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Blogging resumes on Ballymaclinton: An Irish giant, 24 stolen skulls, one colonial legacies project and a slave owner named Berkeley.

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on January 13, 2023 – 12:56 pm

Filed under Comment, Public Engagement, Research

I suspended work on my Ballymaclinton blog while writing my book on Haddon for Berghahn Books New York, but the announcement that the Trustees of the Hunterian Museum in London have withdrawn the skeleton of Charles O’Brien – an Irish giant known and Charles Byrne – from public display brought the resumption of blogging forward by a couple of weeks.

The ethics of such displays were an important part of my research and the subject of a previous blog on Cornelius Magrath, another Irish giant. It seemed like a good time to resume blogging and An Irish giant, 24 stolen skulls, one colonial legacies project and a slave owner named Berkeley is the first of a new series of blogs that feature aspects of my recent research and current activism.

Preview:

Brendan Holland in the Anatomy Museum TCD during the filming of The Giant Gene for BBC. Photo Chris Nikkel. Chris Nikkel and Brendan Holland filmed part of their documentary The Giant Gene in the museum and a key question for Holland, as a contemporary Irish giant, was whether he would like his bones to go on public display like Magrath in Dublin and O’Brien in London.

What does the removal of the skeleton of Charles Byrne from public display in London mean for Trinity College Dublin with regard to its retention of 24 skulls stolen from community burial grounds in Inishbofin, the Aran Islands and St. Finian’s Bay, Kerry? The repatriation of these remains has become a test case for the colonial legacies project initiated by Prof Ciarán O’Neill in 2020 and the question now is whether the issue of human remains in collections in London and Dublin tells us anything about the impending judgement on Berkeley’s involvement in slavery. …

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Rewriting the history of Irish anthropology part 1: BEROSE International Encyclopaedia.

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on July 6, 2022 – 12:16 pm

Filed under Comment, Criticism, Research

Anon. 1885. Dredging party, 1885, with friends.
Sitting, left to right: A.C. Haddon (in front of light suit), S. Haughton, W. S. Green, C. B. Ball;
Standing: Sir D’Arcy W. Thompson (light suit), Sir R. S. Ball (yachting cap), Valentine Ball (at end of trawl),
Permission of the Royal Irish Academy © RIA

BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology has commissioned Ciarán Walsh to write a new entry on the life and work of Alfred Cort Haddon (1865 – 1940). The entry draws on independent post-doc research for a ground-breaking reassessment of Haddon’s contribution to the modernisation of anthropology that Berghahn Books commissioned as part of its series on Anthropology’s Ancestors. Alfred Cort Haddon: a very English savage (in Ireland) is due out in 2023 and represents a radical reworking of Haddon’s work as an artist, philosopher, ethnologist and anti-racism activist whose experiments in photo-ethnography cinematography constitute a singularly modernist achievement in anthropology.

The timing couldn’t be better. The photograph above records a seminal moment in the brave new world of practical marine biology which sets the scene for Haddon’s enthusiastic entry into ethnology two years later, an event that was so disruptive it triggered a decade-long battle with anatomists who attempted to restrict academic anthropology to the study of the natural history of the human species in situations defined by theoretical positions compatible with empire and evolution. This scenario has its analogue in the current stand-off between those who see anthropology as an engaged and essentially emancipatory project and those who operate a restricted form of practical anthropology within a neoliberal academy.

As such, the BEROSE entry represents the first part of a new history of anthropology in Ireland. It addresses key themes of the current debate about what it means to do anthropology (to borrow a phrase from Clifford Geertz) in the intertwined contexts of an engagement with colonial legacies sparked by the Black Lives Matter Movement, legislated genocide in the Amazon and other flash-points across the globe, and the restrictions on knowledge production that characterise a neoliberal academy.

BEROSE will publish “Artist, Philosopher, Ethnologist and Activist: The Life and Work of Alfred Cort Haddon (1855-1940)” by Ciarán Walsh in August 2022.

Don’t Kick That Skull

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on August 30, 2021 – 2:47 pm

Filed under Comment, Research

RTÉ Brainstorm has published “Don’t Kick That Skull” by Ciarán Walsh, the second part of the story of skulls stolen by Haddon and Dixon from community burial grounds in the west of Ireland in the 1890s.

