There is awkward, and then there is standing in a room full of strangers watching a corpse get peeled. In the 1800s, wealthy Europeans somehow decided the second option made for a lovely evening out.

Yes! Somewhere in London, a group of well-dressed people paid good money to sit in a crowded hall and watch a surgeon cut open a dead Egyptian. Nobody called the police. Nobody fainted in protest. In fact, the demand was so high that the surgeon had to tell latecomers to go home. This was Victorian entertainment, and honestly, the more you learn about it, the weirder it gets.

Can you imagine getting that invitation? "Come watch us peel a three-thousand-year-old dead guy like an onion. Drinks at seven." And people actually said yes. If I got that invite, I would have checked my calendar, pretended I had a prior engagement, and then moved to a different country just to be safe. But apparently, the........

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