... Thomas was Hardy, because he sure doesn't seem to have been lucky: Did a cat get Hardy's heart?
Actually, poets' organs seem accident prone: A lab assistant at Penn dropped Whitman's brain on the floor and pretty much destroyed it.
Anyway this seems worth looking into: DNA test for Hardy?
Update: The link to the cat and the heart should be fixed.
My favorite story of this ilk concerns Haydn's head. Prince Esterhazy wanted it. Haydn had been the conductor of his Hapsburg orchestra and he wanted this particular memento mori of his old pal. Besides, collecting skulls was all the rage in those days in Vienna (look up a guy named Franz Josef Gall and you'll see why).
ReplyDeleteSo the Prince sent his valet to dig up the skull the night after Haydn was buried. Valet went, but wound up getting in a fistfight outside the cemetery -- he was beaten so badly, he wound up in a hospital. He couldn't get to the head until a week later. By this time, he'd paid off the sexton who stood by while he dug up Haydn. Haydn, however, after a week, was green and very, very smelly. The poor valet was overcome with nausea and almost did not succeed in getting the body out and the head...off.
The valet wrote down his reminiscences, which is how I know this story at all -- I read it in a book about body snatchers. Lots of people before Alastair Cooke had their body parts stolen!