Footnote: Celebrity body parts

Explicit content warning

06/27/20 • 9 min

Jesus' foreskin isn't the only famous phallic relic -- the organs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Rasputin, Tutunkhamun and John Dillinger have been on the market over the years. A rundown of celebrity body parts, including Galileo's finger, Einstein's brain, Beethoven's ear bones and Abe Lincoln's skull fragments -- as well as famous frauds like Joan of Arc's heart. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Previous Episode

WHO STOLE JESUS' FORESKIN? Interview with David Farley

Celebrity memorabilia is big business these days, but nothing quite compares to the Holy Foreskin, a portion of Jesus' most intimate anatomy revered by Christians since the Middle Ages. David Farley, author of An Irreverent Curiosity and star of a National Geographic TV special, The Quest for the Holy Foreskin, is the world's leading expert on the sacred prepuce and its mysterious fate. The relic was stolen from a church in an Italian hill town in 1983. Was it by Satanists, neo-Nazis... or the Vatican?

Next Episode

THE SCIENCE OF LUST: Interview with Wednesday Martin

Female desire has been a battleground for thousands of years. Men have downplayed it since the ancient Greeks, demonized it in Puritan witchcraft trials and misinterpreted in the studies of Sigmund Freud. Wednesday Martin -- author of Primates of Park Avenue, Untrue and The Button, a history of women's most sensitive part, unravels the saga from the Agricultural Revolution to the Renaissance and the "clitoracy" movement today.