Rest in Pieces

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These are gallstones,8217;8217; says Lenore Barbian. 8216;8216;They8217;re from President Eisenhower.8217;8217; She8217;s the collections manager at the National Museum of Health and Medicine, and she8217;s holding a jar with a rubber band around it. Inside are jagged pieces of crystallized cholesterol removed from the gallbladder of the general who liberated Europe from Hitler, the president who guided America through the 8217;50s. 8216;8216;This is the actual specimen pathology jar with the original label,8217;8217; she says. She rolls up the rubber band and reads from the paper beneath. 8216;Date: 12 December 1966; sex: male; age: 75.8217; This was donated by his wife. So we actually have her return address label.8217;8217;

Barbian sets the jar back into the drawer. 8216;8216;But wait,8217;8217; says Steven Solomon, the museum8217;s spokesman, in his best parody of a late-night TV ad huckster, 8216;8216;there8217;s more!8217;8217; Barbian picks up a gnarly piece of bone. 8216;8216;This is the vertebrae of John Wilkes Booth,8217;8217; she says. 8216;8216;When he was shot and died, he was autopsied, and they took this as a sample of a gunshot wound to the cervical vertebrae and his story was written up in medical journals.8217;8217; Booth8217;s backbone has a little glass rod sticking through it at a jaunty angle. 8216;8216;It shows the path of the bullet,8217;8217; Barbian explains. 8216;8216;The spinal cord runs right through here, so it clearly bisected the spinal cord. And if you don8217;t believe me, we have the spinal cord, too.8217;8217; She picks up a yellowing chunk of plastic containing a forlorn gray string of the infamous assassin8217;s spinal cord. She lays it and the vertebrae back into the drawer. 8216;8216;But wait,8217;8217; says Solomon, 8216;8216;there8217;s more!8217;8217;

He8217;s right. Washington8217;s museums have lots more body parts of the famous and the infamous8212;enough parts to create a celebrity Frankenstein if the curators would permit it. Alas, they won8217;t. They8217;re very finicky about this stuff. Celebrity body parts are the ultimate souvenirs. For centuries they8217;ve been collected and displayed. In the Middles Ages, Christians kept the bones of saints in ornate reliquaries that were sometimes shaped liked the arm or foot they held. More recently, American carnivals exhibited the mummies of famous felons, and Communist nations displayed the embalmed corpses of dead dictators8212;Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung8212;in elaborate shrines. And just this month, actor William Shatner, who played Captain Kirk on Star Trek, sold his kidney stone to the online casino that had already purchased a cheese sandwich containing an image of the Virgin Mary.

Washington8217;s museums have nothing quite that garish. A few of their celebrity body parts are on display, but most are not. Too macabre or too tacky for genteel modern sensibilities, they sit in drawers or in lockers, unseen. There8217;s the severed leg of one famous general and the dentures of another. There are tumors removed from two presidents. And the brains of a famous explorer and an infamous assassin. And the mummy of a bank robber. And the corpses of famous quintuplets. On display at the Air and Space Museum is the stuffed body of an astronaut of sorts. In a cabinet in a back room of the Museum of Health and Medicine is the skeleton of the same pioneer8212;Able, the rhesus monkey who flew into space in the nose cone of a Jupiter rocket in 1959. And then there8217;s the object that8217;s stored in a jar that8217;s locked in a box in a remote hallway at the Smithsonian8217;s Museum of Natural History8212;a legendary item that8217;s been the subject of fevered rumors for decades. It is, of course, bank robber John Dillinger8217;s 8230; um, 8216;8216;synthetic polymer.8217;8217; here8217;s a story behind that, of course. There are stories behind all these strange specimens.

A Confederate cannonball arched through the smoky sky over Gettysburgn in Pennsylvania on July 2, 1863, and came down on the right leg of Union Gen. Daniel Sickles, who was riding his horse. When Powell died in 1902, his brain was shipped to anthropologist Edward Spitzka, who enjoyed weighing and comparing the brains of prominent men. Whitman8217;s was 1,282 grams; Turgenev8217;s a hefty 2,012. Powell8217;s brain weighed in at 1,488 grams. In a 1903 article in the American Anthropologist magazine, Spitzka described the cracks and crevices of Powell8217;s brain at great length8212;57 pages8212;before reaching this momentous conclusion: 8216;8216;Major Powell, geologist, ethnologist, explorer, philosopher and soldier, was endowed with a superior brain, and, what is more, he used it well.8217;8217; When McGee died in 1912, his brain was extracted and weighed8212;1,410 grams. Powell had won the bet, although he wasn8217;t around to brag about it. Spitzka donated Powell8217;s brain to the Smithsonian in 1921. These days, it spends most of its time in an alcohol-filled stainless steel box in a storage facility in suburban Suitland, Md.

John Dillinger, the legendary bank robber and escape artist, took two girlfriends to the movies on July 22, 1934, watching Clark Gable play a gangster who ends up in the electric chair in 8216;8216;Manhattan Melodrama.8217;8217; When Dillinger walked out of the Biograph Theatre in Chicago, a team of FBI agents shot him dead. After his body was hauled away, souvenir-seekers dipped handkerchiefs in his blood. The death of 8216;8216;Public Enemy No. 18217;8217; made headlines worldwide.

Since then, his story has been told in countless books and movies and his legend gave rise to a bizarre rumor8212;that the G-men amputated Dillinger8217;s penis, and that it is now stored in a Washington museum. The Washington Post