CT scans of Jeremy Bentham's preserved head show that the philosopher, who died at 84, was missing many teeth and had advanced arthritis in his lower jaw, Live Science reported. "He must have been in excruciating pain," Tannis Davidson, curator of University College London's Grant Museum of Zoology and the project's leader, told the site, after seeing how thin the jawbone had become. The scans were made to build a digital 3-D model of the head and to mark Bentham's long presence at UCL as the university celebrates its 200th anniversary. Bentham's utilitarian ideas inspired UCL's founders; the institution, first called London University, was only the third university in England, after Oxford and Cambridge, founded in 1826 and opened to students in 1828.
As a young man Bentham had said he would donate his body to science, a radical pledge when dissection was widely reserved for the worst criminals. After he died in 1832, his remains were made into an "auto-icon," a dressed skeleton meant as a memorial. The body was dissected, the skeleton padded with straw and clothed, and a wax head based on paintings and death masks was attached after an attempt to preserve the real head with sulfuric acid badly disfigured it. Except for brief loans, including to the Met Breuer in New York, the auto-icon has been on display at UCL since the 1850s. The real head, whose eyes were replaced with glass, was once shown at the skeleton's feet; according to UCL lore it was stolen in 1975, held for ransom for a few days by rivals from King's College London, and later locked away. The new scans show the brain had been removed before preservation, though some of the dura mater remains, in line with Bentham's instructions that his head be prepared in a manner he associated with Māori heads. The work appears in a short film, "Bentham Revealed."
Davidson said Bentham wrote about his dental problems but may not have understood the arthritis that would have made them worse, and that "dentistry 200 years ago was a very different kettle of fish than it is today." He called himself an "unbeliever"; critics called him "godless." He proposed the panopticon prison in 1791 and a "felicific calculus" for weighing the utility of actions. Davidson suggested the auto-icon may also have been a way to avoid traditional Anglican burial rites: "Maybe this was a way he could 'stick it to them' a little bit."
The verified news is a set of CT findings — missing teeth, jaw arthritis, a removed brain — and UCL's bicentennial scanning project. It is not a new medical diagnosis made in Bentham's lifetime, and it is not a claim that the auto-icon has been moved from campus.