Covid restrictions have forced us all to think about traditions relating to death and dying. The case of skulls stolen on Inishbofin, the Aran Islands, and The Glen (St Finian’s Bay) in 1890 has added a curious twist to that story. The Inishbofin skulls were originally held in a niche in St Colman’s Monastery on the island (see this post on Ballymaclinton) and the current keepers of the skulls, the Anatomy Dept in TCD, have used this fact to raise doubts about the origin of the skulls and contest a claim for the repatriation.

TCD has undertaken an osteo-archaeological investigation into the origin of these skulls and there is no indication as to when those results may be available. In the meantime, Ciarán Walsh completed a separate investigation into burial practices in the west of Ireland in the 1890s and published the finding on the RTÉ Brainstorm site.

“Don’t kick That Skull” reveals a tradition of using sites like St Colman’s Monastery for holding skulls found during burials and reports on a fascinating body of Irish folklore and oral history that warns people against interfering with skulls and human remains found in sites like this. The question now is whether TCD is listening?

Disrupting history at SSNCI 2021

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on June 25, 2021 – 10:24 am

Filed under Comment

Ciaran Walsh | www.curator.ie returns to the theme of Charles R. Browne, the Irish Headhunter for a disruptive new study of the relationship between anthropology and the political establishment in the 1890 at The Society for the Study of Nineteenth Century Ireland’s (SSNCI) annual conference conference, hosted by the School of History in University College Cork.

The conference explores the idea dwellings in nineteenth-century Ireland and Walsh uses Browne study of dwellings in Mayo in 1894, 1895 and 1896 to explore why an epidemic of typhus on the small island of Inishkea came to play a pivotal role in the escalation from home rule to revolution?

If COVID has taught us anything, Walsh argues, it is that pandemics are political events and the small epidemic in Inishkea was no different. Walsh weaves the politics of anthropology and home rule into an original an disruptive exploration of what it meant to dwell on Inishkea, that is to be an Irish native in an English colony in the 1890s.

Ciarán Walsh joins RTÉ Brainstorm as a contributor

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on August 28, 2020 – 3:35 pm

Filed under Comment, History of Anthropology, Journalism

Ciarán Walsh has published his first article on Brainstorm, an online platform for researchers and academic that is manage by RTÉ.

The article asks if readers have ever thought about the political significance of the shape of their heads and goes on to make a connection between Victorian anthropology in Ireland and facial recognition systems in use today, killing a couple of sacred cows along the way.

For More:

https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2020/0811/1158475-skull-measuring-head-hunter-alfred-haddon-history-ireland/

Remembering Tim Robinson

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on April 6, 2020 – 1:18 pm

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Tim Robinson 1935-2020 (Photograph: Nicolas Fève).

Tim Robinson, whose death was announced on Friday, was a constant presence in the work I have been doing on the Aran Islands. Tim launched my exhibition of the photographs of John Millington Synge on Inis Meáin in 2009, an event that Giulia Bruna has described in her book on J. M. Synge and Travel Writing of the Irish Revival.

Deirdre McQuillan interviewed Tim on the occasion and quoted his observation that, in Synge’s hands, the camera turns “itself back to front and photographs the artist. Synge’s sitters . . . do not confront the camera, they present themselves to it frankly and trustingly. And that is the stance of Synge himself in relation to the countryfolk he interprets in his own image.’ (The Irish Times)

Digital scan of the negative of Synge’s photograph of Mairtín Mac Donnchadha, “an islander of Inishmaan” (© TCD).

That statement could apply to Tim himself, but it was the quality of his scholarship and his meticulous rendering of local detail – in his map making and his writing – that made him an indispensable guide to the Aran Islands and Connemara.

May he rest in peace.

Confronting genocide: turning research into activism.

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on January 13, 2020 – 12:29 pm

Filed under Advocacy and Activism, Comment, Conferennce

“They didn’t manage to kill us all at the time of colonization” says Celia Xakriabá “but we are living through a moment of legislated genocide.” Xakriabá is an activist who is featured in Tribal Voice, an online campaign that is organised by Survival International.

Confronting Genocide

Anthropology and Geography Conference, London June 4-7, 2020.

How do we deal with the threat of genocide in 2020?

That is a question that we will be putting to people attending the Anthropology and Geography Conference in London in June 2020.

“We” are a group of researchers, academics, and environmental activists who are responding to the humanitarian consequences of unprecedented and accelerated deforestation in the Amazon, which raises the issue of genocide in Brazil and other countries across the globe.

