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In June 1873, Charles Byrne, feeling his end, asked his friends to bury him in the sea in a casket covered with lead.
He was 22 years old, was famous but fell out of favor and the only thing he had left was despair and a deep terror of what could happen to him after his death.
He feared that the Resurrectionists – gangs of criminals who made their living digging up corpses and selling them to medical schools or scientists – would take possession of their remains.
And their fears were not unfounded .
Byrne, better known as "The Irish Giant", was 2.3 meters tall, at a time when being very different made you valuable both alive and dead.
His contemporaries generously paid to watch off all sorts of wonderful creatures – like animals with more heads or legs than necessary – as well as people afflicted by rare conditions: bearded women, dwarves and giants.
And for scientists, a corpse like Byrne's was of great interest to the investigation.
That is why Byrne thought that he would only be safe when he lay at the bottom of the ocean.
22 years before
Byrne was born in 1761 in Drummullan, a village that today has 175 inhabitants and lives in Northern Ireland.
We do not know much about his parents, they were not extraordinarily great.
It was said that it was designed on a haystack and that it was the reason for its large size.
And this great height, at a place and at a time when legends were reality, was well seen.
In Irish folklore, giants are imagined as beings who inhabit the border between the human and the supernatural .
We owe them certain aspects of the landscape – hills, hills and valleys – among them several in or near the historic county of Tyrone, where Byrne grew up.
The Giant's Causeway is one of the natural beauties that giants made in Ireland. / Getty Images Child, you have surely heard of the formation of the Giant's Causeway when the legendary warrior Finn Mac Cool – who was not always a giant but in this case yes – was fighting another Scottish giant .
Tired of screaming from one ocean to the other, Mac Cool threw stones into the sea and made the pavement, but when he arrived in Scotland, he went to sea. realized that the giant was much bigger than him, and he came back
His wife rescued him, disguising him as a baby, so that when the Scottish giant saw him, he thought that if it was his son, his father had to be huge, and he ran away.
Mac Cool took a handful of land to launch it against the Scottish giant but he did not reach it: the land fell into the sea and formed the Isle of Man and the hole left by removing the earth was filled with water and became the largest lake in Ireland: Lake Neagh .
At that time, for the people, it was history.
"The Irish Giant"
Rumors began to circulate in the county that there was a child growing up more than anyone else. When he reached adolescence, he was the biggest character in the area.
Byrne reached 2.31 meters in height.
Hordes of people from all over the province went to see him while he dreamed of amassing a fortune with a show that made him famous all over Europe.
Thus, in 1782, under the pseudonym "The Irish Giant", he arrived in a world totally different from the one he had left behind: London
The news of the arrival of the largest man who would have walked the British capital He never watered quickly.
It was said that he lit his pipe with the fire of street lamps . And the Morning Herald newspaper announced:
April 24, 1782
THE GIANT IRISH. See him, every day this week, in his elegant and large room (…) on M. Byrne, the surprising giant Irishman, perhaps the tallest man in the world, with a height of 2.49 meters in perfect proportion and with only 21 years of age. # 39; eda d, n or will be long in London because it plans to travel to the mainland.
began to show, the ticket price was high because it was a show designed for the middle class and the rich, who actually came to see him in his apartment.
The boy from a lost Irish town has become one of London's greatest celebrities.
The reason for his greatness
However, the celebrity is a fickle friend and the reason he realized it was not magical like the giants of legends: it was a disease
Normal hand (left) next to someone who suffers from acromegaly (right). It is a disorder in which there is uncontrolled growth, which leads to changes in the features and enlargement of the hands and feet. / Science Photo Library Today, we recognize Byrne's gigantism as being caused by a tumor of the pituitary gland, the endocrine gland that secretes many essential hormones, including those of growth.
According to the age of the patient at the beginning of the tumor, gigantism or acromegaly develops (in adults).
Because the maintenance of a large heavy body poses abnormal requirements on both bones and in the heart, gigantism causes multiple health problems involving the circulatory or skeletal system.
Acromegaly is a rare, insidious and potentially life-threatening condition for which treatment is successful in providing life expectancy to the patient. patient equal to that of the normal population.
The Scottish Giant
John Hunter did not know it.
What Hunter knew was that Byrne was exceptional. I also knew that the giants died young.
Hunter was the Scottish giant: an eminent scientist, now recognized as the father of modern surgery, with a distinguished reputation for his lectures and his aptitude as a physician.
Hunter was, and still is, a giant in the field of medicine. / Science Photo Library He wanted Byrne's body at all costs, so he offered to buy it. But that only made him scare him.
Londoners of the eighteenth century considered dissection as a mark of infamy .
In addition, for Byrne, the offer of such a reputed doctor was an indication that death was near.
Far from home, frightened, wounded by his condition and weakened by tuberculosis, Byrne takes refuge in alcohol.
In April 1873, he fell asleep on a London street with all his savings in his pocket. When he woke up, they were gone. The young giant sank into despair
On Sunday, June 1 of the same year, he died . Thousands came in its wake.
On the way from London to Margate, where he could lie under the waves of the sea, as he had wished, his body was taken out of the coffin and replaced by stones.
Far from the sea
Many say that it is Hunter himself who paid to fly Byrne's body. When he received it in his laboratory, he put it in a huge boiler and boiled it for 24 hours to separate the meat from the bones. He then assembled the skeleton and tied it up so that it stays as when the giant has lived.
What remained of Byrne has been part of Hunter's private collection for centuries. / Science Photo Library The truth is that a few years later, the skeleton appeared in Hunter's private collection, and remained exposed for two centuries in the Hunterian Museum, which then passed into the hands of the Royal College of Surgeons.
To this day, the museum has rejected Byrne's remains removal requests from the exhibition and to comply with their expressed wishes, claiming that has "educational and artistic value". 39, important investigation ".
They cited, for example, the case of a survey conducted by the endocrinologist Márta Korbonits about a hereditary form of pituitary tumor called isolated familial pituitary adenoma.
Korbonits had found a family with several affected members in recent history who came from the same county in Ireland as Byrne and wondered if they were related.
With DNA tests of the "Irish giant" teeth, he found that Byrne and current patients inherited their genetic variant from the same common ancestor and that this mutation was about 1500 years old ].
Research has opened up the possibility of tracking the carriers of this gene – estimated between 200 and 300 – and treating them before they become giants
The Royal College Surgeons in England will consider the issue of Byrne's remains during the three years that the museum will be closed. Nevertheless, activists claim that even when someone gives his body to medical research, he does not expect it to be presented as a curious object.
In addition, they point out that Charles Byrne explicitly stated that he did not want that they use their remains in no case and stresses that this desire must be honored.
And finally maybe it will happen .
The Hunterian Museum has recently closed for a three-year restoration, during which, said Royal College of Surgeons spokesman Charles Byrne will not be exhibited. "
" The Hunteriana Collection Board of Directors will discuss the issue (repatriation of remains) during the museum's closing period. "
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