In 1729, Jonathan Swift wrote an essay called "A Modest Proposal" in which he jokingly suggested turning the poor children from Ireland into food for the rich.
After Jonathan Swift's lifelong friend Esther Johnson died in 1728 he kept a lock of her hair in his desk wrapped in paper bearing the words: "Only a woman's hair."
When Jonathan Swift died in 1745, he left some of his money to an Irish hospital to establish a lunatic asylum because no nation needed it so much.
