2024-07-11 07:06:14
The pathologist who stole Einstein’s brain, the priest who kept Galileo’s finger, or Che Guevara’s hands that traveled the world. Body parts of famous personalities have fascinated collectors since time immemorial. Modern relics have found their way into museums around the world. And how big was Napoleon’s penis in reality? The German weekly Der Spiegel asks in its text.
When Albert Einstein died of internal bleeding at a Princeton hospital on April 18, 1955, his wish was to have his body cremated “so that people would not come to his bones to pray,” the scientist told his biographer Abraham Pais. However, when the body went through the heat, Einstein’s most important organ – the brain – was missing.
Today’s Einstein Foundation in Berlin calls it theft. When the head of pathologists at Princeton Hospital, Thomas Harvey, opened Einstein’s skull, removed his brain and placed it in formalin, he took the precious material home with him, as well as Einstein’s eyes.
In retrospect, the pathologist obtained permission for such an operation from Einstein’s son Hans Albert, assuring him that his father’s brain would be used exclusively for scientific purposes. But Harvey obviously wanted to probe the scientist’s brain to find out what made the father of relativity’s thinking organ so special and what his genius lay in.
At first, scientists did not find any peculiarities, but only with more advanced methods of investigation in the 1980s did they discover a number of abnormalities. For example, a large number of glial cells, unusually wide parietal lobes and a very strong corpus callosum that connects the two cerebral hemispheres. Whether this is the answer to the question of the origin of Einstein’s intelligence, however, remains debatable.
Perhaps it was the interplay of various specially designed areas of Einstein’s brain that made him so smart. Anyway, Harvey kept parts of Einstein’s brain under his desk until his death in 2007 at the age of 94. Parts of Einstein’s brain tissue are currently held by the Mütter Museum of Medicine in Philadelphia.
Badly treated deerskin lace
Warlord, ruler and emperor – this is how Napoleon Bonaparte entered history. What parts of his body did admirers have a crush on after his death? Surprisingly, it was not the hand that Napoleon typically held in his shirt in portraits, but his penis. When he died in exile on the island of Saint Helena in 1821, the doctor cut off his penis during the post-mortem examination, according to historian and author Tony Perrottet. Inadvertence or intention? This has not yet been clarified. Napoleon’s limb was allegedly subsequently taken by a priest to Corsica, where no trace of it disappeared.
However, in 1927, an artifact presented as Napoleon’s penis was sensationally unveiled in New York to the public. A journalist from Time magazine disappointedly described it as “badly treated deerskin laces”. Other newspapers allegedly described him as a “shriveled eel”.
“The penis acquired a sort of mythical status, transported in a small leather box and air-dried. Because it was not soaked in formalin, it looked a bit like dried meat,” said historian Perrottet in 2008. The penis then passed through the hands of several collectors. According to the Washington Post, forensic analyzes a few years ago confirmed that it was a penis. However, it was not possible to determine whether it really belonged to Napoleon.
A coffin with a 2.5 millimeter layer of lead
When the brilliant scientist Marie Curie-Sklodowska died in the French city of Passy at the beginning of July 1934, no one dared to even touch her corpse, let alone separate or steal any of its parts. The two-time Nobel laureate discovered radioactive polonium and radium, constantly exposing herself to dangerous radiation, which was the cause of her death from a rare bone marrow disease.
When Curie-Sklodowska’s body was exhumed in 1995, it was found that the scientist’s coffin was covered with a 2.5 millimeter layer of lead. But radiation measurements, according to the British Journal of the History of Radiology, showed only a low level of exposure. Approximately 60 years after her death, Curie’s body has barely decomposed. Finally, it was transferred to the Panthéon in Paris, the burial place of famous French personalities. However, Curie’s belongings, such as notebooks, are still radioactive and are kept in special lead boxes in the National Library of France.
Galileo Galilei is giving museum visitors a middle finger today. The Galileo Museum in Florence exhibited the finger of this engineer, mathematician and scholar. Galileo made enemies of the church during his lifetime because he confirmed with his observations that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and not the other way around.
When his remains were to be transferred to a large tomb almost 100 years later, researcher and priest Anton Francesco Gori apparently took advantage of this. From Galileo’s skeleton, which was later exhibited in the famous Medici Library of St. Lawrence in Florence, allegedly cut off his middle finger. Since then, the middle finger has traveled to several museums.
Guevara’s hands
“Amputate his hands,” was the order when Bolivian ruler René Barrientos Ortuno had Che Guevara, the world’s most famous guerrilla, executed on October 9, 1967. The official explanation was that this would make it easier to compare the fingerprints with those on Guevara’s Argentine documents. The hands were actually to be destroyed on Barrientos’ orders. However, Interior Minister Antonio Arguedas, a secret admirer of Che Guevara, took them home in a jar filled with formalin.
Later, Guevara’s hands traveled halfway around the world to Moscow and finally to Cuba to Che Guevara’s old friend Fidel Castro. Castro was said to be very moved. Exactly where Ernesto Che Guevara’s hands are today in Cuba is a state secret.
A piece of “soul” in a test tube
The world-famous inventor Thomas Edison did not lose any part of his body after his death, but what was taken from him was a piece of his soul in a test tube. That is, only if a person believes that with his last breath he leaves his body and his soul. When Edison was dying at his home in New Jersey on October 18, 1931, his son Charles took a piece of his “soul” into a test tube, which he gave to Henry Ford – his father’s friend and business partner. Ford kept the donated test tube and kept it along with other Edison memorabilia, now the artifacts are on display at the Ford Museum in Michigan.
Among the other relics that supporters of famous criminals studied and worshiped even after their death, there is, for example, Lenin’s brain or the skull of Josef Mengele. A famous part of the body of a not-so-famous personality is, for example, the nervous system of Harriet Coles, on which Rufus Weaver, associate professor of anatomy, demonstrated the shape of the human nervous system. Images of this nervous system are said to have appeared in hundreds of textbooks, laboratories and doctors’ offices. Weaver was celebrated for his success, but for a long time the origin of this textbook material was not known to the general public.