The dead have always been useful. Medical schools needed them, churches venerated pieces of them, and collectors paid for them. These stories follow bodies after death, which is often where the historical record becomes strangest.
Every story in Bodies, relics & medicine
- Jerusalem · 1185The Leper King's Story No Film Would ShowKingdom of Heaven gave him a dignified death behind a silver mask, the truth was far crueller.
- Whitechapel, London · 1890The Truth Behind The Elephant ManThe real man behind the famous film was quieter, stranger and far more heartbreaking than any screenplay.
Correggio · 1940The Soap-Maker Who Murdered For LoveAn Italian woman murdered three neighbours and turned their bodies into soap and teacakes, believing she was saving her son.
Paris · 1778Voltaire's Final Battle With The ChurchThe Church tried to deny him a grave, but revolutionaries would carry his body to a hero's tomb thirteen years later.
Geneva · 1816The Tragic Life Behind FrankensteinThe real 1818 novel is nothing like the lumbering movie monster — and the woman who wrote it lived a life as tragic as her fiction.
London · 1381The Archbishop's Head That Still SurvivesA raging mob hacked the Archbishop of Canterbury to death, and his mummified head still sits in a Suffolk church today.
Washington, D.C. · 1941The Lobotomy That Silenced A KennedyDoctors kept cutting into her brain until a conscious young woman stopped making sense.
Oxford · 1650The Woman Who Woke Up In Her Own CoffinHanged, sealed in a coffin, and delivered to anatomists with knives ready, she was found alive when they opened the lid.- Longwood House, Saint Helena · 1821The Poison In Napoleon's WallpaperA dying emperor believed he was being murdered, and centuries later his own wallpaper became a suspect.
New York City · 1836The Showman Who Sold Tickets To A DissectionP.T. Barnum built his fortune exhibiting an enslaved woman alive, then sold tickets to watch her autopsy.
Stockport · 1829The Poison Behind The Mad HatterGenerations of hatters were slowly poisoned by mercury, giving English a phrase before Lewis Carroll ever used it.
Baghdad · 1258The Day The Mongols Drowned A LibraryThe Mongols sacked the greatest city on Earth, and the Tigris ran black with ink from a thousand years of lost knowledge.
Paris · 1794The Woman Who Cast Faces From The GuillotineA wax modeller who once taught princesses at Versailles ended up pressing plaster into the still-warm faces of the guillotined.
Deir el-Medina · 1150 BCThe Tomb Robber's Charge SheetA 3,200-year-old papyrus names the women a powerful Egyptian craftsman was accused of assaulting, and his own tomb still stands as evidence.- Thebes · 1155 BCThe Pharaoh Murdered By His Own HaremA CT scan finally revealed the hidden throat wound that ended the reign of Egypt's last great pharaoh.
- Cavendish, Vermont · 1848The Iron Rod That Rewrote A Man's PersonalityA tamping iron shot through his skull and left the steady, capable foreman a changed man — and changed science forever.
Coney Island, New York · 1920The Ordinary Woman Billed As The World's UgliestA tumour transformed a nurse and mother's face beyond recognition, and a circus turned her survival into a sideshow act.
Orange, New Jersey · 1922The Dial Painter Whose Bones Still GlowedA false diagnosis blamed her death on syphilis — the truth was the radium paint she'd been told to point with her lips.
Caen · 1087The Conqueror Whose Funeral Fell ApartThe king who took England died alone, stripped of his valuables, and his funeral turned into a grotesque disaster.
Hiroshima · 1945The Shadow Burned Into The StepsIn less than a second, a bank's granite steps bleach white everywhere except where one person happened to be sitting.
Vienna · 1827The Composer Whose Skull Was StolenA genius conceals his encroaching deafness for years, and even after death, souvenir hunters aren't done taking pieces of him.
Vienna · 1847The Doctor Who Discovered Handwashing Too LateA Vienna doctor works out why women are dying of childbed fever in droves, and nobody in power wants to believe him.- Edinburgh · 1828The Landlord Who Turned To Murder For ProfitA simple scheme to sell a dead lodger's body to an anatomy school turns into a ten-month killing spree in Edinburgh.
The Solent, Portsmouth · 1545The Warship That Sank Before The King's EyesHenry VIII watched his flagship heel over and vanish beneath the waves in under a minute, taking hundreds of trapped men with her.
Paris · 1794The Chemist The Revolution Had No Time ForThe man who discovered oxygen was guillotined not for his science, but for a tax company he once belonged to.
Arguin Bank, off Mauritania · 1816The Raft That Inspired A Masterpiece147 people were abandoned on a raft in the Atlantic — starvation, madness and cannibalism followed before rescue.
Lindow Moss, Wilmslow · 60The Bog Body With Three Ways To DieA 2,000-year-old body pulled from a Cheshire bog bore a smashed skull, a garrotte, and a slit throat.
Herculaneum · 79The Boathouses of HerculaneumThree hundred people sheltered from Vesuvius in stone boathouses, and superheated gas killed them all in an instant.
Bethnal Green, London · 1831The Body Snatchers of Nova Scotia GardensA veteran grave robber stopped digging and started killing when he realized freshly murdered bodies paid better.
Greenwich, London · 1553The Boy King's Hidden CollapseBehind closed doors, the nine-year-old king who inherited a dynasty rotted from a lung disease his advisors desperately hid.- Windsor · 1547The Rotting Death of Henry VIIIEngland's most feared king died fat, diseased, and stinking of infection in a bed few dared approach.
- London · 1543The Portrait That Became a Death WarrantA court painter's flattering portrait of a bride-to-be enraged a king desperate for the truth.
- Tower of London, London · 1503The Queen Whose Death Broke a KingA desperate late pregnancy killed a beloved queen and drove her husband into total madness.
- London · 1562The Lady Who Caught the Queen's SmallpoxShe nursed a dying queen back to health and paid for it with her own face.
- Greenwich Palace, London · 1553The Boy King Whose Lungs Rotted Inside HimHis skin turned green and his legs swelled as he coughed up pieces of his own blackened lungs.
- Burgh by Sands · 1307The King Who Wanted His Bones Carried Into BattleDying of dysentery on the border, he ordered his flesh boiled away so his skeleton could lead the army.
- Teba · 1330The Heart Thrown Into Battle Against The EnemySurrounded and facing certain death, the knight hurled his dead king's heart into the enemy line and followed it.
- Syon House, London · 1547The King's Corpse The Dogs Got To FirstSealed in lead and left overnight, his body leaked and swelled until stray dogs found their way inside the room.
- Kimbolton Castle · 1536The Queen Whose Heart Turned BlackEmbalmers found every organ healthy except one — shrivelled, black, and hideous to look at.
- London · 1797The Feminist Philosopher Killed by ChildbirthShe wrote one of history's first feminist manifestos, then died days after giving birth to the daughter who wrote Frankenstein.
- North Brother Island, New York · 1938The Cook Who Refused to Believe She Was Typhoid MaryShe infected dozens as an asymptomatic carrier and spent 26 years in forced isolation, still insisting she was innocent.