John Hunter Stole Byrne's Corpse

13.Charles Byrne was an Irish exhibition performer in the 1780s who made his living by exhibiting his extraordinary height to paying audiences. Byrne was 7'7" tall. Terrified that surgeons would seize his corpse after his death, Byrne instructed his friends to seal him inside a lead coffin and bury him at sea. After Byrne died in 1783, a surgeon named John Hunter reportedly paid his friends 500 pounds for the body and boiled it down to a skeleton. The Hunterian Museum in London displayed Byrne's remains for more than 200 years, from 1799 until finally removing them from public view in 2023.

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