*The burning of the Amazon rainforest in Mato Grosso state, Brazil. Photo: Mayke Toscano/AFP/Getty Images &* *The Guardian*

In keeping with the conference theme of “dialogues past, present and future,” we are asking if we have learned anything from over 150 years of genocide and humanitarian activism in response to it. For instance, in the 1890s, a small group of anthropologists and geographers went against the colonial mainstream and demanded a radical political response from the scientific community and the public to the threat of genocide created by habitat destruction by colonists.

It sounds very historical, but Celia Xakriabá (see above ) makes it clear that the threat of genocide is very real, very current and the call to action is even more urgent today given the situation that is developing in the Amazon under Bolsonaro, whose policies have been described as “legislated genocide.”

The indigenous peoples of the Amazon are not the only populations under threat and Brazil is not the only place where a combination of globalisation and habitat destruction is leading to “legislated genocide”-–the deliberate destruction of livelihoods and the legalised murder of indigenous peoples. Genocide is happening now in Turkey, the Kalahari, the Congo Basin, the jungles of India, the Andaman Islands, Australasia.

Mohammad Salas, a 51-year-old man from Iran’s largest Sufi order, the Gonabadi Dervish religious minority. Salas was executed by the Iranian authorities after a trial that was widely condemned as a miscarriage of justice. *Amnesty International*.

Much of this genocide has remained hidden and we hope that our research and activism will start a debate about “legislated genocide,” a combination of advocacy and activism that will encourage further action in solidarity with the victims of habitat destruction, forced migration, and genocide, whether the causes are cultural, political, economic, or environmental.

The Contributors

The debate will be chaired by Dr Eve Bratman, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Franklin & Marshall College. She will give a paper on “The Lives and Landscapes of Sustainable Development in the Xingu River Basin of the Brazilian Amazon.” She asks how the discourse of sustainable development legitimates and privileges certain interests, and how it comes to be manifested – and resisted. She will present as a case study the geographic and social terrain of the Xingu river basin in the state of Pará. Oxford University Press has just published her book Governing the Rainforest: Sustainable Development Politics in the Brazilian Amazon.

Representatives of the local indigenous communities and environmental activists demonstrate in Sao Paulo against the construction of Belo Monte dam at Xingu river in the Brazilian state of Para. Photograph: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images (The Guardian).

Fiona Watson, Advocacy and Research Director with Survival international, will present Tribal Voice, a series of hard-hitting videos that provide an online platform for tribal peoples living in an age of legislated genocide. These videos expose hidden genocides and support tribal peoples in their fight against genocide. Tribal Voice represents a significant development in the nature and direction of humanitarian activism and has profound implications for the idea of engaged practices in a multi-agency fight against legislated genocide in 2020 and beyond. Watson is a regular contributor to The Guardian.

Dr Raúl Acosta-Garcia, Institut für Ethnologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, will deal with advocacy networks that have sought to protect the Amazon rainforest and its inhabitants, creating associations that have become laboratories for political experimentation. His analysis builds on arguments presented in his new book Civil becomings: performative politics in the Brazilian Amazon and the Mediterranean, the first monograph of the series NGOgraphies (University of Alabama Press).

Top: An aerial view of the road BR-319 highway near city of Humaita, Amazonas state, Brazil (Irish Examiner). Bottom: A paved section of the BR-163 highway in Brazil. (Photo by Jeso Carneiro/Flickr / Eve Bratman & NACLA)

Dr Federico Ferretti, Associate Professor, University College Dublin, School of Geography, will present a paper on “Savage anarchy’ between geography and anthropology”, which deals with early forms of collaboration that occurred between geographical and anthropological (or ethnographical) knowledge around the circuits of anarchist geographers between the nineteenth and the twentieth century. Ferretti is the invited author for the Progress in Human Geography report series on ‘History and Philosophy of Geography‘ from 2020 to 2022 (3 papers).

A detail of a photograph taken by **Alfred Cort Haddon** in the Torres Strait in 1888 and a detail from a Tribal Voice video released by **Survival International** in 2019

Ciarán Walsh, freelance curator, will deal with the emergence of social anthropology from radical geography in Ireland in the 1890s, using the photo-ethnographic practice of Alfred Cort Haddon as a novel vantage point from which to see how anthropology is positioned to deal with climate change, the destruction of habitats, and hostile borders in the present and assess the future relevance of the discipline in this context. His essay on “Anarchy in the UK: Haddon and the anarchist agenda in the Anglo-Irish folklore movement” is about to go to press (Routledge).

