s liver
Fanny Burney’s breasts
Louis XIV’s rear end
Samuel Pepys’ bladder
Marie Skłodowska-­Curie’s bone marrow
Charles Byrne’s bones
William Burke’s skin
Richard and Ronald Herrick’s kidneys
Alfred the Great’s guts
Napoleon Bonaparte’s penis
Adolf Hitler’s testicle
Henrietta Lacks’ cervical cells
Douglas Bader’s legs
James II of Scotland’s femur
Captain Oates’ feet
Yao Niang’s toes
Freddie Mercury’s white blood cells
posted by pracowity at 5:13 AM on December 10, 2023 [6 favorites]

Douglas Bader’s legs. [standard story] These prostheses were defo part of my cultural background when I was a schoolboy in short pants in 1960s England. Bader was a POW in WWII and vowed to be “a plain, bloody nuisance to the Germans”. One incident was refusing to attend appel /roll-call in the snow because his feet would get cold. Hilarious stick-it-to-the-man anecdote. Except that, several years after me hoovering up Reach For The Sky his biography by Paul Brickhill, I heard about the POV of his fellow POWs who had been required to parade in the snow until all prisoners were present and accounted for.
posted by BobTheScientist at 7:14 AM on December 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

I love this stuff! Reminds me of the bit in Name of The Rose (the book, that's where all the best weird bits is) where William recalls being shown sacred precious relics, fingers and hearts and what not.
Including the skull of John The Baptist, aged 11. (that's a great medieval joke)

Also, hoo boy get famous and there go your parts.
There's probably a thriving market for fake famous bits...get yer David Bowie pinkie finger! Or, no, his index finger, the one he pointed at ME!ME!ME! on the top of the pops. I would purchase a gold leafed reliquary of such, I watched those gold leafing videos posted recently...
posted by winesong at 7:22 AM on December 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

Then there's the matter of Christ's 18, very, very large invisible foreskins.
posted by Paul Slade at 7:38 AM on December 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

Just noticed the singular/plural of "Frida Kahlo’s eyebrow(s)"
posted by pracowity at 12:05 PM on December 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

I've seen Galileo's middle finger! I even took a compass with me to the museum to figure out which way it was pointing. It was not, alas, aimed at Rome.
posted by phooky at 12:19 PM on December 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

(Surprised Charles I's vertebra is in there but not Oliver Cromwell's head)
posted by phooky at 12:24 PM on December 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

...and enough splinters of the true cross to build a house...
posted by kaibutsu at 1:06 PM on December 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

I just read Burney's account of her mastectomy. Yikes.
posted by pracowity at 1:52 PM on December 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

Antonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón, the Napoleon of the West, the Mexican president who traded the whole state of Texas in exchange for his life, and ultimately ceded more than half the national territory to the USA, later lost his leg in the Pastry War against the French, which revindicated him in the national mythology and got him the new nickname “El quince uñas” (fifteen nails, Spanish does not use different words for fingernails and toenails).

He held a state funeral in Veracruz with full military and religious honors for his leg, Mexico being Mexico this made his leg a combination of a War Hero and a medieval relic. Back into top level politics in Mexico City he missed his leg. He had a glass case built to transport the leg from Veracruz to Mexico City in the kind of funerary procession usually reserved for poets, singers, and actors (I like the fact that the largest funeral in modern Mexico was for a poet, Amado Nervo. Your national pride may or may not be injured by looking up your country’s largest funerals). The leg was interred in a mausoleum in a fancy graveyard in another exuberant state function.

Two years later in a revolt against his dictatorship (Santa Anna was president of Mexico between 8 and 11 times) rebels stole the leg, dragged it through the streets of Mexico City, and managed to misplace it never to be seen again.

He is the same man who introduced chewing gum to the world. In exile in New York in the 1860s he chewed chicle, made from the sap of a kind of zapote tree endemic to his native Veracruz, constantly. His employer Thomas Adams got interested, failed to make cheap automobile tires from the gum, but ended up with Chiclets by the Adams New York Gum Company.
posted by Dr. Curare at 6:05 PM on December 10, 2023 [6 favorites]

Dr. Curare, what a RIDE
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 7:42 PM on December 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

>Your national pride may or may not be injured by looking up your country’s largest funerals

For the americans out there, it seems to be JFK and then a combined funeral for several labor union activists murdered at the same riot. Less embarrassing than I expected, honestly.
posted by fomhar at 5:17 PM on December 11, 2023

Have ordered the book through local library. Not featured (I think) is The Hand of Danjou, an object of veneration in the French Foreign Legion especially on the anniversary of the 1863 "Battle" of Camaron in Mexico. This was a long day for a small detachment of 65 members of the FFL who held off an army of at least 2000 Mexicans during the French Intervention in Mexico. Captain Jean Danjou, the French commander, died in the process along with 2/3rds of his men. Only two unwounded soldiers remained at the end of the day and they refused to surrender unless they could keep their arms and escort the body of their Captain off the battle-field. Two peculiarities attend the ceremonies. The officers make coffee for the ranks because in 1863 the soldiers were interrupted by the Mexicans just as they were about to have theirs and spent the whole day without water, let alone coffee. The Hand of Danjou is also reverenced. Captain Danjou, a career soldier and graduate of St Cyr had blown off his left hand in an accident in 1853 and sported a wooden prosthesis painted to look like a gloved hand. This was discovered after the battle and found its way back to the Legion's head office in France.
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:49 PM on December 11, 2023