Cranioklepty

by Colin Dickey

  PHRENOLOGY WAS A science for an uncertain time, and perhaps no one exemplified this better than the phrenologist and revolutionary Gustav von Struve. The young Struve had come to Mannheim in Baden, Germany, to practice law, but his ambitions quickly grew. He began actively to promote both phrenology and radical reform, which he saw as inextricably linked.

  Ever since Gall’s expulsion from Vienna, German-speaking countries had lagged behind the rest of Europe when it came to phrenology. For Struve, this rejection accounted for Germany’s lack of progress and why it still lay captive to oppressive religious and aristocratic regimes. He set out to remedy the problem, co-founding the German-language Phrenological Journal and advocating tirelessly for the New Science. Combe recognized the value of his contributions in his own A System of Phrenology, and the Fowlers regularly translated excerpts of his work in their own journal. His colleague Alexander Herzen claimed that Struve was so devoted to phrenology that he deliberately chose a wife who lacked a “passion” bump.108

  Struve’s own passion was for political and social reform. He argued for vegetarianism and temperance, against capital punishment. He set aside a portion of every day to meditate on the great secular heroes of revolution, from Washington and Lafayette to Rousseau and Robespierre. Contemporaries described Struve as having a face that “showed the moral rigidity of the fanatic . . . with uncombed beard and untroubled eyes,” but he was sincere in his desire for reform, and in 1847 he dropped the aristocratic “von” from his name in solidarity with the common man.

  Gustav Struve.

  Mario Vargas Llosa, in his 1984 novel The War at the End of the World, would reincarnate this archetype of the revolutionary phrenologist and put him in South America. An amalgamation of Struve and Combe, Llosa’s character, a Scotsman who takes the name Galileo Gall, comes to Brazil to foment revolution: “As other children grew up listening to fairy stories, he had grown up hearing that property is the origin of all social evils and that the poor will succeed in shattering the chains of exploitation and obscurantism only through the use of violence.” Inextricable from this revolutionary fervor is a fervor for phrenology:

  Whereas for other followers of Gall’s, this science was scarcely more than the belief that intellect, instinct, and feelings are organs located in the cerebral cortex and can be palpated and measured, for Galileo’s father this discipline meant the death of religion, the empirical foundation of materialism, the proof that the mind was not what philosophical mumbo jumbo made it out to be, something imponderable and impalpable, but on the contrary a dimension of the body, like the senses, and hence equally capable of being studied and treated clinically.109

  Galileo Gall thus operates from a simple precept: “Revolution will free society of its afflictions, while science will free the individual of his.”

  Something very similar was at work in the mind of Struve: a desire for a violent overthrow of oppressive regimes, which could in turn allow the democratic and progressive principles of phrenology to flourish. He was not alone in his democratic zeal: In 1848 democratic revolutions broke out all over Europe, starting in France and quickly engulfing the entire continent. The year Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto, all of Europe was ready for change, and men like Struve saw their chance. On March 31 of that year, German reformers gathered in a “Pre-Parliament” to discuss the establishment of a free, united German republic. During the discussion Struve read his fifteen-point plan to end the “subjugation, stultification, and bleeding dry of the people,” which included the abolition of the standing army, all aristocratic privileges, and any connection between church and state and their replacement with laws that were based on “the spirit of our age,” including phrenology.

  The Pre-Parliament rejected Struve and his radical coalition in favor of a more moderate approach, and so the radicals decided to bring about emancipation by force. They raised a small army to march on the capital of Baden, but when they met the government’s forces in the Black Forest they were severely routed, and Struve and the others were imprisoned. Freed the following year, the undaunted phrenologist once again joined another failed uprising against the government—one in which, it should be noted, his “passionless” wife fought with unmatched tenacity.

