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...

Babbage’s brain

Until it was recently closed, the mathematics gallery at the Science Museum surprised unwary visitors (expecting slide rules, dividing engines and geometrical models) with a brain in a jar. But not quite the whole brain, oh no: that would be far too unremarkable. This is a pickled brain with a section removed, also, separately, on display at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. At its original owner’s request, it was preserved for the benefit of men of science and medicine, who tried but rather failed to better understand the mathematical genius of Charles Babbage (1791–1871). Sadly it has neither numbers nor cogs and wheels running through it.

Babbage’s brain on display at the Science Museum Photograph: Alan Levine/Wikimedia

Brains are the obvious part of the intellectual and scientist to investigate and preserve. After all, our stereotype of “the scientist” emphasises the large, domed cranium, only just keeping the remarkable organ connected to the earthly realm and all the other necessary organs. Thus we find that Einstein’s brain has also been preserved, in 240 blocks and 1000 thin slices, some of which are displayed at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia.

Galileo’s fingers (and thumb)

The history of science museum in Florence was renamed Museo Galileo in 2010, largely in honour of – and because of the fame of – these bodily remains of the great man (1564-1642), celebrated as hero and martyr of science. They sit alongside other talismanic items, such as the instruments he made and manuscripts in which he recorded and publicised his findings. The instruments and one finger were once displayed in the chapel-like Tribune of Galileo, and the digits are contained in what can only be described as reliquaries, worthy of the most significant cathedral and site of pilgrimage.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Galileo’s digits, displayed at the Galileo Museum in Florence. Photograph: Fabrizio Giovannozzi/AP

But how have they ended up here? Galileo’s fingers were all safely attached when he died, and remained with his other bones until his tomb was opened 95 years after his death. Galileo’s disciple Vincenzo Viviani had arranged for the transfer of his remains to the Basilica of Santa Croce and Antonio Francesco Gori, a priest and antiquarian, and others somewhat surreptitiously extracted three digits, a tooth and a vertebra. These took different paths but, via a surprise rediscovery at an auction, have been reunited - although I am not entirely sure that the right thumb and middle finger have not been matched with another right middle finger...

Bentham’s body

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), the utilitarian philosopher, had apparently decided by the age of 21 that his body should be subjected to dissection. It signalled his unsentimental and rational views at a time in which it was otherwise very difficult for medical students and doctors to get hold of corpses: the Anatomy Act that eased the situation was not passed until the month after Bentham’s post-mortem. This event was watched by friends and presided over by his disciple, the physician Thomas Southwood Smith. Smith, as instructed by Bentham, kept, stuffed and clothed the skeleton and mummified the head.

In 1850 the resulting “auto-icon” was offered to University College London, an institution Bentham had helped found. He is, today, still seated in his wooden cabinet in UCL’s South Cloister. Today, the Bentham-watchers who are watched by the PanoptiCam, see only a waxwork head and structure completely covered by clothes (Jeremy’s own). How much worse it must have been for those treading the silent halls of a vacation, when the actual head remained in the cabinet. Perhaps creepiest of all was while it was kept, not atop the man, but between his feet, as the preserved skin became increasingly discoloured.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jeremy Bentham’s remains at University College London, c.1950. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Take another look...

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Aarrgh!! Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

And, if you dare, click for some large and full-colour images of his head, taken during its annual conservation check.

Pasteur’s tomb

This one is much easier on the eye but, as a tomb, might surely be the setting for a ghost story. The Pasteur Institute in Paris is a curious mixture, combining a still-active scientific research institute, a museum showing the apartments in which the microbiologist Louis Pasteur (1822-95) had lived, and his mausoleum in a crypt. He is presented as a secular saint, with a marble sarcophagus and golden mosaics depicting scenes from his life and decorated with symbolic animals and plants. He is, of course, the patron saint of the institute and his day, like those of other saints, is kept by the locals (i.e. the staff), who process down to the tomb to pay homage.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Tomb Of Louis Pasteur In The Pasteur Institute, Paris, from L’Illustration, 1897. Photograph: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images

Scarpa’s head

Those who enjoy Jeremy Bentham’s head might want to pay a visit to the beautiful Italian town of Pavia, where, in the university’s museum, they can be treated to a view of the disembodied head of the professor of anatomy Antonio Scarpa (1752–1832). Known as the “Father of Italian Ophthalmology”, he nevertheless probably did not expect to have his head kept in a box, now shuttered in a recess above a door, or his thumb and index finger cut off and urinary tract removed. I, somewhat unwillingly, saw the head this summer and heard that he had not been universally popular with his students and staff - the men who carried out the post-mortem. The suggestion was that the decapitation may have been as much motivated by revenge as science or the desire for a memento.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Head of Antonio Scarpa, at the museo della storia dell’ Universita di Pavia. Photograph: Wellcome Library, London

Newton’s death mask

Perhaps because Newton’s death mask was used to help model some of the best known busts and statues of him, it does not necessarily strike the viewer as gory. It has an air of serenity and, as a cast of the face, lacks the obvious signs of bodily contact and post-mortem treatment of, say, original moulds or Oliver Cromwell, warts, facial hair, bandages and all.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration of Newton’s death mask, from The Book Short History Of The English People By J.R. Green (London, 1893). Photograph: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images

The mask is just one of a number of potent Newtonian relics, including his hair, his telescope, and bits of the One True Tree. Bringing such items together evidently increases their symbolic power - the Royal Society is multiply blessed, and their parade bestowed significance to the inauguration of Newton’s statue in Grantham. Grafted cuttings from the apple tree and copies of the death mask signal the authority of many mathematical and physical institutes. The tree lent its power to a space shuttle, and remains a site of pilgrimage in Lincolnshire.

Since these items – carefully preserved, appropriately presented and ritually acknowledged – are treated as relics, perhaps this post should be for All Saints’ Day tomorrow rather than Halloween. But, frankly, they’re ghoulish enough for anyone looking for last-minute Halloween party costume inspiration.

If anyone takes a history of science theme for their fancy dress – Halloween-focused, relic-based or otherwise – please take pictures and tweet them to @beckyfh. If there are enough I’ll create a gallery here on The H Word.