Under the central dome of UCL — an indoor crossroads where hordes of students come and go on their way to lectures and lunch — there’s an intriguing exhibition on at the moment about death. ‘Human remains are displayed in this exhibition’, it says in white lettering on the floor atall four entrances, to warn any passing snowflakes.
The real head of Jeremy Bentham, who died in 1832, glass eyes staring out at you from behind a vitrine, is indeed a bit queasy-making. This is the central object of the exhibition. Bentham still has his long dark-grey hair at the back and sides of his bald pate, and his whole head is leather-brown from the tanning treatment after his death. He looks as if he’s grinning or grimacing. You can see the deep clamp marks in his cheeks from when his head was held in position and suspended over a vat of sulphuric acid for preservation purposes.
At least, for today’s more sensitive undergraduates, this is the head of someone who ticks all the virtue boxes. Bentham, the ‘spiritual founder’ of UCL, was an all-round good egg: against slavery, the death penalty and physical punishment, and in favour of animal rights and the legalisation of homosexuality. He was also a utilitarian and an atheist, and it was these two convictions that led him to stipulate in his will that his body should be delivered to a medical school and used in the furtherance of medical understanding of diseases.
Flinders Petrie, the Egyptologist whose collection forms the core of UCL’s Petrie Museum of Archeology, is another matter. Petrie’s head is not actually in this exhibition, as it lives in a jar at the Royal College of Surgeons, and that is perhaps a good thing, as it might have started a ‘no-vitrining’ riot.
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