  In Baden and elsewhere, these popular uprisings were brutally suppressed. In Vienna, for example, when dissidents took control of the center of the city, the royal response was swift and bloody, and the army savagely bombed the entire city. Among the casualties was the imperial zoological collection, which was hit by an errant cannonball, caught fire, and burned to the ground. Lost in the fire was the stuffed body of Angelo Soliman, who finally found his rest in the tumult of such an extraordinary time.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  SKULDUGGERY

  In such a climate, rare or significant skulls continued to be quite valuable. The “New York Golgotha” that was the Fowlers’ storefront was filled with a wide variety of skulls, representing “saint . . . savage, and . . . sage,” and (the Phrenological Journal reported) all “are represented in the mute eloquence of a thousand crania arranged and labeled among the walls of the building.” The Fowlers were always looking to increase their collection: Any time a hanging was announced, they dispatched an agent to “attend the execution and take a cast of his head.” They took anything, including alligator and deer skulls. But despite this plethora of crania, the skulls of the famous and the highly intelligent continued to elude the Fowlers. In 1854 the Phrenological Journal complained, “We have a very large collection of the skulls of murderers, who have been executed, and of soldiers killed on battle-fields, also of Indians, Africans, Egyptians, Chinese, and Cannibals, but we have only a few from the higher class of minds, such as Reformers, Statesmen, Scholars, & c. Of these we have hundreds of casts, and busts from living heads, but not their skulls.” In an era of hands-on, empirical science, busts and casts were simply not enough. “What a treasure it would be,” the editorial concluded, “if some plan could be devised, by which these leading ‘types’ could be preserved as specimens, for scientific purposes.”110

  The phrenologists were not alone in this desire. As anatomical study came to be recognized as increasingly important in the preservation of life, an active campaign was mounted by burial reformers to change people’s attitudes about what should be done with their bodies after death and to destigmatize dissection. If anyone, it was the scientists and burial reformers who would have to lead by example. A nameless French scholar in 1829 had delivered a lecture to the British Forum on the virtues of dissection, which concluded with a reading of his will, wherein he stipulated that his body should first be dissected, and then his skin tanned and made into a leather chair. In addition, his bones should be cleaned so that the head could go to the London Phrenological Society and the smaller bones could be made into “knife-handles, pin-cases, small boxes, buttons, etc.”111

  More famously, the Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham left his body to science, stuffed and arranged in what he called his “Auto-icon,” the description of which he detailed in his will: a wooden box with a glass front in which his body could be seated in a chair “usually occupied by me when living in the attitude in which I am sitting when engaged in thought.” Bentham went so far as to stipulate that he be dressed “in one of the suits of black occasionally worn by me” and that he be made to hold his beloved walking stick, nicknamed “Dapple.” His head was replaced with a wax replica (the original having been badly treated during the autopsy), and the “Auto-icon” was acquired in 1850 by University College London, which put it on display. For the 100th and 150th anniversaries of the college, the Auto-icon was wheeled into the meeting of the College Council, and when the roll was called, Bentham was listed as “present, but not voting” (though the college maintains that it is a myth the stuffed corpse has ever cast the deciding vote in the event of a tie).

  Jeremy Bentham in his “Auto-Icon.”

  PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL REEVE.

  In 18
75 the Anthropological Society of Paris founded a Society of Mutual Autopsy, not only to further the destigmatization of dissection but to recast autopsy as a form of immortality: Upon death a member would be immortalized in a detailed description of his body, particularly his brain— which would be added to the society’s collection for all time.

  But most people were not about to let their mortal remains be used as scientific toys or gothic mementoes. The fear of grave robbing was still strong through much of the nineteenth century, and new technologies arose to foil the resurrectionists. There was, for example, the “mortsafe,” an iron grid that encased the coffin to prevent any molestation of one’s remains, and in 1818 an Englishman named Edward Bridgman introduced the first device invented specifically to combat grave robbing: the “patent coffin,” a cast- or wrought-iron coffin with spring catches hidden on the inside of the lid, configured in such a way that it was impossible to pry off the lid with a crowbar. The patent coffin was such a sensation that a man named Charles Dibden composed an ode to this “prince of coffin makers” and sold it as a broadsheet, an upbeat ditty that included the following choice verses:

  Each age has boasted curious selves,

  By patent notoriety,

  Whose inventions have enriched themselves,

  For advantage of society.

