Eyes, fingers, genitals: why do collectors need body parts of famous people - ForumDaily
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Eyes, fingers, genitals: why do collectors need body parts of famous people

Since ancient times, in various religions there has been a special relation to the relics of saints. But the publication with the BBC compiled a list of the most unusual secular relics: from Einstein's eyes to Napoleon's penis.

Photo: Shutterstock

Thinking about the afterlife, it’s unlikely that it will ever occur to you that it is somehow related to selling parts of your body from the eBay online auction.

Although a complaint recently filed by one user of this site leaves open the question of the sanctity of the human material remains after his death. Such an idea visited a man who stumbled on a piece of lots on a fragment of a bone supposedly belonging to a Catholic saint.

Of course, in the dark business associated with the sale of the remains of especially revered people, there is nothing new. For centuries, believers have been making pilgrimages to bow to the relics of the prophets and martyrs.

Buddha’s tooth, allegedly kept in the temple of the city of Kandy in Sri Lanka, the beard of the prophet Muhammad, exhibited in one of the Istanbul palaces, the sacred umbilical cord of Jesus Christ, according to legend, kept in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist on Lateran Hill in Rome, and to this day attract crowds pilgrims.

But what about all the rest, mere mortals? What will happen to the parts and elements that make up our physical shell, tens and hundreds of years after we leave this sinful earth?

Without a doubt, the bodies of most of us will remain lying in the graves while maintaining their integrity as much as worms allow.

However, this fate does not await everyone. There are many examples in world history when the remains of the deceased - eyes, fingers, brains and hearts - were removed from their final resting place and put on public display.

This article talks about the five most remarkable anatomical relics that are not related to religion.

Finger of galileo

In June 2010, one of the most extraordinary events in the history of culture took place in Italy: the thumb and middle fingers of the Renaissance astronomer Galileo Galilei, recently acquired at auction by the Florentine Museum of the History of Science, reunited with the tooth and one more finger of the scientist, already included in the number exhibits of this museum.

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The fingers of a brilliant scientist, separated from his body along with a tooth and a vertebra in 1737 during a reburial, were stolen by his fans as talismans.

Now these remains are displayed next to a pair of telescopes invented by Galileo - they give a completely ordinary exhibition a grim realism and turn the museum into a kind of mecca for modern admirers of a great mind that managed to comprehend the secrets of the sky like no one before.

Penis of napoleon

Some secular relics are exhibited in museums and are open to the general public, but some are kept in private collections. Say the penis of Napoleon Bonaparte.

According to legend, this organ was separated from the body of the great Corsican by an English surgeon during an autopsy procedure on the island of St. Helena in 1821.

The French emperor was exiled to this island in the Atlantic Ocean six years earlier after being defeated by British troops at the Battle of Waterloo. As a result, this island became his last refuge.

Since then, the penis, allegedly cut off from the commander's body, has been passed down as a kind of cultural relic from generation to generation: from an Italian priest in the 1969th century to a London bookseller in the 2th century, then to the private collection of an American urologist who paid for it in 900 year $2007 and until his death in XNUMX, he kept this shriveled piece of flesh in a suitcase under his bed.

In June 2016, his vast collection of historical treasures, including a cyanide ampoule, with which Hermann Goering committed suicide, was auctioned off and went to an Argentine collector.

It is possible that, among other interesting things, there was Napoleon's penis.

Einstein's eyes

Napoleon's reproductive organ is not the only celebrity relic hidden from the public.

Albert Einstein's eyes, after decades of contemplating the stars and the vast universe and separated from the scientist's body after his death in 1955, are now rumored to be looking at a much less exciting black hole - the depths of a private safe in New York City.

When the brain of an outstanding physicist was removed from the skull for careful study (lasting for decades), his eyes, preserved in a special solution, were transferred to the memory of Einstein's permanent ophthalmologist Henry Abrams.

The doctor’s attending physician survived until 2009 and died at the age of 97. It is believed that Einstein's eyes, which have yet to be auctioned, are still peering lonely into the darkness of the vault.

"Last Exhalation" by Thomas Edison

Humanity eternally strives to preserve what is impossible to preserve. A clear confirmation of this is one of the exhibits of the Henry Ford Museum, located in the American city of Dearborn in Michigan.

In a corked test tube, mounted at an angle on a thin stand like a pop star’s microphone, there is a transparent glass flask that supposedly contains air exhaled by the legendary American inventor Thomas Edison at the time of death.

In 1931, the famous creator of the phonograph, movie camera and light bulb was dying at home in New Jersey. And when he let out his last breath, the doctor sitting at the head brought an open ampoule to his mouth, which he then sealed.

Edison's son Charles, who probably believed (like the Greeks) that a person's breath, or pneuma, was his soul, gave the test tube for safekeeping to his father's business partner, automobile magnate Henry Ford.

Index finger Pancho Villa

Of course, the craze for the mortal remains of celebrities opens up wide scope for fraud and counterfeiting.

In 2011, one of these dubious relics attracted public attention in the city of El Paso in Texas.

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Dave's Lombard put up for sale an item that supposedly was the index finger of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa.

During his lifetime, this freedom fighter was known as the elusive, and after his death, his body continued this glorious tradition.

Several people immediately claim that it was they who kept the shot-through skull of a national hero, separated from his body by cemetery thieves in 1926, three years after his death.

Pancho Villa was killed in a shootout when a group of armed men attacked his car. One local reporter, describing the item for sale, gave free rein to the imagination, reporting that the “wrinkled and slightly bent” finger bore “a strangely jagged wound, as if it had clawed its way out of the grave.”

The owner did not provide any guarantee of the authenticity of the relic, accompanying it with the same tale that he himself had been told seven years earlier, offering the item as collateral. Five years have passed since then, and the pawnshop is still looking for buyers for the dubious finger, a photo of which is posted on the establishment’s Facebook page next to the statement that “there is no second pawnshop like it.”

What makes people acquire the property of mortal remains, reminiscent of the physical existence of other people, is a mystery shrouded in darkness.

Perhaps someone believes that fragments of someone else’s body are the vehicles through which life energy probably passes.

Or people cling to gloomy totems in the hope of defeating the finality of death.

As Einstein’s ophthalmologist admitted to a journalist in 1994, “As long as I have the professor’s eyes, his life is not over. A piece of him is always with me.”

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