“The Irish giant” and the questions haunting medical museums

The remains of Charles Byrne, known as the “Irish giant,” have become the subject of public discussion once more, reviving debates that continue to haunt medical and scientific museums. Instead of engaging in futile efforts to achieve closure on their colonial histories, museums must learn to live with the spectres of their past injustices that persist to the present. Decolonial scholars, such as Eve Tuck and C Ree, emphasise that being haunted by these injustices is the cost of the horrors and subjugations of colonisation and museums’ role in this; it is “the relentless remembering and reminding that will not be appeased by settler society’s assurances of innocence and reconciliation.”1 Museums must accept that they are haunted by their past by acknowledging and living with their colonial history, which they cannot resolve, forget, or hide.The Hunterian Museum at London’s Royal College of Surgeons of England has just reopened after refurbishment….
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