by Colin Dickey
With so much invested in a proof of European intellectual superiority, the heads of those great men whose creativity had defined an age—men like Browne—would seem particularly important. If Morton’s theories were to hold up, it seemed necessary to prove that just as Europeans had bigger brains than their African or Indian counterparts, European geniuses must have even bigger brains than regular Europeans.
Across the Atlantic, in Paris, a landmark dispute took place with the goal of settling this very question.
THE AVERAGE EUROPEAN brain was said to weigh around 1,400 grams. Numerous examples had been found of great artists and thinkers who had heavier brains—the brain of Georges Cuvier, the naturalist who had bought Gall’s skull collection, had been recorded as weighing an astonishing 1,830 grams. The Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev’s brain weighed a mighty 2,012 grams, and Lord Byron’s brain had been placed somewhere between 1,800 grams and a massive 2,238 grams. The question of whether there was a reliable correlation between genius and large brain size was one that consumed two famous craniometrists in the middle of the nineteenth century—the battle between Paul Broca and Louis Pierre Gratiolet would go down in history as a landmark in the evolution of scientific thinking.166
Paul Broca was a French anatomist and anthropologist—and Morton’s most ardent and capable follower. Broca, who had founded the Anthropological Society of Paris in 1859, refined many of Morton’s methodologies while keeping the aim much the same. After Morton’s death it was Broca who assumed the mantle of spokesman for craniometry and defended it vociferously against the few scientists who dared to assert that there was no measurable difference in brain size between Europeans and Africans. Friedrich Tiedemann published one such critique, and Broca’s response was savage. He thoroughly denounced the German doctor, conclusively demonstrating that Tiedemann had made systematic errors in his calculations and thus invalidating his findings. Of course Morton had made the exact same kinds of misstep, albeit in the other direction, but Broca, who had extensively reviewed Morton’s work, did not see fit to comment on Morton’s irregularities.
An even more radical threat was to come in a theory advocated by Louis Pierre Gratiolet, a rival anatomist whose claim to fame lay in understanding the different hemispheres of the brain and identifying its four lobes. Gratiolet went so far as to argue that brain size simply bears no correlation to intelligence whatsoever, effectively declaring that the whole project of craniometry was fallacious.
In a meeting held on June 6, 1961, which would go down in the annals of craniometry as one of the study’s most famous days, Gratiolet attempted to disprove the prevailing hypothesis that skull size could be a useful metric for intelligence. He reviewed the data on the brain of the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and concluded, “This is not an enormous brain; this is not an exceptional weight.” The same was true of the famous mineralogist Johann Hausman. Most famously, Gratiolet set out to challenge the notion that Georges Cuvier’s brain had been exceptionally large. But this time, in true theatrical fashion (and lacking the zoologist’s actual skull), Gratiolet brandished Cuvier’s hat. He had taken it to the most renowned hatter in Paris, M. Puriau, who had told him that it was a large hat (21.8 by 16 centimeters), to be sure, but not exceptionally so—Puriau estimated that 30 percent of his customers bought hats of that size. Furthermore, Gratiolet reasoned, Cuvier was known for his “extremely abundant mass of hair,” which could—could it not?—account for a larger hat size. “The measurements that I have just pointed out,” he said, “seem to prove rather obviously that if the skull of Cuvier had a considerable size, this size is not absolutely exceptional and unique.”167
For Broca, this conclusion was intolerable. Tiedemann may have been blinded by his preconceived notions that all races are innately equal, but at least he had understood the fundamental importance of the skull in science. Gratiolet wanted to end the skull’s supremacy altogether. Broca began his riposte to Gratiolet by stating the obvious: If there is really no correlation between head size and intelligence, then “the study of the brains of human races would lose most of its interest and utility.”168
What Gratiolet was proposing, Broca pointed out, was not just a differing opinion but an attack on the foundation of an entire branch of science. If one were really to take his ludicrous ideas seriously, Broca went on, whole careers, perhaps even lives, would be ruined: “The great importance of craniology has struck anthropologists with such force that many among us have neglected the other parts of our science in order to devote ourselves almost exclusively to the study of skulls.” It was a noble goal, central to science, and far more important than Gratiolet’s nonsensical conclusions about a hat. Broca concluded by noting that with “such data, we hoped to find some information relevant to the intellectual value of the various human races.”169