The discussant is Dr Matthew Cheeseman, Associate Professor of Creative Writing, College of Arts, Humanities and Education, University of Derby, who is working with Carina Hart of the University of Nottingham on a collection of essays (Routledge) dealing with the relationship between nationality, identity, and folklore movements in the context of Brexit and the rise of the alt right in Europe.

The Anthropology and Geography: Dialogues Past, Present and Future conference is jointly organised by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, the Royal Geographical Society, the British Academy, the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS (The School of Oriental & African Studies), and the British Museum’s Department for Africa, Oceania and the Americas. The conference will be held in SOAS, Senate House, and the Clore Centre of the British Museum.

“Old” Anatomy goes live for Science Week 2018

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on November 13, 2018 – 11:14 am

Filed under Anthropology, Comment, Education, Research, Science Week

Going Wilde in “Old” Anatomy. William Wilde’s collection of skulls goes on display in TCD as a backdrop for the filming of “Growing, Up Live”

The skulls have been taken out of storage and put on display as the “Old” Anatomy Museum in TCD goes “live” for three nights during Science Week 2018. The Museum has been transformed into a studio for Growing Up, Live. It is being filmed in front of a live studio audience and the programme makers will “be treating the audience to live science experiments every night” which, RTE promises, “will unlock our understanding of a human lifetime.’

The Anatomy Museum is a really interesting setting for a show like this. Historically, dissections were done in front of a live audience. That won’t happen in “Growing Up, Live” but the audience will be surrounded by the results of 300 years of anatomical research. The Museum is home to a collection of anatomical and medical specimens that was built up over 300 years of medical education in Trinity College, University of Dublin, much of which was “re-discovered” when “Old” Anatomy Dept was decommissioned in 2014 and the School of Medicine move to the TBSI building on Pearse St.

Angela Scanlon adopts the traditional pose of the Anatomist – skull in hand – in “Old” Anatomy in preparation for the filming of “Growing Up, Live.”

The live broadcast marks a turning point in the process of opening the least known and most interesting museum in Dublin to the public. In March 2017, Joe Duffy created some controversy when he called for the skeleton of Cornelius Magrath, the Irish Giant, to be removed from display in the mistaken belief the Magrath’s body had been robbed, dissected in secret, and his skeleton put on display in 1760. I was working on the collection at the time and found evidence that Magrath had in fact been in the care of Trinity School of Medicine when he died.

The controversy died but there was a some nervousness about opening the collections to the public as a result. Brendan Holland, another Irish Giant, came to the rescue. He filmed part of the documentary “The Giant Gene” in the Anatomy Museum and went public on the most difficult question of all: as a giant, how would he feel it his skeleton was put on display? Brendan didn’t have a problem with that, given the contribution that historic specimens like Magrath continue to make to medical research into conditions like gigantism.

2018. Public engagement at work: BBC Northern Ireland recording an interview between Brendan Holland and Martina Hennessy (School of Medicine TCD) for the a documentary entitled “The Giant Gene.” It was produced by Chris Nikkel and broadcast in June 2018.

2016. The Anatomy Museum operating as a mixture of conservation workshop and anthropological “field.” This is some of the material that was discovered in 2014 and needed to be sorted, catalogued, and stored in preparation for conservation and display. The anthropological material is visible in the foreground.

The use of the space as a studio marks another turning point. An enormous amount of material was discovered in the process of decommissioning the “Old” Anatomy Dept in 2014. Much of this was in tea-chests and crates but there was a lot of material stored under the old theatre and in every nook and cranny of the building. This included a really important collection of photographs taken in the Aran Islands in 1890, shortly before the Anatomy Dept established a small Anthropology Dept and opened an anthropometric (the measurement of humans) laboratory.

A photograph taken by Andrew F. Dixon and Alfred Cort Haddon in Dún Chonnchubhair, Inis Meáin, in 1890. The negative on the left still has the masking that was used to create the effect of a clear sky. The image on the right is an inverted scan of the original, which is called a positive.

