Carrion Luggage

Skeletons in the Closet

Anyone who's followed me for some time knows I appreciate Ben Franklin. I hope my hometown (known as Thomas Jefferson's stomping grounds) won't call me a traitor for it. But everyone has skeletons in their closet and, as this older Smithsonian article points out, sometimes they're literal:

    Why Were There So Many Skeletons Hidden in Benjamin Franklin’s Basement?  
During restorations in the 1990s, more than 1,200 pieces of bone surfaced beneath the founding father’s London home

This being an article originally released way back in 2013, I had to check to see if I've covered it before. Not in this blog, certainly, but in the previous one. I didn't find it, so perhaps I didn't. Well, Smithsonian did an unspecified update last year, so even if I did feature it at some point, it was almost certainly before the update.

The future founding father left his English home and returned to America in 1775. Two centuries later, bones from more than a dozen bodies were found in the basement, where they had been buried in a mysterious, windowless room beneath the garden.

Well, I can understand how that might seem suspicious. If anyone found purely hypothetical bodies buried beneath my purely hypothetical garden, I couldn't blame them for backing away from me slowly.

The skeletons had gone unnoticed until the 1990s, when historians decided to turn Franklin’s old haunt into a museum.

Presumably British historians, which, when you think about it, is about as weird as American Southerners putting up statues of Union generals.

Franklin was a storied revolutionary and high-ranking Freemason, so it’s easy to wonder what dark secrets he may have hidden in his basement chamber.

Yeah, like, was he fighting the Revolutionary War one Brit at a time, before the war even started?

But the truth, it turns out, isn’t quite so dark.

I am both relieved and disappointed.

“The most plausible explanation is not mass murder, but an anatomy school run by Benjamin Franklin’s young friend and protégé, William Hewson,” as the Guardian’s Maev Kennedy wrote in 2003.

Franklin was a lot of things, but I don't think "murderer" was one. One never really knows, though.

Hewson was an anatomist who began his career as a student of William Hunter, a famous obstetrician who also studied anatomy. Following a dispute, Hewson parted ways with his teacher and started his own anatomy school at 36 Craven, where his mother-in-law, Margaret Stevenson, was the landlady.

Imagine going up to your mother-in-law and going "Can I rent out your house to desecrate corpses?"

In Franklin’s time, the study of anatomy was an ethically ambiguous business.

I have a strong feeling that religious doctrines had a lot to do with that.

“[Franklin] was a champion of science—he was supportive of young researchers and others that could exemplify his passion for knowledge and innovation,” Balisciano told Discover magazine. “He probably loved the idea that this scientific work would be going on.”

Obviously speculation, but it tracks.

In 1774, a 34-year-old Hewson died of sepsis, which he had contracted by accidentally cutting himself during a procedure.

I could be wrong about this, but I don't think the idea of diseases spread through invisible microbes really caught on until the following century. While previous generations had some inkling,   there was no science backing them up, just empiricism.

So, I'm not sure if the mystery is truly solved, but at least there's a plausible explanation that doesn't involve Ben Franklin being an early Jack the Ripper.