A giant leap for medical science

The Irish Giant, is the true tale of two remarkable men. Hunter: a pioneering 18th-century surgeon obsessed with life, death – and abnormal bodies. And Charles Byrne: Georgian London’s biggest celebrity, an 8ft-tall Irishman. Byrne was exhibiting himself as a ‘freak’ for the entertainment of society London when Hunter approached him, and asked if he would donate his bones on his death to ‘science’. But Byrne, being a God-fearing man, wanted his body to go to heaven intact. Hunter responded by commissioning his servant to follow Byrne for the rest of his short life, so his bones might be snatched when the time came. Byrne’s skeleton can be seen to this day at The Hunterian Musuem in London.

We’re making The Irish Giant with the support of the Wellcome Trust and we’re collaborating with an expert on Gigantism (John Wass), a science historian (Roger Cooter) and a biomedical ethicist (Muireann Quigley). We also spent a week at Warwick University with the Centre for the History of Medicine as part of a cross-disciplinary project called Being Human. Dr Claudia Stein wanted to use the scratch as a jumping off point for discussion about the ethical, scientific and historical issues connected to the case and the two scratch showings were followed by fascinating panel discussions. Mine was about Religion, Science and Commerce with a university scientist, historian and a chaplain. Brian Logan’s discussion was entitled Gigantism, Genetics and History and he was joined by Brendon Holland, a pituitary giant who’s discovered that Charles Byrne is an ancestor, Marta Korbonits, the scientist who’s discovered genetic links in Gigantism using the Byrne/Holland case, and Ronan McCloskey, whose BBC documentary followed their amazing story. It was really exciting to be working in such a completely different setting and to be offering an artist’s perspective on the truths and issues in the story. Following the scratch shows discussions ran long into night about the show’s future potential both in theatrical and in educative settings.
We describe our work as kind of a cocktail of script-defying impro, storytelling and live music. I guess people like the Salvo’s because we have this very honest and direct relationship with the audience. We respect their intelligence and sense of humour. I direct the shows and I’m always aware that as an audience member I hate being told what to think. For that reason we’d say we sort of ‘don’t do issues’ but we do want the audience to be stimulated intellectually of course. At the same time we are very keen on redefining who we are with each project so actually saying ‘we don’t do issues’ becomes instantly something we’d be inclined to challenge in ourselves. Working with our science partners we soon discovered that this story is well known in science circles as a landmark case in terms of biomedical ethics. The story of Charles Byrne is about a moment in history when science and religion were on a collision course. This is further complicated in Georgian London by the growth of commerce. So we wanted to find a device that would keep this complex story open, so that we weren’t narrowing down the scope of the content for our audience.
It is sad that Byrne’s wishes were not respected in his time, but the dissection of corpses at Dr Hunter’s medical school were progressing the course of history. We are at the early stages of R&D on the show right now (with a full-scale run in London and the South East next year) and are imagining that perhaps in his own last orders Hunter might challenge his students to dissect his body and find the physical basis for the ‘soul’. Seeing how scientists work and think around subjects has given us license as artists to explode the bigger more intangible questions. As this soul-seeking device in the story is impossible and endless I hope we can make sure we don’t have our production ‘close the case’ of this rich story that continues to be massively contentious today.