Museums, Science and Piety

[richsc]

There's a lot to be learned from bones, though most people wouldn't appreciate that without being told. Physical anthropologists fight all the time over this stuff, who owns it, where it was found. Roman bone remains are extremely rare, so these are probably more valuable to science than the other artifacts.
In the Smithsonian for the longest time there was a corpse that had turned to soap on display: the fellow had died in American colonial period in Philadelphia, around 1780. (actually saw him on History channel last night: secrets of the Smithsonian) The Smithsonian keeps some 35,000 sets of bones in neat green drawers, which means 35,000 people. These are definitely *not* secret. I venture to say the BM has a physical anthropology section where they have thousands of bone sets stored for research as well.
And there are lots of medical museums around the world with particularly choice displays. The Army medical museum at Walter Reed is especially famous: when I was growing up the elephentitis leg and the gallery of shotgun suicides were mandatory for us kids.

Army Medical Museum