Babbage's brain & Galileo's finger: six macabre scientific relics | Rebekah Higgitt

The H Word blog's Halloween special looks at the displayed bodily remains of six scientific savants - from the intruiging to the odd, via the frankly ghoulish

Admirers of science usually like to think that they're above the talismanic, fetishist practices they'd associate with superstition, magic and religion. Yet, as was discussed recently at a seminar on Savant Relics, there are a surprising number of objects and bodily remains of scientific individual that have been preserved and are, often, treated with the kind of ritual and endowed with the kind of aura that is elsewhere reserved for saints.

They are distinctly odd things through which to celebrate the memories of individuals admired for their scientific work: too corporeal for transcendent genius and too wrapped in mystique for sceptical science. While in some cases there was a scientific or medical motivation, it being hoped that something might be learned from an examination of the remains of someone remarkable, others are simply relics. And like religious relics they often play a role in ceremony, endow a place with symbolic significance or form an object of pilgrimage. They are also rather gruesome: be warned...