U.S. museum returns remains of 12 Canadian soldiers

In this Sept. 17, 2019 photo shown is the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

OTTAWA — After more than 100 years, an American medical museum has returned the partial human remains of 12 Canadian soldiers from the First World War.

The Department of National Defence would not say what exactly the remains consist of — only that American medical personnel collected them after the war at a military hospital in Le Tréport, France.

The remains ended up at the Mutter Museum and Historical Medical Library in Philadelphia after being sent there in 1919 for a study.

National Defence said the collected remains will be interred in the individual soldiers’ graves, most of which are in a cemetery in Le Tréport, a port town in Normandy. The department said the museum is now dismantling the collection the Canadians were part of after a broader review.

The Mutter Museum is famous for displaying medical and macabre curiosities — such as fragments of Albert Einstein’s brain and a woman who was naturally mummified. It features a wall display of human skulls.

In 2017, The Guardian newspaper reported the museum had removed from its display and would return to Australia the skull of a First World War soldier who was shot in the head.

A lengthy internal ethical review that ended in 2025 led the museum to revamp its policies on handling human remains. The museum continues to display human remains but says it will repatriate them on a case-by-case basis.

National Defence said the Canadian Armed Forces has been involved an international effort to reclaim soldiers’ remains, led by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. The commission maintains graves for the war dead from the two world wars on behalf of the governments of Canada, the U.K. and other nations.

The department declined an interview request, saying Canada is not handling the repatriation of the human remains, which were sent from the U.S. directly to France.

“The Commonwealth War Graves Commission is the lead organization in reclaiming these remains and has undertaken detailed provenance and records research, working with the Mutter Museum to co-ordinate their transfer and appropriate burial,” spokesperson Kened Sadiku said in an email.

“To respect the privacy of the deceased and their descendants, we are not disclosing additional details about what was recovered.”

Andrew Burtch, a military historian with the Canadian War Museum — who is not involved in this effort but once worked on an exhibition on military medicine — said the repatriation and reburial of Canadian military remains collected as medical samples is rare and unusual.

“I can’t say definitively whether it’s ever happened before or not. It may well have but it’s the first I’m hearing of it,” he said.

Burtch said that during the First World War, it was a common practice to collect pathology specimens on both sides of the conflict for teaching purposes. In Germany’s case the remains were also used for propaganda to showcase its progress in military medicine, he said.

Burtch and the late historian Tim Cook researched the collection of hundreds of such samples at Canadian field hospitals, some of which ended up on exhibit in Montreal in 1921.

Cook, who authored a book on the subject titled “Life Savers and Body Snatchers,” said in a 2022 interview on CBC’s The Current that the remains were supposed to be put into a new medical museum after their return to Canada, but the museum was never built. He said the remains may have been destroyed after being used as teaching aids at McGill University.

“Part of the practice of military medicine involved pathology samples. What became of all of those samples of Canadian soldiers, I was never able to find out,” Burtch said.

National Defence said it is in the process of contacting family members of the deceased identified by the U.S. museum and encouraged them to contact its history and heritage branch.

It provided a list of the names of eight privates, two corporals and two sergeants from across Canada whose remains were identified in the museum collection.

They include Pte. Edward Lea of Vancouver from the Canadian Expeditionary Force, Cpl. John Kincaid of Kingston from field artillery and Sgt. Martin Murphy of Edmonton, who was part of the Canadian Machine Gun Corps.

The war graves commission declined an interview request but sent a prepared statement explaining how it first learned of these remains at the museum last fall.

“The Mutter Museum has safely and securely transferred the collection of remains to the (commission) Recovery Unit in Northern France, where they are being managed in line with our existing policy and interred in the existing graves,” the statement said.

“Specialist technical staff will undertake all interments, ensuring they are carried out with dignity and respect.”

The museum, part of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, started with a donation by the surgeon Thomas Mutter in the 1800s to further medical education.

The college did not grant an interview request Tuesday but sent a prepared statement explaining the effort to return the remains is the result of audits it conducted over the past five years.

The college said those audits were made possible through grant funding that “gave museum staff the tools to reconcile electronic records with nearly 175 years of paper records,” and also to match its records with the commission’s data on casualties.

The college said it reached out to the commission in fall 2025 to “seek its guidance” on its collection of 113 remains of Allied casualties it identified in the collection from Base Hospital 10 in Le Tréport.

“As was accepted practice at the time and approved by Allied governments, this collection was assembled to advance medical research on the treatment of novel war injuries,” an emailed statement from the college said.

It noted the hospital was staffed mostly by medical personnel from Pennsylvania Hospital, and most of the soldiers treated there were part of the British military.

“After the war, this collection was transferred to the museum, where it was preserved and safely stored as part of the museum and library’s collection of more than 450,000 items, including approximately 6,500 partial human remains,” the email said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 10, 2026.

Kyle Duggan, The Canadian Press