DO you have an absorbed twin’s head growing out your chest? Third elbow? Abnormally elongated coccyx? Then don’t tell anyone – certainly not a medical professional, lest they give you a wee jag, nick your corpse, boil the flesh off your bones and put your skeleton on display. For why should death stop folk gawping at you as they did in life?

The question of how we posthumously treat unique specimens of homosapien was resurrected this week with the so-called “monumental discovery” of an unmarked burial site at City of London Cemetery. This was somewhat contradictory hyperbole, as any coffin lying six feet under would be completely empty – having once contained only the “soft tissue” of a man called John Merrick.

If this was indeed the site where the so-called Elephant Man’s stewed flesh was unceremoniously disposed in 1890, then the ground had long since absorbed his remains and nourished the soil.

Yet, John Merrick still does not rest – his bleached, posed bones remain a queasy monument to the sludgy depths of human curiosity, macabrely presented at Queen Mary University in an ornate glass case. Much like the crown jewels, fireworks or Gillette Mach 3 razors.

Merrick’s skeleton can be viewed by appointment if one feels the urge – Michael Jackson certainly did. A somewhat unique specimen himself, the self-proclaimed King of Pop was alleged to have spent hours gazing at Merrick’s remains during private viewings – one singular blip of nature perhaps finding solidarity with another. A geneticist at the University, Richard Trembath, said: “He would come and spend time on his own sitting next to the skeleton, obviously contemplating.”

Bearing physical witness to Merrick’s undignified fate, it’s perhaps surprising Jackson never chose to be cremated like David Bowie – who once expressed fear his skull could be dug up and kept as a trophy. Yet, it’s also likely a narcissist like Jackson might have welcomed being put on display as a public curio, in death as in life.

With unsavoury allegations surrounding his private life still rife, it’s perhaps likely Jackson will soon be exhumed from his LA resting place – then placed within an impenetrable steel sarcophagus to stop vigilante group Dark Justice digging him up and recycling his cranium as an ashtray.

Whereas Jackson spent his life distancing himself from humanity, or, more accurately, adults – it’s certainly a poetic irony that the 27-year-old Merrick died trying to be like the rest of us, accidentally asphyxiating himself in an attempt to sleep lying down. Before he was cold, Merrick’s corpse was boiled and stripped of its flesh – dismissed as extraneous waste material by the medics who once treated him as a friend. Those who had made their reputations pimping Merrick’s suffering to the world now had their prize – his bones. John Merrick was dead, long live the Elephant Man.

The lovely bones

ACADEMICS claiming abnormal human skeletons as trophies may be unpalatable to 21st-century sensitivities, yet even the Elephant Man’s queasy fate pales in comparison to the contemptible manner in which revered 18th-century Scottish surgeon and anatomist John Hunter treated another legendary anomaly of nature. The callous theft of 8ft tall Charles Byrne from his coffin should have seen Hunter punished by law, but instead his peers named The Hunterian Museum in his honour.

In June 1783, the Londonderry Journal published the following brief article: “Charles Byrne, the famous Irish Giant, a death precipitated by excessive drinking, to which he was always addicted, but more particularly since his late loss of £700.” A somewhat blunt eulogy, but you’d like a wee drink too if you were ostracised by society like Byrne, a towering natural wonder who had indeed been recently robbed of the savings he’d amassed by selling himself as a freak show exhibit.

This was the final assault upon a man who had experienced incalculable abuse in his time – and clearly the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Despite Byrne specifically wishing for a burial at sea, newspapers of the era noted “a whole tribe of surgeons put in a claim for the poor departed Irishman surrounding his house just as harpooners would an enormous whale”.

Byrne’s final farewell was supposed to have taken place at the south coast of England – yet only his coffin entered the water. Hunter had bribed an undertaker to switch the corpse for heavy stones and bring him the body. Hopefully he ate his spinach that day as Byrne was said to have weighed around 25 stones.

A natural Hunter

ALTHOUGH the rather grandiose inscription on Hunter’s grave proclaiming him “a genius, a gifted interpreter of the Divine Power and Wisdom at work in the Laws of Organic Life” somewhat hyperbolically aligns his talents with God, a recent investigation published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine suggests he had a less than heavenly personality.

It alleges Hunter helped his similarly fêted brother William – whom Glasgow’s awe-inspiring Hunterian Museum is named after – acquire dead bodies in a less than legit fashion. Think Burke and Hare. Wha’s like us?

While the Scotsman now rests in peace with countless other notable luminaries at Westminster Abbey, Byrne’s bleached bones were only recently taken away from public view as The Hunterian undergoes a three-year period of refurbishment.

The public’s tolerance of voyeuristic anatomy porn does seem to be dissipating, however. Campaigners are currently calling on the release of Merrick and Byrne’s bones for burial, in accordance to their wishes in life.

The Hunterian trustees have refused however, arguing that the Irish Giant’s skeleton has “important educational and research value”. Meaning, the museum is synonymous with Byrne’s infamy and will not give up its lucky talisman without a fight.

Now that the Hunterian has temporarily closed, trustees of John Hunter’s questionable legacy have some thinking time. Do they respect the Irish Giant’s last wishes, or continue to display his remains in a museum built as a memorial to the very man who stole them?

The Friends of Joseph Merrick group is also now calling for the Elephant Man’s bones to be given a proper burial, with Valerie Howkins, the granddaughter of one of Merrick’s former managers, stating: “There was no question when John died that he would go back to Leicester to be buried. He would have expected a Christian burial.”

Centuries after the deformities that cut their lives short granted them a kind of macabre immortality, it’s surely time to grant Charles Byrne and John Merrick the peace that eluded them both in life. To paraphrase the 1980 David Lynch movie of Merrick's life – they were human beings, not animals.

And finally ...

IT’S no myth that Michael Jackson once tried to purchase John Merrick’s skeleton – yet his bids of $500,000 and $1m were both rejected. Although he dismissed the story on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show, it's notable that he also denied many other things in life. I mean, of course, telling Martin Bashir he had only ever had two facial surgeries.

In 1988 however, the singer bought his own Elephant Man – forking out for an animated version in his Leave Me Alone video, which saw Jackson excitedly thrust his groin, hee-hee and hoo-hoo as a stop-motion Merrick bust some funky moves beside him.

Distasteful as this may seem to some, the video is simply Jackson drawing an analogy between his own life and Merrick’s, namely their “freak” social status and how those who hounded them had condemned the pair to an isolated, lonely cell of existence.

Yet, this was clearly conceit on the part of Jackson, whose uniqueness was entirely self-inflicted. No doubt he knew this – and the ball and chain he wore in the video perhaps indicative of a self-awareness that he was indeed the builder of his own prison. Proteus syndrome gave Merrick no such choice, yet to this day he remains locked up as a university's modern-day freakshow exhibit. It's time to set him free.