This column first appeared in December 2010.
Some of the most popular articles I have written for the pages of this newspaper in the past concern the fascination with the public sale at auction of macabre relics associated with American pop icons. You might remember columns devoted to the sale of rock-n-roll legend The Big Bopper’s casket, King of the Cowboy’s Roy Rogers stuffed horse Trigger and the autopsy tools used to work on Elvis Presley. Well, here’s another creepy auction offering for your perusal, but this one has an international appeal from the pages of scientific history.
Galileo Galilei was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer and philosopher credited by many as the central figure of the Scientific Revolution. Galileo has been called the “father of modern observational astronomy,” the “father of modern physics,” the “father of science,” and “the Father of Modern Science.” No less an authority than Stephen Hawking said, “Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science.” His achievements include developing the telescope and observing that the Earth revolved around the Sun. This discovery made Galileo an enemy of the Catholic Church, of which he was a member, by challenging its teachings. Clerics eventually denounced him to the Roman Inquisition in 1615 over his support of a heliocentric, or sun-centered, view of the universe. Although he was cleared of any offense at that time, the Church condemned his belief as “false and contrary to Scripture” and Galileo promised to stop publicizing it. Galileo was forced to recant and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
Galileo continued his studies right up to the day he died on January 8, 1642, at age 77. The Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinando II, began plans to bury him in the chapel of the Basilica of Santa Croce, next to the tombs of his father and other ancestors until a marble mausoleum could be built in his honor. These plans were scrapped, however, when Pope Urban VIII protested, because Galileo was condemned by the Catholic Church for “vehement suspicion of heresy.” For 95 years after his death, ecclesiastical authorities refused to allow Galileo to be buried in consecrated ground because his findings were considered contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church. Instead, he was secretly buried in a small room next to the commoner’s chapel at the end of a long corridor of the basilica to the sacristy. He was reburied in the chapel of the basilica in 1737 opposite the tomb of Michelangelo after attitudes had changed.
During the re-internment, several body parts were detached from the revered stargazer in hopes that they would be preserved for posterity. Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti, a science historian who cut away the parts and afterwards wrote about the ceremony stated that he had “found it hard to resist the temptation to take away the skull which had housed such extraordinary genius,” but suppressed the urge. Instead, the last tooth remaining in his lower jaw was taken, which could also be seen as an interesting insight into Florentine dentistry.
Some of Galileo’s body parts remained lost for nearly 300 years until resurfacing in an October 2009 auction as “unidentified artifacts contained in a 17th century wooden case.” Alberto Bruschi, a well-known Florence art collector, unknowingly bought them with other religious relics. When Bruschi noticed that Galileo’s bust topped the case, he shared it with his daughter who then located a book by Professor Paolo Galluzzi documenting how parts of the scientist’s body had been cut off at his burial. Based on this information, they contacted the museum and explained that they believed these might be the body parts of Galileo, missing for more than a century. Luckily for the museum, Bruschi donated the purchase (a tooth, thumb and forefinger) to the Museum of the History of Science in Florence and personally delivered the jar and its contents into the hands of Galileo specialist and museum director Paolo Galluzzi (yes the same Professor Galluzzi whose book Bruschi had consulted in the first place). The donated relics went on permanent display in June of 2010.
Galluzzi explained that by the time the jar went on sale, the label saying what was inside had been lost, so the sellers and the auctioneer did not realize its significance. “I was very curious, everybody knew there were fingers and a tooth, but the people preparing the auction didn’t know it was Galileo,” Galluzzi said. “There is a description from 1905 by the last person to have seen these objects. It provides us with a very detailed description of the container and the contents inside.” The jar “matches in every minute detail” the description, he explained. Galluzzi is convinced the find is genuine, saying if it was a fake, “would you have sold it at very low cost at an auction? All the story is so convincing I cannot think of a reason not to believe it,” he said. The museum has had the third Galileo finger since 1927, “so the digits will be reunited for the first time in centuries,” he added.
Experts at the museum compared the new find to a finger and vertebrae also cut from the scientist and confirmed they were indeed Galileo’s. A spokesman for the museum said, “All the organic material extracted from the corpse has therefore now been identified and is conserved in responsible hands. On the basis of considerable historical documentation, there are no doubts about the authenticity of the items.” The museum was so pleased with its newest acquisition, the “Museum of the History of Science” in Florence changed its name to the “Galileo Museum.”
Removing body parts from the corpse was an echo of a practice common with saints, whose digits, tongues and organs were revered by Catholics as relics with sacred powers. The irony of Galileo’s body having been subjected to the same treatment cannot go unnoticed since he was effectively blacklisted by the Catholic Church. Galluzzi noted, “The people who cut off his fingers essentially considered him a secular saint, since the fingers that were removed were the ones he would have used to hold a pen. Exactly as it was practiced with saints of religion, so with saints of science,” Galluzzi continued, “He was a hero and a martyr, keeping alive freedom of thought and freedom of research.” It is unclear whether enough organic material remains in the newly discovered fingers for DNA testing, but if so, the relics might shed light on the blindness that afflicted Galileo late in his life and identify what ultimately caused his death.
Of course, Galileo is far from the only dead icon whose body parts have now become tourist magnets. In Guanajuato, Mexico it is standing room only at the Mummy Museum with more than 100 exhumed, eerily preserved bodies of locals whose families couldn’t afford to pay their graveyard rent. In Dawson City, Yukon, the Downtown Hotel’s “Sourtoe Cocktail Club” celebrates its gold rush history by replacing olives with a dehydrated, salt-cured human toe. A sign above the bar reads: “You can drink it fast, you can drink it slow — But the lips have gotta touch the toe,” and another reads, “swallowing one is not suggested.”
The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia displays body parts of the famous, including the attached livers of Siamese twins Chang and Eng and the thorax of Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth, with the not so famous, including an anonymous giant colon that Roadside America claims, “looks like a sand worm from Frank Herbert’s Dune.”
There are also more grizzly relics to be found in public and private collections around the country just waiting for you to discover them. During Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth’s autopsy, three vertebrae were removed from his neck in order to access the bullet. Although the bones of this famous murderer lie in an unmarked grave in Baltimore, Booth’s neck bones are on display in Washington D.C.’s National Museum of Health and Medicine. While at this museum, you can also visit the shattered leg bone of Union Army General Dan Sickles, blown off at Gettysburg, and the hip of General Henry Barnum, vertebrae of President James A. Garfield and the tumor removed from the cheek of President Grover Cleveland.
Our fascination with these chilling artifacts is hard to explain. No one questions the relevance or authenticity of a poem or a work of art although both are considered to be visual evidence of human existence beyond the physical plain that we can learn from simply because of what they are. To many, these artifacts are the same way although lacking the beauty of the former while possessing the stark reality of the latter. A body part relic, if authentic, is the ultimate evidence. After all, maybe dead men do tell tales.
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. His newest books are “Bumps in the Night. Stories from the Weekly View,” “Irvington Haunts. The Tour Guide,” and “The Mystery of the H.H. Holmes Collection.” Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
