Hunterian Museum, London

At the Hunterian Museum, you are looking at a collection of anatomical specimens gathered by John Hunter, an eighteenth-century Scottish surgeon. Its most famous exhibit is no longer displayed: the skeleton of Charles Byrne, an Irish celebrity who measured about 2.31 metres and drew crowds in 1780s London. Byrne knew Hunter wanted his body, so he arranged burial at sea in a lead coffin.

After Byrne died in 1783 at age 22, Hunter paid a man escorting the coffin, took the body, and prepared the skeleton for display. The museum also preserves a foot from an Egyptian mummy dissected in 1763; someone later attached an onion to it, and the reason remains unknown. Other notable items include teaching boards displaying human nerves and blood vessels, teeth extracted from soldiers at Waterloo, Winston Churchill’s false teeth, and a cockerel’s head that contains a human tooth.