That is where curator.ie got involved. I received funding from the Irish Research Council (research.ie) to work on collections associated with the Anthropometric Laboratory and its programme of ethnographic surveys in the west of Ireland. The project was a joint venture of Maynooth University, TCD School of Medicine, and Kimmage Development Studies Centre, now Shanahan Research Centre.

As a curator and a student of anthropology, I did my fieldwork in “Old” Anatomy. Most of the material discovered in 2014 was stored in the Anatomy Museum and it took the best part of two years to go through it and organise suitable storage in the nooks and crannies from whence it came. The plan, all along, was to restore the museum as a public space.

The filming of “The Giant Gene” was a key part of a strategy to make the collection visible and to engage the public in a conversation about the contemporary significance of “Old” Anatomy, whether that is the Skeleton of Magrath, the huge range of medical education material, or the ethnographic material associated with the Anthropological Dept.

The filming of “Growing Up, Live” is on a different scale altogether, given the reach of Science Week and the presence in the museum of a studio audience. RTE publicists have described the “studio” as an amazing Anatomy Museum” and it will be very interesting to see how the audience engages with the various collections.

This is the space to watch during Science Week.

The history of the British Isles as represented in skulls. Ethnologists in the mid-nineteenth century believed that they could find traces of the various invasions of Ireland by comparing the shape of ancient skulls.

To Follow: The Skull Measuring Business: the work of the Dublin Anthropometric Anthropometric Laboratory (1891-1903).

Knock: Apparition Or Slide Show

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on August 22, 2018 – 10:52 pm

Filed under Comment, Photography, Politics, Research

A man of Vision: Fr Bartholomew Cavanagh ( 1821-1897), Parish Priest of Knock and Aughamore in 1879. This is man who may have engineered an apparition using a magic lantern. The site of the “apparition” is visible in the background. Photo: Knock Shrine.

The latest post on the curator.ie blog examines new evidence supporting the claim that the apparition said to have occurred in Knock in 1879 was in fact a slide show engineered by the parish priest (pictured above).

It builds on research into the Dublin Anthropometric Laboratory, drawing on an investigation of the role played by James Hack Tuke in the organisation of a survey of fishing Grounds in the West of Ireland in 1890. This survey laid the foundation for the programme of ethnographic fieldwork undertaken by the Laboratory in one of Tuke’s main areas of operation, Mayo and Connemara.

Sketch showing distribution of relief tickets in the turf market in Westport. From Illustrated London News, March 6th, 1880. Source Mayo Library.

Tuke visited Knock in 1880, 6 months after the apparition occurred and 6 weeks or so after the first report was published in the press. Tuke claimed that the “apparition” involved the use of a lantern projector to “depict” the Blessed Virgin as in a “vision.” This connected with a conversation I had some time ago with Stan Mason, grandson of Thomas Mason, the man who recalled providing the parish priest in Knock with a lantern projector around the time of the apparition. It seemed obvious to me that Knock was more slide show than apparition.

The announcement that the Pope was going to Knock as part of his visit to Ireland (2018) prompted a review of the literature on the apparition of 1879. The findings are posted on Ballymaclinton, which is sort of appropriate given that the blog was inspired by a fictional village that was created as a showcase for the “Real” Irish during the Franco-Brititish exhibition in London in 1908.

The most surprising finding is that church authorities were sceptical of reports of an apparition and commissioned Francis Lennon, Professor of Mathematics and Natural Law in Maynooth, to investigate the possibility that a lantern projector was used. He concluded that the “apparition”was created using some form of optical device but he was overruled. John MacHale, Archbishop of Tuam, decided that the witness statements were trustworthy and set about establishing Knock as a site of Marian apparition and pilgrimage. The story was published in the Tuam News in January 1880.

A lantern projector in action. Source: Martyn Jolly.

So, the question has to be asked: If the apparition was a slide show, as the evidence suggests, why is Pope Francis visiting Knock? Maybe it is a case of history repeating itself and maybe it is a case of the optics of pilgrimage. For more go to Ballymaclinton.

Ciarán Walsh

The Skeleton of the Irish Giant, Cornelius Magrath.

