Charles Byrne arranged to be buried at sea to escape the anatomists, and John Hunter got his body and displayed his skeleton for 200 years

Charles Byrne was born in 1761 at Littlebridge, County Derry. A pituitary tumour kept him growing, to about 7 feet 7 inches. He showed himself for money in Edinburgh and London as "the Irish Giant". The surgeon and anatomist John Hunter offered him money for his corpse. Byrne refused. He arranged to be buried at sea in a lead coffin so that anatomists could not take his body. He died in 1783, aged 22. Hunter paid Byrne's friends £500 before the burial, about £60,000 today. About three years later Hunter put the skeleton on display in his museum in Leicester Square. The Royal College of Surgeons of England bought Hunter's collection in 1799, and the skeleton stood in its Hunterian Museum for nearly 200 years. The novelist Hilary Mantel campaigned for its removal. The museum closed for refurbishment in 2017. In January 2023 its trustees said the skeleton would not be shown in the new museum, which reopened in March after a £4.6 million refit. The College keeps the bones for "bona fide medical research" into gigantism. It calls Byrne's wish "well-documented but anecdotal" and says no written record of it exists. Byrne has not been buried at sea.