Vital Organs: A new book puts famous historical body parts put under the microscope

Medical historian Dr Suzie Edge takes an intriguing anatomical journey in her latest book with accounts of famous body parts, including Napoleon's penis, Queen Victoria's armpits and Albert Einstein’s brain

Fri, 15 Sep, 2023 - 02:00

Marjorie Brennan

Some people might consider Dr Suzie Edge’s gory hobby a little unusual — for years she has collected stories of body parts.

Edge has been fascinated by the human body since she first picked up a scalpel and cut into a cadaver at medical school. History is also one of her great loves, so it made sense to combine both and become a medical historian.

In her latest book, Vital Organs, she takes a fascinating anatomical journey through history via some of the world’s most famous body parts, from Napoleon’s penis to Marie Antoinette’s teeth to Freddie Mercury’s blood cells and Albert Einstein’s brain.

German-born American physicist Albert Einstein. Pic: Central Press/Getty Images

“Some people just roll their eyes at me but I’m having fun. I have never been squeamish, I could stick my fingers in things and just poke around and have a look, I cannot get enough of all that which is why I became a surgeon, I guess. I can’t get my head around why people are squeamish. They probably think I am mad,” she says.

Edge, who lives in the Scottish Highlands with her husband and two teenagers, trained as a molecular cell biologist before working as a junior doctor, and has also completed an MLitt in Modern History. Her previous book was Mortal Monarchs — 1,000 Years of Royal Deaths.

“I have always collected these stories in my head. I am really fascinated by how we treated the human body — I don’t mean with medicines but how we have thought about the body over the years. And others are also fascinated…people flock to see body parts in museums and on display.”

This interest is reflected in Edge’s online following — she has more than 325,000 followers on TikTok and was recently nominated for the BookTok Author of the Year award. She says she loves the interactive aspect of what she does, which leads her to new avenues of discovery.

“Whenever I make a video about something, people in the comments are so knowledgable and questioning, they add more to it and I take that and run with it. There are stories that we all know about but there is other stuff where I have been deep into archives and that is equally as fascinating.”

Queen Victoria: much sought-after armpits

In Vital Organs, Edge explores how body parts have been used as propaganda in wars, solved medical puzzles, turned into relics and even saved lives. She delves into how Queen Victoria’s armpit led to the development of antiseptics; the strange case of Hitler’s right testicle and why the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s heart would not burn when he was placed on his funeral pyre.

“I love that story….it looked like he had tuberculosis when he was young and his heart just filled up with calcium. It was just like a rock when they put it on the fire,” she says.

But for all the strange tales of famous people and their body parts, Edge says her favourite in the book was far more down to earth, relating to an illiterate labourer who lived in the US state of Michigan in the 19th century.

“I’ve really become obsessed about people who have developed holes in their bodies that haven’t gone away.” she chuckles.

“There was this absolutely brilliant one about this chap called Alexis St Martin who in the 1820s was accidentally shot in the stomach. The hole that was left never healed and he was left with an open window into his stomach. His doctor did all kinds of incredible experiments on him, including sticking his tongue in to see what it tasted like.”

While Edge marvels at what the human body can withstand, she also acknowledges the accompanying realisation that our bodies are not invincible.

“Absolutely. A lot of the stories I found about body parts that have been kept, either as trophies or relics, were about memento mori, reminding ourselves that we are mortal, for example, Mary Shelley kept her husband’s heart on her desk.”

She says researching and writing the book has given her pause for thought but has also made her more determined to make the most of her life.

“I find the more that I look at these things and the more I read and the more peculiar stories I come across, the more I just want to have fun. My first book, Mortal Monarchs, was all about the deaths of kings and queens, and my father died while I was writing it. In a way, it was quite cathartic that I was able to say, ‘All of this happens, this is why and this is how’. It really has shown me how strong we are and how vulnerable we are at the same time.”

She says that viewing history through bodies also gives people a more tangible link to the past.

“When we talk about history sometimes it is very abstract, you think about dates and battles, and even if we think about people sometimes, they don’t feel like people like us. But as soon as you start to talk about bodies or ailments or things like that, you get a visceral reaction and that’s because you are literally feeling what they went through.”

Edge is happy to get people thinking and learning about the past and our bodies, and finds the huge level of interest reassuring.

“There are people who have messaged me saying I’ve just started a history degree because I got into this having seen your videos. When someone says that to me, it just blows me away. I’m thinking I’m just sitting in my little writing shed at the bottom of my garden in the Scottish Highlands and somebody is saying that to me, it just blows me away.”