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on March 3, 2017 – 12:00 pm

Filed under Anthropology, Comment, Heritage, Research

A reproduction of the portrait of the Irish Giant, Cornelius Magrath. The portrait was painted in Venice in 1757 by the Italian artist Pietro Longhi, when Magrath was 20 years of age. It shows Magrath being viewed by a group of Venetians in carnival bauta costumes, one of whom is wearing a mask called a larva. A man walks under Migrates outstretched arm.He is much taller than any one else in the room and, yet, Margate towers over him. Magarth died three years later and his body was sold to the School of Anatomy in Dublin University, Trinity College. It was dissected and the articulated skeleton remains as part of an historic collection of anatomy specimens, which is currently being curated by Ciarán Walsh of curator.ie.

Pietro Longhi, 1757, “True portrait of the Giant Cornelio Magrat the Irishman; he came to Venice in the year 1757; born 1st January 1737, he is 7 feet tall and weighs 420 pounds. Painted on commission from the Noble Gentleman Giovanni Grimani dei Servi, Patrician of Venice.” Museo di Rezzonico, Venice. Photograph: Osvaldo Böhm.

The Skeleton of The Irish Giant, Cornelius Magrath is held by the School of Anatomy in Dublin University, Trinity College (TCD). It is the most famous item in a historic collection of anatomy specimens, records, and instruments that is held in the ‘Old’ Anatomy Building. The building was decommissioned in 2014 and the collection is being resolved as part of post-grad research programme managed jointly by the School of Medicine TCD, Maynooth University, Kimmage Development Studies Centre, and funded by the Irish Research Council (IRC).

I am employed as a full-time researcher on the project and resolving ethical issues relating to the retention of human remains is a major part of the work in hand. Indeed, the research proposal had to pass rigorous ethical approval procedures in Maynooth University, the School of Medicine TCD, and the IRC before I could get access to the ‘old’ Anatomy building and the collections held therein, which include the skeleton of Cornelius Magrath.

The skeleton is “in the news” following calls for Magrath’s remains to be buried. The controversy kicked off on the History Show on RTE Radio 1. It was picked up by chat show host Joe Duffy on Monday. Duffy argued that TCD should bury the skeleton of Cornelius Magrath because it was taken in a ‘body snatching’ raid on Magrath’s wake. Since then a debate of sorts has been taking place on the show.

The problem here is that there is no evidence that the body snatching story, however entertaining, is true. Magrath died on 16th May 1760 but the only contemporary account of his death was most likely written by either Robert Robinson, Professor of Anatomy in TCD, or Dr. George Cleghorn, the University anatomist. It is a rather enigmatic account, stating only that “Upon death, his body was carried to the Dissecting House.” (see Daniel J. Cunningham’s 1891 report to the Royal Irish Academy).

Magrath was dying of a wasting disease and it is clear from the Robinson/Cleghorn account that he was receiving medical attention at the time of his death. It records that Magrath’s “complexion was miserably pale and sallow; his pulses very quick at times for a man of his extraordinary height; and his legs were swollen.” Elsewhere, it states that his pulse beat almost sixty times a minutes “on his arrival here.” It sounds like Magrath was being cared for in the School of Medicine TCD when he died.

The body snatching legend has it that Magrath was being waked when medical students spiked the porter and made off with his body, which was immediately dissected in secret. Such a sensational body snatching could not have escaped notice and, furthermore, the dissection was both public knowledge and uncontroversial. Historians of anatomy in TCD have always believed that the body was paid for by Cleghorn and that the acquisition of the body was legitimate and ethical by the standards of the day. The problem here is that there is no documentary evidence of Magrath having consented to dissection or the permanent display of his skeleton.

That brings us to the contemporary issue of retention or burial. The report of the Working Group on Human Remains in Museum Collections (WGHR), published in the UK in 2003, acknowledged that human remains in collections “represent a unique and irreplaceable resource for the legitimate pursuance of scientific and other research” (p. 28) and concludes: “The Working Group feels that there is much merit in including museum collections of human remains within the regulatory structure proposed by the DH for health authorities and hospitals.” (p. 81).

Supervision by the Inspector of Anatomy of the ‘Old’ Anatomy collections in TCD covers the issue of regulation in Ireland in terms of the retention of Magrath’s skeleton as part of a historical scientific collection. This leaves the burial of Magrath’s remains at the discretion of the college authorities; which means that any decision will have to deal with public perception as to the “morality” of retaining identifiable human remains in collections of scientific material. That is deeply problematic, and Duffy’s attempt to frame the issue in body snatching folklore is distorting what should be a valuable and timely debate.

For more see: http://wp.me/p56Bmf-eP