It isn’t uncommon for people to hold on to keepsakes from loved ones who have passed away in order to remember and feel close to them. Some cultures, take this idea a step further by literally keeping pieces of the deceased:

In some cultures, the physical remains of a loved one is intended to comfort the bereaved. New Zealanders embalmed the heads of family members by removing the brains, stuffing the cavities with flowers, baking them in the oven and drying them out in the sun. The relics were kept in baskets, scented with oil, and brought out on special occasions during which their relatives would cry over them. (source)

There are some fairly mainstream examples of this kind of keeping of the dead, from some unexpected places. When Mary Shelley died, the heart of her deceased husband Percy Bysshe Shelley was found in her desk wrapped in a silk handkerchief. He died nearly thirty years before her. Sir Walter Raleigh‘s widow had his head embalmed after his execution, which she kept until her own death many years later.

Though there are different motivations behind it, more recently, the preservation of human bodies has seen a resurgence in traveling exhibitions like Body Worlds, which showcases human bodies stripped of their skin and preserved using a process called plastination. Another exhibition called Bodies infers something darker about the origins of some of these corpses. The exhibition contains “21 preserved human cadavers, along with 250 organs and partial-body specimens,” all of which are Chinese homeless citizens who, sadly, had no one to claim or bury them after they died.

If anything is macabre about our ongoing history with the dead, it must be this more recent disregard for the nameless, unloved and unclaimed rather than the desire of earlier people to keep their dear ones close.

Bleeding Hollow Heart by Skesis.

In the Spring of 2007 a urologist named N.J. John K. Lattimer died in California. According to the New York Times, what made this man’s death interesting were the strange collectibles he left behind, including Napoleon’s penis, “Lincoln’s blood-stained collar and Hermann Göring’s cyanide ampoule.” Yes, that’s right. Napoleon’s penis.

Napoleon Bonaparte died in exile on the southern Atlantic island of Saint Helena on May 5, 1821. The following day an autopsy was conducted by the emperor’s doctor … [who] removed Napoleon’s heart (the deceased had requested that it be given to his estranged wife, the empress Marie-Louise, though it was never delivered) …

In 1916 … [the] collection of Napoleonic artifacts [was sold] to a British rare book firm, which in 1924 sold the lot for about $2,000 to a Philadelphia bibliophile, A.S.W. Rosenbach. Among the relics was “the mummified tendon taken from Napoleon’s body during the post-mortem.” A few years later Rosenbach displayed the putative penis, tastefully couched in blue morocco and velvet, at the Museum of French Art in New York. According to a contemporary news report, “In a glass case [spectators] saw something looking like a maltreated strip of buckskin shoelace or shriveled eel.” The organ has also been described as a shriveled sea horse, a small shriveled finger, and “one inch long and resembling a grape.” (source)

Ouch!

Napoleon Bonapart image by Dunechaser.