Object of the Week: Jeremy Bentham’s 184-year-old skin sitting in a box in London

This article originally appeared on Culture24.

Jeremy Bentham's skin sits inside University College London, the institution he helped found

The philosopher Jeremy Bentham could never be accused of hypocrisy. A firm rationalist, after his death in 1832, and according to his instructions, he was publicly dissected and displayed.

What Bentham called his ‘auto-icon’ (his skeleton, wearing his clothes, stuffed with hay, and topped with a wax head sporting his own hair) still sits in a box at University College London.

His mummified head was displayed too, but became a target for pranks so is now stored. This strip of skin comes from the dissection.

The inscription reads: "Part of the skin of the late Jeremy Bentham Esq. who bequeathed his Body for anatomical purposes, and was dissected, July 1832."

Henry Solomon Wellcome (1853-1936) collected the wedge-shaped piece of skin. It's not clear how it came into Wellcome's collection, but a journal, Notes and Queries, records two sightings of it: in 1856, J Doran remembered seeing a portion of Bentham's skin in the museum of the Philosophical Institution at Reading. In 1865, another contributor, WCJ, noted a portion of Bentham's skin in the possession of Dr Henry Duncan Littlejohn in Edinburgh.

The artefact was, however, definitely on display at the British Museum exhibition Medicine Man: the Forgotten Museum of Henry Wellcome.

• Nelson’s Spyglass: 101 Curious Objects from British History, by Sophie Campbell, is available now from The History Press. You can find more images of Bentham's skin at Wellcome Images.

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More from Culture24's Object of the Week

A bust based on a cast of Isaac Newton's face made at his death

A gas mask worn by a German soldier in the First World War trenches

An 18th century ivory dildo hidden in a Paris convent for 100 years

Source: http://www.culture24.org.uk/science-and-nature/art561931-jeremy-bentham-dissected-skin-university-london