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The museums, the machines and the men and women who worked it out: laboratories kept as they were, beam engines under steam, the tunnel, the barrier, the roofs, and the plaques on the houses where the ideas came.
A body left to anatomy in 1832 and still on show, wax head and all, because its owner wanted a corpse to be useful.
Statues & plaquesMedicineGo insideFree
Also in Power & Politics.
Bentham died on 6 June 1832 and his will handed his body to his friend Thomas Southwood Smith to dissect - at a time when the only legal supply of corpses for anatomy was the gallows, and the shortfall was made up by grave-robbers. He asked for what was left to be kept and displayed rather than buried, on the reasoning that ran through everything else he wrote: a thing should be judged by its use, and a dead body that teaches anatomy is more use than one in the ground.
What is in the case is the skeleton, dressed and seated, with a wax head. The preserved head was meant to sit on the shoulders; the mummification, attempted with a technique reported from New Zealand, left it unusable for display. It is now in a conservation safe at the Institute of Archaeology and is not shown, being both fragile and human remains - which is a later century's answer to the question Bentham thought he had settled.
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