  I, an immortal artisan,

  Pray, gents, favour your scoffing,

  Produce tonight, muse, sing the man

  That made the patent coffin.

  CHORUS:

  Then toll the knell, each passing bell

  Shall of the mighty name of this wondrous man be talking,

  While foremost in the ranks of fame

  His coffin shall be walking.

  Resurrection men, your fate deplore,

  Retire with sore vexation,

  Your mystery’s gone, your art’s no more,

  No more your occupation;

  Surgeons, no more shall ye ransack

  The grave, with feelings callous,

  Tho’ on the Old Bailey turn’d your back,

  Your only hopes the gallows.112

  That the inventor of a resurrection-proof coffin would be hailed as a national hero reveals the extent to which the general public still feared such a postmortem fate. Certainly the average citizen did not see the prospect of putting his or her skull on display as anything like a worthy tribute to a famous mind—after all, it was still primarily the case that if a skull was on display or under the eye of science, it had probably come from the gallows or the insane asylum, and few wanted any such institutions associated with their own heads.

  AND SO, AS expressed by that most basic tenet of capitalism, the dearth of famous skulls coupled with increasing demand made them that much more valuable, and their theft that much more lucrative. In 1809 Joseph Carl Rosenbaum had to pay only 25 gulden to secure a grave digger’s help; in 1827 those interested in Beethoven’s head were willing to go as high as 1,000 gulden.

  A few rare skulls could be had through legal channels. When the German poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller’s body was exhumed in 1826, twenty-one years after his death, the Duke Carl August had the skull mounted on a velvet cushion in a glass case and displayed in his library. In order to keep the duke from being confused with the religiously superstitious or macabre treasure hunters, much was made of the fact that the skull was to be kept in the library—the proper place for a skull of genius, which could be read phrenologically, almost as if it were another book on the shelf. As a private, special book, it was not for everyone. As the director of the duke’s library put it, the skull was to be made available only to those “of whom one can be certain that their steps are not governed by curiosity but by a feeling, a knowledge of what that great man achieved for Germany, for Europe, and for the whole civilized world.”113

  If anyone had that feeling, it was this librarian, no less than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who would become the bedrock on which much of Germanic literature was based. Either way, after a year the Duke got nervous about the skull and ordered it reinterred with the body. Respectable sources simply could not be relied on; if you wanted a skull, you had to steal it yourself.

  SUCH WAS THE case with the head of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, which showed up for sale in England in 1816 or ’17 (the reports varied). A polymath who had excelled in physics, geometry, and chemistry, Swedenborg turned to spiritual questions in his middle age and in the last thirty years of his life published over thirty books of spiritual revelations. In the years following his death a small but fervently devoted branch of Christianity was born.

  Swedenborg stressed that the Second Coming was already upon us—not as a literal reappearance of Jesus Christ but his return in spirit, which affected all the world, ushering in a new age—what Swedenborg called the New Church. His writings depicted a parallel spiritual world which can be fully realized only in death, once we have left our mortal remains and when each of us is revealed as who we truly are.

  Swedenborg was traveling in London in 1772 when he suffered a stroke and shortly thereafter was liberated from his own mortal remains. He was buried in the Swedish Church, which had been founded by his father to serve the small Swedish community of London and Swedish naval personnel passing through the port. Swedenborg was buried in the vault below the church, which was kept sealed and opened only occasionally to accept new occupants.

  Swedenborg’s coffin was first disturbed in 1790, though not by grave robbers. Rather it was an American Rosicrucian, traveling in England, who flatly refused to believe that Swedenborg had died and contended instead that he had discovered the secret to immortality, drunk an elixir of eternal youth, and then had a fake funeral performed so as to avoid discovery. After a heated discussion over dinner with friends one night, the American and his party resolved to settle the matter. Bribing the sexton, the American descended into the crypt with a small entourage, which included Gustav Broling and Robert Hindmarsh, who both later recounted the story. The coffin, it turned out, was airtight and had to be opened with the aid of a solderer called in to break the seal. Because no air or moisture had been able to aid in decomposition, Swedenborg’s body was almost perfectly preserved—and smelled. Broling recalled how, upon opening the coffin, “there issued forth effluvia in such abundance and of such a sort that the candles went out, and all the observers were obliged to rush head over heels out of the burial vault in order not to be smothered.” This was, finally, enough to satisfy the doubting American.114

