Why can't this gentle giant rest in peace? The undignified fight over the skeleton of a 8ft 4in colossus exhibited as a freak in his lifetime
He was so tall that he could light his pipe from a street lamp. He was said to be more than 8ft 4in (although his skeleton suggests he was actually nearer 8ft). His voice sounded ‘like thunder’, his hands and feet were immense and he had a gentle manner — when he was sober.
Charles Byrne, known as the Irish Giant, was the toast of Georgian London after arriving to seek his fortune at the age of 21 and being put on show as a freak.
People flocked to see him. Newspapers printed breathless reports of his astonishing size. The King and Queen received him, and the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire — the leading lights of fashionable society — took their friends to see Byrne.
But after a brief period of fame, the Irish Giant died.
A devout Catholic, mindful of the after-life, he left strict instructions that his body should be buried at sea in a lead-lined coffin: he was desperate that his remains escape the attentions of surgeons and scientists who were eager to dissect it and place it on public display....
Now two academics have mounted a campaign to fulfil his dying wishes and give the Irish Giant the burial he wanted. Writing in the British Medical Journal, Thomas Muinzer, a legal researcher at Queen’s University Belfast, and Len Doyal, professor of edical ethics at the University of London, argue there is no scientific benefit from continuing to display his remains....