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Vice Blog

LONDON - CABINET OF CURIOSITIES

To escape your dirty, miserable life as a Londoner in the 1800s you might have cheered yourself up by visiting the Hunterian Museum to gawp at the curiosities displayed there. You'd have seen the preserved skeletons of human oddities like dwarfs, giants, conjoined twins and still-born quintuplets (pictured). You'd also have seen hundreds of cases containing exotic zoological specimens like tiger tongue, vulture head, sloth fetus and gorilla penis. Over the past two hundred years the collection has been built up, then devastated by bombing during the war, and more recently renovated and upgraded. We went to have a poke around this little-known wonder room …

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The museum was founded by Victorian surgeon/body-snatcher John Hunter who, as well as being the British Empire's preeminent expert on anatomy, was also the world's most unscrupulous collector of peculiar corpses.

This is the skull of the two-headed boy of Bengal. According to news reports in the 1790s, the boy was in pretty good health except for the fact that his skull was fused to a parasitic head which had its own brain, face and emotions. When one head slept, the other one was awake; when one smiled, the other cried. The boy was four years old when he was bitten by a cobra and died. The body of the two-headed boy was dug up, despite protests by his family, and later acquired by the museum.

The smaller skeleton is that of Caroline Crachami, a primordial dwarf better known as the Sicilian fairy (even though she was actually Irish). Standing 19 inches tall and weighing less than five pounds, she was a sensation on the sideshow circuit. People would pay a shilling to pick her up, feed her a biscuit and watch her do a little dance. One day in 1824, after being handled by over 200 people, the tiny girl collapsed and died. Again, her remains were taken against her family's wishes.

These are five-month-old quintuplet foetuses from a premature birth in Blackburn, Lancashire in 1786. Two were still-born, the other three died shortly after delivery.

This is the pustuled face of a child who died from smallpox in the late 1700s.

The Hunterian Museum is inside the Royal College of Surgeons at Lincoln's Inn Fields. It's open Tuesday to Saturday from 10am to 5pm. Admission is free.