As an object, the skull had maintained a religious and symbolic weight since the earliest days of humanity: It was the image of death par excellence, the most singular relic of one’s mortal remains. It was the sole bone amid a pile of such bones that could definitively identify remains as belonging to a human. But what Broca’s comments reinforce is how quickly it had also become the preeminent object of scientific discourse and inquiry. In less than one hundred years the skull had become the founding and central document of not just phrenology and craniometry but psychology and anthropology, criminology and psychiatry. For that matter, it was essential to the programs of slavery and segregation, colonialism and imperialism, patriarchy and misogyny. Next to perhaps the Bible itself, the human skull was the inalienable proof of the unchallenged suitability of the white male for dominion over the entire world.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A MEASURE OF FAME
The early 1870s marked a number of important changes for Rokitansky and for Hyrtl, for Paul Broca back in Paris, for the Norwich surgeon Charles Williams—but nothing, as it turned out, lay in store for the head that had once produced the Religio Medici.
In Vienna, long-awaited reforms were under way: Since 1848 Rokitansky had been considered an intellectual leader, and his revolutionary scientific approach seemed to mirror the age. Accordingly, he pushed for educational reforms at all levels of Austrian medicine. He argued that the medical establishment should be severed from its long-standing ties to the emperor and the aristocracy, and that the church should likewise be excluded. He finally achieved these reforms in 1872–1873, effectively liberating medical practice from its centuries-old dependence on aristocratic privilege.
It wasn’t that Rokitansky was immune to the same Romanticism that burned in Hyrtl and Seligmann. While his professional goal had always been (in one historian’s words) to “arouse German medicine from its natural-philosophical dream,” his personal philosophy was more nuanced.170 He had come of age reading Kant (as had been required for medical school when he was a student), and he had never lost that part of his personality that friends referred to as his “poetical side” and he himself called “that bent towards speculation.” For the most part he had been able to keep a line of separation between his empirical studies and his personal faith, though in the English preface to Rokitansky’s manual, the editor noted that it had been necessary to abridge “somewhat the author’s general introduction, partly because, totally unlike the general tendency of the work, it is of too ‘transcendental’ a character to suit the English language or to harmonize with English ideas; but more particularly because it is interwoven with a train of speculative reasoning upon the relation between power and matter, which might, in this country, very possibly give rise to misinterpretation and rebuke.”171
Rokitansky’s colleague Joseph Hyrtl, meanwhile, had retired out of sight. While he had enjoyed early fame with his Handbook of Topographic Anatomy, his life had been filled with more disappointments than Rokitansky’s. A long-running and bitter feud with a rival anatomist had cost him dearly in prestige; he had been on the faculty at the University of Vienna for thirty years, yet was never appointed dean. “Dis
turbed and disappointed,” he had written in 1869, “I withdrew into my professional work, spent my life between my workroom and my lecture hall, became taciturn and therefore disliked by my colleagues, as I still am.” In a city where anatomy was given such prominence, the virtuoso Hyrtl, whose preparations were sought the world over, was never given an adequate workspace either at the hospital or at the university. Since 1854 he had worked out of a building that had been built as a stable and had previously been used as a rifle factory. “Slowly,” he wrote, “I also learned to put up with these conditions. Only he who knows how and where anatomy is attended to here, will be able to understand how difficult it was for me to bear these conditions.”172
The same year Rokitansky’s reforms were finally passed, Hyrtl relocated to Leipzig, claiming his weakening eyesight as his official reason for retirement. There he established a small room and laboratory in a ruin near a cemetery. In his tiny quarters he kept his rarest and most perfect anatomical specimens. In his bedroom, which was barely big enough to admit a bed, the only decoration was his collection of skulls, which adorned the walls and looked down on him while he slept.
