A selection of historical conundrums answered by experts
Is there any truth to the rumour that Benjamin Franklin was a serial killer?
The very idea is extraordinary and, of course, the answer is an emphatic ‘no’. There were, though, human bones from 15 different individuals found buried in what had been the garden of his central London home between 1757 and 1762 and again between 1764 and 1772.
The bones were discovered in 1998 when work was being undertaken to enable the house to become the museum and education centre that is today’s Benjamin Franklin House. The bones were 250 years old, dating from the time when Dr Franklin was still living in Craven Street, if not in the same house.
That said, he still had access to his old abode, because both houses belonged to his landlady Margaret Stevenson. She and her famous lodger had moved across the road to make way for her daughter, her son-in-law and young son, who was also Franklin’s godson. It is the son-in-law and anatomist Dr William Hewson who was responsible for the bones – and he was not a serial killer either.
Hewson was one of the most brilliant medical scientists of the age and, like Franklin, he was the winner of the Royal Society’s annual Copley Medal. After moving to Craven Street, Hewson gave well-attended practical lectures at the anatomy theatre he had built next to the house. For these he needed fresh cadavers, which presented him with a problem.
Up until the Anatomy Act of 1832, only the bodies of executed murderers were legally available for teaching and study and these went to the Company of Surgeons. However, in filthy and disease-ridden London, a city of 750,000 where the death rate was high, there was no shortage of new bodies that could be supplied by body snatchers, before or after burial. But the post-demonstration bones had to disappear, hence the use of the garden from 1772 until 1774, when it stopped for a tragic reason: Dr Hewson’s knife slipped, he cut himself and sadly died of septicaemia.
George Goodwin, author of Benjamin Franklin in London and author in residence at Benjamin Franklin House
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