Burns Mummies For Sale


Yesterday, the Concord Monitor picked up a story from a couple weeks ago by Michael Stroh, of the Baltimore Sun, involving the so-called Burns mummies, and their sale on eBay. The mummies were preserved with salt, mercury lead, sugar and arsenic by Allen Burns, a Scottish anatomist. The cadavers are estimated to be 200 years old.

The study of anatomy was once quite a difficult pursuit, as students were forced to steal bodies, or wait for a prisoner to be executed before they could dissect a cadaver.

In this case, Michigan authorities confiscated a cadaver in October, which had been put on sale on eBay. Ronn Wade, director of the University of Maryland anatomical-sciences division suspects the body may have been part of the Burns collection. The University of Maryland acquired the Burns collection from Granville Patterson, a protege of Burns, in 1820 for $7,800. The collection once amounted to 500 specimens, but today there are closer to 150.

I’m not sure how close a collection of cadavers comes to our paradigmatic conception of cultural property, but they are the subject of serious study, and illustrate the evolution of the scientific study of the human body. One wonders how many other cadavers are offered for sale on eBay.

(Image: Sun photo by Andre F. Chung)

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com