Secrets of the Dead: "Ben Franklin's Bones" (Icon Films, Thirteen Productions, WNET, PBS, 2015)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Secrets of the Dead episode which followed immediately after “Ultimate Space Telescope” was called “Ben Franklin’s Bones,” which at first I thought would be a tale about the dispositions of Benjamin Franklin’s remains after his death. He and his wife are buried under a flat grave marker in Franklin’s adopted home town, Philadelphia, and there doesn’t seem to be any real suspense that it is indeed he and his wife under that stone. In fact it’s about the bones of at least 28 separate humans, along with some non-human animal remains as well, discovered in the basement of 36 Craven Street in London, where Franklin lived from 1757 to 1775. Franklin was there as a diplomatic representative of the colony of Pennsylvania, trying (and failing) to negotiate a peaceful resolution of the differences between Britain and its American colonies that ultimately led to the Revolutionary War. He rented it from a woman named Mrs. Stevenson who had a daughter named Polly, and Franklin essentially adopted them as a sort of surrogate family since he’d had to leave his real wife and daughter back home in America because Mrs. Franklin feared sea travel. Polly eventually married a man named Dr. William Hewson, a pioneering anatomist who was trying to advance the scope of human understanding of medicine and in particular how the human body worked.

Unfortunately, he ran into a problem that will be familiar to anyone who’s read Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story “The Body Snatcher” or seen the great 1945 film of it by producer Val Lewton and director Robert Wise (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-body-snatchjer-rko-1945.html). In the 18th and 19th century British law kept a very tight control on the supply of corpses available for dissection. The only people allowed to be dissected after their deaths were convicted murderers who had already been hanged, and with no refrigeration available their bodies had to be harvested immediately after their deaths. The reason was that there was a widespread religious superstition that even if you’d led a sin-free and blameless life, you would not be admitted into heaven if your body had been mutilated post-mortem. So the British government allowed doctors to dissect only bodies of people that had already been convicted and put to death for murder because presumably they were destined for hell anyway. Dr. Hewson was determined to do as many dissections as he could in order to prove his theories of anatomy – including his argument that the lymphatic system was not unique to humans but existed in other animals as well – even though this meant dealing with the so-called “resurrectionists,” illegal grave-robbers who worked out an elaborate system of breaking into newly dug graves and stealing the bodies from under them, then covering their tracks by restoring the original earth on top of the bodies.

Dr. Hewson first studied anatomy under two brothers, William and John Hunter, but they had a falling-out and fought a legal battle over who had the right to keep the grisly but well-preserved specimens their dissections had come up with, many of which are still in the library of the Royal Academy of Sciences in London. (The show featured a shot of the sign-in book at the Royal Academy, including the signatures of Franklin, Isaac Newton and Joseph Priestley, discoverer of oxygen and regular correspondent of America’s third President, Thomas Jefferson.) After the Hunters kicked him out, Dr. Hewson opened his own anatomy school in the basement at 36 Craven Street, where he left behind many bones of the human and animal corpses he’d dissected until his own death from peritonitis at just 34. Franklin had supported Dr. Hewson’s researches, and after Hewson’s death he arranged for his widow Polly and their son to emigrate to the U.S. and settle in Philadelphia – where the various generations of Hewsons have continued in the medical field to this day. The film included an interview with Melissa Hewson, a medical student and the fifth generation of her family to pursue medicine as her chosen profession, and she boasted that even if she gets married she will continue to use the name “Hewson” professionally to continue the line of Dr. Hewsons. Though there’s a certain sensationalism about the way the discovery of human bones, obviously sawn through neatly, in Benjamin Franklin’s basement – Franklin was even briefly suspected of being a serial killer like Fred and Rosemary West, a husband-and-wife team who committed at least 12 known murders of young women in Gloucestershire between 1967 and 1987 and were finally apprehended in 1994 – ultimately the show became a quite compelling drama of the unwelcome interface between medicine and crime prompted by the idiotic laws in place during the 18th and 19th centuries that kept doctors and researchers from obtaining the bodies they needed to advance medical knowledge and save future lives.