A few years ago, medical historian and surgeon-in-training Suzie Edge was in the operating room preparing to amputate a patient’s leg. She began recounting how such an amputation might have gone during the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, when there were no anesthetics or antiseptics, and doctors relied on surgical saws to do their work. With a combination of admiration and mild rebuke, the head of surgery told her, “Suzie, you really need to go and tell these stories somewhere else.”
So she did. Edge began posting short videos recounting gory stories of the body parts of historical figures on TikTok. She soon developed a large and adoring following. Many of them offered up their own bloody anecdotes in comments. “They just kept on suggesting things and saying, ‘Have you looked at this?’ ‘Have you looked at that?’” says Edge. “Suddenly, I had this huge pile of body parts.” It was enough material for a book, so she wrote one: Vital Organs: The History of the World’s Most Famous Body Parts. It was published earlier this year.
“It’s something that we’re not supposed to like, we’re not supposed to be interested,” she says of the broad appeal of guts and gore. But she found that thinking about actual bodies in all of their vital carnality really brought the historical characters she had been studying to life. Below, five of Edge’s favorite body part stories, in her own words.
He was the only person to stab the Queen and get away with it.
1. Charles I’s Neck Bone
The first story that really stuck with me was about Charles I. His head was chopped off in 1649, and he was stuck in a temporary vault with Henry VIII and a couple of others. But the Georgians [as the folks in England from 1714 to 1837 were known] loved to open tombs and coffins and have a poke, so when his body was found, the doctor had a look and said, “Oh yes, this, this definitely looks like somebody who’s had his head chopped off.” There was a slice through the cervical vertebrae. Now the doctor stole a little piece of sliced neck bone and took it home, and he turned it into a salt cellar. He pushed it around at dinner parties. This went on for years until Queen Victoria got wind of it, and she said, “That’s really odd, and, uh, can we put it back please?” So the coffin was opened up and it was put back. I just found that remarkable. It sent me digging for more of these body part tales.
2. Alexis St. Martin’s Stomach
I think one of my absolute favorites is a chap in Canada who, in the 1820s, was shot at close range in the chest. The wound didn’t really heal very well, so he was left with an open hole in his stomach.