Sure, you’ve seen a dead body before, but have you ever seen a thumb preserved in salt? How about a saint’s heart shrouded in gold?

Beyond the normal displays of skeletons in medical museums and holy leaders’ bodies in churches and temples, there’s a whole world of bits and pieces to explore. Throughout history, body parts have been taken as trophies during wartime, worshipped as miraculous healing agents, cut off and displayed to honor their owners, or simply saved incidentally by natural processes.

If seeing a whole body feels banal, we recommend delving from the complete corpse to its components. Here are some of our favorites from around the world.

This young girl was embalmed in arsenic in the 1940s. Michelle Enemark for Atlas Obscura

1. National Museum of Health and Medicine - Silver Spring, Maryland

Among the 24 million medical instruments and anatomical specimens housed here are portions of Abraham Lincoln’s skull (and the attached hair), as well as Gen.…