Hyrtl had built his collection during the same era as Broca and Morton, but he was fundamentally opposed to craniometry. A devout Catholic, he had come to believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution, but only to a point. He did not believe that the brain was subject to evolution; it was instead, he thought, divinely inserted into the body by the hand of God Himself.
AROUND THE SAME time the Norwich and Norfolk Hospital celebrated its centenary, and as a tribute, Charles Williams—who had been appointed house-surgeon in 1858 and promoted to assistant surgeon in 1869—presented to the hospital a collection of portraits of past board members. A gathering of lithographs, photographs, and paintings, it told the hospital’s hundred-year history through a line of eminent men, each conferring great dignity on the boardroom where their portraits were hung. In addition to past presidents, surgeons, and distinguished benefactors were three portraits of Sir Thomas Browne, the patron saint of Norwich medicine. Hanging next to him was the portrait of Dr. Edward Lubbock, the Norwich physician who had purchased his head in 1840 and left it to the hospital after his death in 1848.
AND LAST, IN Paris, Paul Broca was running into problems with his craniometrics.
In their famous debate in 1861 Gratiolet had been so thoroughly defeated by Broca that at the subsequent meeting he had gone so far as to apologize for having brought up “the little spark that caused a philosophical explosion.” But in a way Gratiolet had won the war, even after losing the battle. Less and less was said in those years about the great heads of famous men. While the hefty brain of Turgenev could always be singled out as proof of genius and brain size, such a metric inevitably produced embarrassments, such as Walt Whitman, the poet of phrenology, whose brain weighed a meager 1,282 grams. Leigh Hunt later commented of John Keats that his “head was a particular puzzle for the phrenologist, being remarkably small in the skull; a singularity he has in common with Lord Byron and Mr. Shelley, none of whose hats I could get on.”173 Most embarrassingly, Franz Joseph Gall’s own brain was found to only weigh 1,198 grams (though this was a transcription error; the actual weight was 1,312—better, but still not great). Whether you judged by hat size, skull volume, or brain weight, great thinkers and artists were inevitably going to crop up whose measures were below average.
Other anomalies appeared: Broca had measured an African brain that weighed a problematic 1,500 grams, over 200 grams more than the “average” African brain was supposed to weigh. One of his students, Paul Topinard, thoughtfully explained this away by pointing out that the man in question had lived his life in Europe. Topinard went on to inquire, “May it not be asked whether the free negro living among Europeans has not a heavier brain than if he had remained in his own country, far removed from great intellectual excitement?”174
But as more and more of these “anomalies” came to light, craniometry had a harder time reconciling them with the general theory. Whereas a phrenologist, as Mark Twain had famously demonstrated, could find some indication of superlative genius on any head, determining the size of a particular brain was a bit more of an objective process (though obviously not entirely so). When it came to truly small-brained geniuses, there was little that could be done by way of fudging the data. Both, it turned out, were self-fulfilling hypotheses, each using the skull as a means to verify what was already believed, but whereas phrenology excelled at specifics, craniometry worked best as a science of averages.
Craniometric Devices, from Paul Topinard’s Anthropology
Small-headed geniuses were a problem, to be sure, although they could conceivably be swept under the rug. But soon enough Broca began to find some even more problematic statistics with regard to certain ethnic groups. The more data he collected, the more apparent it became—even to someone with a knack for unconscious manipulation of data—that certain “inferior” races had disturbingly large heads. In particular, a number of indigenous peoples—Eskimos, Mongolians, and so on—had an average head size greater than that of Europeans. Broca found himself in the unenviable position of reaching conclusions similar to those of Friedrich Tiedemann, whom he had lambasted decades earlier.
Craniometric Devices, from Paul Topinard’s Anthropology
Craniometry’s goal had always been a perfect statistical distribution, with Africans at the low end, indigenous populations of Asia and America slightly above that, and the European male at the top end. But by the early 1870s, Broca could no longer deny that this distribution was a myth.
