Museums and churches still display famous preserved body parts, from Einstein’s brain slides to a saint’s tongue, in exhibits that mix science, faith, and the macabre.
Atlas Obscura mapped a global circuit of medical specimens, holy relics, bog bodies, and one very stubborn cocktail tradition built around human remains that never quite left the public eye.
The stops range from Silver Spring, Maryland, to Padua, Florence, Warsaw, and a bar in Canada’s Yukon. Some pieces were kept for study. Others were claimed for faith. A few exist because someone left a dying wish too specific to ignore.
Taken together, they show how long people have tried to hold on to the body after death, and how often institutions still put those leftovers on view.
The National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Spring keeps roughly 24 million medical instruments and anatomical specimens. Among them are portions of Abraham Lincoln’s skull with attached hair, plus the amputated leg of Gen. Daniel Sickles.
The same collection holds a Civil War soldier’s skull, child-development skeletons, a conjoined twin preserved in alcohol, the mummified head and shoulders of a girl, and a large neuroanatomical set. It is a working archive of injury, surgery, and pathology, not a sideshow by design, but no less stark for that.
Pathologist Thomas Harvey removed Albert Einstein’s brain without permission. Einstein had wanted cremation. Slivers of that brain now sit on 46 microscope slides at the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians in Philadelphia.
The Mütter also holds about 2,000 objects pulled from people’s throats, skeletons of conjoined twins, and the remains of a man who stood 7-foot-6. The Einstein slides are the draw for many visitors. The rest of the shelves make plain how much of medicine has always been a catalog of what went wrong inside living bodies.
In Dawson City, the Downtown Hotel keeps a colder kind of souvenir. Miner and rumrunner Louie Linken lost a frostbitten toe that ended up in a jar of alcohol. Decades later it became the star of the Sourtoe Cocktail.
The house rule is blunt:
"You can drink it fast, you can drink it slow, but the lips have gotta touch the toe."
The original toe lasted seven years before it needed replacing. Donors have since given “a whole foot’s worth of toes.” The ritual is part dare, part local legend, and fully dependent on human remains floating in liquor.
At the British Museum in London, visitors can see Lindow Man, nicknamed Pete Marsh, a bog body scientists believe belonged to a man about 25 years old. He died sometime between 2 B.C. and A.D. 119. His last meal was unleavened bread made from wheat and barley. The body shows head indentations, broken ribs, and a slashed throat.
Ireland’s National Museum in Dublin keeps a permanent “Kingship and Sacrifice” exhibition of Iron and Bronze Age bog bodies, including Cashel Man, described as the oldest fleshed bog body ever unearthed. Peat did what formal embalmers later tried to copy: it stopped decay cold.
In Lisbon, the University of Lisbon still holds the head of Diogo Alves, called Portugal’s first serial killer and one of the last men hanged there. He died in 1841. Source accounts say he pushed dozens of people to their deaths from a walkway atop an aqueduct. Phrenologists kept the head for study. By 1843 that field was already labeled a pseudoscience. The jar remained.
In Padua, St. Anthony’s basilica houses the saint’s tongue and jaw in gold reliquaries. His body was exhumed in 1263 and the tongue had not decomposed. St. Bonaventure’s reaction was recorded as praise, not horror:
"O blessed tongue, which has always blessed God and caused others to bless Him, now it appears evident how great were your merits before God!"
St. Catherine died in 1380. The Sienese cut off her head, carried it in a paper bag past Roman guards, and later placed it in a reliquary at the Basilica of San Domenico in Siena, where a thumb is also on display. A foot ended up in Venice.
In Prague, Saints Peter and Paul Basilica shows what it says is St. Valentine’s shoulder blade. Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV supposedly brought the bone in the 1300s. It was found again in 2002 while workers organized the basement. The church claims a seal attesting authenticity and holds a special Mass on Valentine’s Day.
Singapore’s Buddha Tooth Relic Temple and Museum was built to display a tooth said to have been recovered from a collapsed stupa in Myanmar in the 1980s. Some experts said the tooth was “definitely not human.” The building went up anyway.
Almost a century after Galileo’s burial, an antiquarian and anatomist removed his middle finger, two other fingers, and a tooth. The middle finger stands in an egg-shaped glass case on a marble base at Florence’s Museo Galileo. In 2009 it was reunited with an authenticated index finger, thumb, and tooth. Astronomer Tommaso Perelli left a commemorative line for the relic:
"Spurn not the remains of the finger by which the right hand measured out paths of the sky, pointed to orbs never before seen by mortals."
The museum frames the finger as part of “the celebration of Galileo as a hero and martyr of science.”
Frédéric Chopin asked that his heart go to his native Poland rather than stay with his body in Paris. His sister, Ludwika Jędrzejewicz, removed the heart before burial and smuggled it to Warsaw in a jar of alcohol. It was placed beneath Holy Cross Church. Nazis took the heart during World War II. Germany returned it after the war.
Prince René de Chalon died at 25 during the 1544 siege of Saint-Dizier. He did not want a beautiful corpse. He wanted to be remembered as a rotting body. In 1547, sculptor Ligier Richier delivered the Transi de René de Chalon, still housed at the Church of Saint-Étienne-le-Vieux in Bar-le-Duc, France. A heart-shaped reliquary once held the shriveled remains of his heart. It was lost or stolen during the French Revolution.
In Tambov, Russia, forensic pathologist Yuri Shchukin built the Museum of Sin as a passion project with more than 700 body parts and organs meant to show the effects of vice. The Latin line at the entrance states the premise without soft edges:
"This is a place where the dead teach the living."
And in Washington, New Hampshire, Capt. Samuel Jones, a tavern owner, had his leg pinned between a building and a fence during construction in 1804. The leg was amputated. He held a funeral for the limb and buried it in the local cemetery. His body was later interred elsewhere; theories point to Boston, Rhode Island, or the Bronx. The leg still has its own gravestone.
People keep arguing about dignity, consent, and taste. The jars, slides, reliquaries, and cocktail toes are already on the shelf, proof that curiosity, faith, and institutional habit often outlast the person who once owned the parts.
