Historical Body Parts That Are Still Kicking
No matter what the weird buzzkills say, most of us won’t, in fact, die alone. The vast majority will be put in a hole in a huge field full of people-holes or scattered into a sea full of untold life or at least (much to the consternation of employees) onto the floor of Disney’s Haunted Mansion. Almost none of us will be singled out to be put on display, archived in a government’s historical collection or secreted away in a box in someone’s office. Almost.
Galileo’s Middle Finger
Considering he was so misunderstood, it feels appropriate that Galileo Galilei is flipping us off for all eternity, his middle finger having been displayed at Florence’s Galileo Museum since 1927. It’s just a hilarious coincidence, though. Several of his fingers were removed by “admirers” in 1737, almost 100 years after his death, and the museum just happened to come across the most profane one before finding the rest in 2009. And you thought stan culture was bad now.
Possibly the most famous organ in history is Albert Einstein’s brain, which was stolen by pathologist Thomas Harvey almost as soon as the physicist’s body hit his autopsy table in 1955. Harvey intended to earn his own place in the history books by finding out what made Einstein so smart, but things started to get awkward as the years dragged on and he didn’t find anything special about the brain. In 1978, a journalist found what was left of Einstein’s thoroughly dissected brain in two mason jars in Harvey’s office. After Harvey’s death, it was donated to a handful of museums, who display samples of it on slides. Yeah, it was that dissected.
Booth’s Vertebrae
For some reason, the government didn’t care much for most of John Wilkes Booth’s body. They just kinda threw it in storage for a few years before releasing it to his family for burial in the Booth cemetery plot. They did want their bullet back, though, so they removed the three vertebrae it hit and then kept them as souvenirs. The family has petitioned for access to these bones for DNA testing, to settle bets that Booth actually escaped and a patsy was shot in his place, but they were denied due to “the need to preserve these bones for future generations.” In other words, “our trophy, can’t have it.”
Chopin’s Heart
When Frédéric Chopin died in Paris in 1849, he requested that his heart be taken back to his native Poland, so his doctor plopped it into a jar of cognac and his sister took it on a fun little multi-border road trip. A century later, it was stolen by Nazis from Warsaw’s Church of the Holy Cross but eventually returned by an S.S. commander in search of an image rehab. Academically speaking, we call that “too little, too late.”
Hitler’s Teeth
Speaking of Nazis, conspiracy theorists love to speculate that, like Booth, Adolf Hitler actually escaped his bunker and lived out his days sipping mate and dancing the tango in Argentina. Fortunately, the Red Army, foresighted as they were, snapped up Hitler’s remains as soon as they found them. In 2018, his teeth were conclusively matched to his dental records, though that was about all that was left, as Hitler requested that his and his wife’s bodies be burned after their suicides.
See? Even Hitler didn’t die alone. In a ditch and on fire, but not alone.