Still, with his characteristic obtuseness, Broca did not dare admit that other races might be equal in intelligence to whites, as his data and methodology would have demanded. Nor did he abandon craniometry in favor of some other method of proving racial superiority. His attack on Gratiolet had revealed how much of his life he had already invested in the science. And so he did what anyone but a true scientist might have done: He selectively reinterpreted his data so that it would conform to his prejudices: “A table on which races were arranged by order of their cranial capacity would not represent the degrees of their superiority or inferiority, because size represents only one element of the problem. On such a table, Eskimos, Lapps, Malays, Tartars and several other peoples of the Mongolian type would surpass the most civilized people of Europe. A lowly race may therefore have a big brain.”
In other words, the high end of the craniometric distribution was unreliable. But there was no need to dispense with the whole project. “This does not destroy the value of small brain size as a mark of inferiority,” Broca wrote. “The table shows that West African blacks have a cranial capacity about 100 cc less than that of European races. To this figure, we may add the following: Caffirs, Nubians, Tasmanians, Hottentots, Australians. These examples are sufficient to prove that if the volume of the brain does not play a decisive role in the intellectual ranking of races, it nevertheless has a very real importance.”175
Under the weight of its own comprehensiveness, Broca’s craniometry was becoming ever more convoluted in the quest for the justification of racism.
IN 1875, THREE years before his death, Rokitansky entrusted the Haydn skull to his sons, instructing them to turn it over to the Society for the Friends of Music, per Rosenbaum’s and Peter’s wishes. A year earlier Joseph Hyrtl had put his skulls up for sale. He had been in contact with Thomas Hewson Bache of Philadelphia about them for some time. He had already done an extensive series of preparations for Bache on the organs of hearing, but with the acquisition of the Hyrtl skulls Bache’s collection went from being a private collection to what is now the Mütter Museum.
Joseph Hyrtl’s collection of eighty-two skulls (meager compared to Morton’s but still captivating) now occupies an entire wall of the museum’s main gallery. Behind glass, dozens of skulls are arrayed in perfect geometric order, each one accompanied by a three-by-five card that lists nationality, name, and cause of death, with an occas
ional notation of cranial anomaly:
Moravia
Anton Mikschik, Age 17
Shoemaker’s Apprentice
Suicide, because of discovered theft
Magyar (Hungarian) from Transylvania
Ladislaus Pal
Reformist, guerilla, and deserter
Executed by hanging
(bilateral flare of gonial angles)
Russia
Kasimir Ostrowsczynski, Age 30
For crime of grave insubordination, died under the most cruel
scourging
Russia
Andrejew Sokoloff
Skopi (Russian sect that believes in castration)
Died of self-inflicted removal of testicles
(dual left of supra-orbital formation)
Among these names is that of Francisca Seycora, who died at age nineteen of meningitis in the Vienna General Hospital and who is listed as a “famous Viennese prostitute.” However well known Seycora might have been in her day, her fame was ephemeral—if anything, it was a fame passed from client to client, of which no written record now exists. It was certainly not enough to distinguish her from Mikschik, the distraught shoemaker’s apprentice, or Sokoloff, dead from a botched castration. In the end she was just one of many, only another item in Hyrtl’s collection.
Mozart’s fame, of course, was of a different nature altogether; his skull, held aloft from the rest of the collection, was in a glass case and labeled with a line from Horace. Seycora’s bears the inscription “Prominent temporal lines continue onto frontal bones.”
It was an age when sample size and sheer volume meant far more than any single relic and thus an age when Seycora, paradoxically, as one of eighty-two meant more to collectors than did Mozart in his sample size of one. By the second half of the nineteenth century it was already abundantly clear that the heads of great men had no real scientific value. With the decline of phrenology as a viable scientific discipline, the heads of the famous, in their glass cases on velvet cushions, threatened to become once more nothing but elegant, secular relics.
