Scott Hollifield: Galileo rests in pieces

Someday, I hope to be the proud owner of Abe Lincoln’s big toe.

            I once considered this an unachievable dream. I often asked myself, how could a man from such humble beginnings ever find himself in possession of an artifact as historically significant as the big toe of the 16^th president of the United States?

            OK, I never really asked myself that, at least not until I learned famed Italian scientist Galileo Galilei’s fingers, sawed from his corpse in the 18^th century by what an Associated Press story termed “admirers,” and other appropriated body parts are now on display at The Galileo Museum in Florence. (I told my wife we’d stop and have a look on our way to Myrtle Beach this summer but she sadly informed me it was not that Florence.)

            A quick history lesson: Galileo (1564-1642) was an astronomer, physicist, mathematician, philosopher, power-hitting third baseman and outstanding short-order cook (some of those may not be accurate because I was doing most of my research on the Internet). Stephen Hawking said Signor G  “was responsible for the birth of modern science,” though Galileo declined an offer to go on the “Maury” show and determine once and for all who was science’s baby daddy.

            Galileo championed the heliocentric view of the universe, which put the sun, not the Earth, at the center. This was in direct opposition to the views of the Catholic Church at the time and the science curriculum currently favored by the Texas Board of Education.

            He was tried by the Inquisition, found to be “vehemently suspect of heresy” (why his lawyer failed to argue that down to “philosophizing without a license” is still debated among historians) and spent the next eight years under house arrest until his death at age 77.

            Ninety-five years later, according to a June 8 press release headlined “How we found the lost relics of Galileo” from The Galileo Museum, there was a “solemn ceremony… attended by numerous representatives of the cultural world (many of whom belonged to the Masonic lodges then spreading through Florence) and members of the city’s most illustrious nobility” involving the remains.

            During this so-called solemn ceremony, where it is unclear if alcohol was served but I am guessing yes, “Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti, a great historian of science and competent naturalist, drew from his pocket a knife, with which organic fragments from Galileo’s cadaver were removed… from the badly deteriorated remains of Galileo’s corpse, three fingers on the right hand (the thumb, index finger and middle finger), a vertebra (the fifth) and a tooth were removed. Targioni Tozzetti later confessed that he had found it hard to resist the temptation to appropriate the skull that had contained the brain of such exceptional genius!”

As a journalist, I must say this was the first press release I’ve ever read about someone carving up the dead body of one of the world’s most important scientists. Frankly, we need more of this.

Over the years, Galileo’s parts were scattered hither and yon. His vertebra currently resides at the University of Padua (a school I consider the backbone of the Italian education system). The digits and tooth ended up in a container passed from generation to generation by a family – “Son, I bequeath to you my gold watch, my diamond cufflinks and the shriveled thumb of the father of modern observational astronomy” – then at an auction house and finally to the museum that bears the name of the person to which they were once attached.

It’s a feel-good story, and one that gives me hope.

Somewhere out there, perhaps on a dusty shelf, floating in a Mason jar and looking like a reject from the Vienna sausage factory, just may be Abe Lincoln’s big toe.

If not, I will settle for James K. Polk’s earlobe.