  Once the vault was cleared out, they returned to find Swedenborg’s body unchanged after eighteen years. “We all stood for a few minutes in silent astonishment,” Hindmarsh wrote, “to observe the physiognomy of that material frame now prostrate in the hands of death, which had once been the organ of so much intellect.” In awe, Hindmarsh placed his hand on the philosopher’s face, triggering the sudden decomposition that had been postponed for so long: “The whole frame was speedily reduced to ashes, leaving only the bones to testify to future inspectors of the coffin that a man had once lived and died.”

  The coffin was never resealed, so anyone who happened to be in the vault might easily have had access to Swedenborg’s remains. With phrenology spreading like wildfire through Great Britain, it was only a matter of time before curiosity got the better of someone.

  The skull was stolen in either 1816 or 1817—the circumstances surrounding the theft were never very clear—but not much was made of the theft until 1823, when the Times of London ran a short notice on the skull’s reunion with the rest of the philosopher’s bones. The ensuing confusion regarding the circumstances and motives of the theft speaks volumes of the changing attitudes toward the dead body during this time. The Times article, which appeared on March 31, 1823, offered a particularly colorful version of the events. The newspaper related how a Swedish disciple of Swedenborg, “whether prompted by supernatural inspiration or by his own blind superstition,” had in fact

  The skull of Emanuel Swedenbo
rg.

  contrived, by means of bribing the sexton or gravedigger, to gain admittance to the cemetery where his body was deposited. Here, in the silent hour of midnight (having previously supplied himself with the necessary implements) he broke open the coffin, and severed the head from the trunk of the departed saint, with the former of which he safely decamped to his own country. This relic he preserved with the greatest care and veneration till the day of his death, when it was discovered by his surviving relatives.

  The writer went on to relate how the thief’s friends, “alarmed at the consequences that might follow such an unhallowed violation of the tomb, and being desirous of atoning in some measure for the sins of him who had been guilty of so great a crime, caused the head to be forthwith transmitted” back to London so that it could be reunited with Swedenborg’s body, “with due solemnity in the presence of the elders of the church.”115

  Alas, the story was almost entirely an invention of the Times writer. Oddly, it bore a striking similarity to the saga of Haydn and Rosenbaum: a devoted disciple motivated by a misguided passion and devotion, a midnight theft to retrieve a prized relic. Odd because at that time the story was not known at all beyond those few involved, many of whom (including Nicholas II) did not know the whole story. It was almost as if Rosenbaum’s story had percolated into the collective unconscious of the age, as if from some common Romantic wellspring.

  A series of letters quickly reached the Times to correct the erroneous account. The first of these, by one Reverend Samuel Noble, was by far the most indignant. Noble was not only a minister in the New Church but was also the founder of the Society for Printing and Publishing the Writings of Swedenborg (now the Swedenborg Society) and editor of the leading Swedenborgian journal in Britain, the Intellectual Repository. To Noble, the Times’s account was “certainly sufficiently ridiculous, and calculated, with all who might believe it, to throw unmerited obloquy on the whole body of the admirers of [Swedenborg’s] writings,” and he had written to correct this miscarriage of justice. Yes, Noble confirmed, Swedenborg’s head had been stolen, “but it is not true that the person who executed this singular robbery was one of his disciples.” Rather than anyone connected with Swedenborgianism or the New Church, the thief was, Noble claimed, someone affiliated with phrenology, the New Science: “I understand that the motive which led him to obtain possession of this ‘relic,’ was the same as led Drs. Gall and Spurzheim to posses themselves of similar relics of other eminent men.” The phrenologist, Noble explained, had been at the Swedish Church for the burial of Baroness von Nolcken, who had died in 1816, and after the funeral had been wandering in the tomb when he had noticed the opened coffin.