Edison's Last Breath

The words are those of the Italian astronomer Tommaso Perelli. The finger is Galileo Galilei's, severed from his hand when his body was moved from its original burial site to a monumental tomb in the Church of Santa Croce in Florence in 1737. Macabre? Doubtless, from one point of view, but even a moment's reflection brings to mind more than a few such grisly artifacts on exhibit in the museums of the world. The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History has displayed a victim of the 1798 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia whose body was mummified thanks to the soil conditions where he was originally buried. For generations the National Museum of Health and Medicine at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., has exhibited the bullet that killed Abraham Lincoln along with fragments of his skull. The same museum displays the severed leg bone of Civil War major general Daniel E. Sickles, along with a 12-pound cannonball like the one that originally shattered the bone. For years Sickles visited the museum on the anniversary of his leg's amputation.