by Colin Dickey
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SOME LAST PATHETIC QUIBBLING
Craniometry, with its averages and distributions, largely rendered the individual skull scientifically useless. But in his retort to Gratiolet, Broca had perhaps inadvertently heralded the end of the skull as the singular object of study altogether. Gratiolet, in his litany of examples, had drawn on the skull of Descartes, which he argued was not exceptionally large. In his response, Broca had commented, almost as an aside, that “the study of a skull, however complete, merely gives an approximate idea of the volume and above all the weight of the brain.”176 Lord Byron, if Leigh Hunt was to be believed, was a perfect case in point: Even with the second-heaviest brain ever measured, he still had a small hat, and thus his skull would hardly have been a useful indicator of his intelligence. The skull, in other words, was not always the most reliable metric, even in Broca’s mind.
Brains were soon to be the order of the day over skulls, since they held so much more information about the human mind and its secrets. And by the 1860s they could be preserved far better than they could in Gall’s day. The German anatomist Johann Christian Reil had first discovered a way to preserve the brain in alcohol in 1809, though it took a few more decades before the process caught on. Alcohol was not ideal, as it had a difficult time penetrating tissue as dense as the human brain—the external surface of the brain tended to dry out and crack, while the interior turned to mush. But Reil’s alcohol solution offered a much more promising method of studying the minds of the dead than simply referring to their skulls, and over the course of the nineteenth century it was gradually refined as it became more and more frequently used. Finally the preservative properties of formaldehyde were discovered and became the gold standard for wet preservation. Indeed, after Broca’s death in 1880, it was his brain, not his skull, that was preserved and onto which his name was etched.
As brains replaced skulls as the measure of humanity, the legend of Sir Thomas Browne’s skull continued to grow, passing in and out of reality like some half-remembered myth. In January 1886, Mr. C. A. Ward wrote to the long-running Notes and Queries, the scholarly clearinghouse of ephemeral knowledge and odd questions. “In what museum,” he asked, “is the skull of Sir Thomas Browne to be seen, since the desecration of 1840?”177 It was almost as if such a thing couldn’t be real. Surely that kind of grave robbing belonged to some other era.
In the next issue the surgeon Charles Williams replied that Browne’s skull was indeed still to be found in the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital Museum. Williams had been promoted to full surgeon in 1878, upon the death of G. W. W. Frith, the first person to whom Skull George had tried to sell the head. In his reply Williams quoted his favorite passage from Browne’s Urn Burial: “Truly the good knight may say, ‘But who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried? Who hath the oracles of his ashes, or whither they are to be scattered?” Then Williams ended with a flourish, “Since I began to write this note, mirabile dictu, some veritable hair from the head of our great physician has been deposited in my hands.”178
In 1883, twelve years after the centenary, the new Norfolk and Norwich Hospital was opened. The museum was greatly expanded, and Browne found a new home in these enlarged dwellings, though he was still a marginal figure among the calculi and other preparations and was kept company by “a remarkable specimen of the skeleton of a rickety dwarf, executed many years ago in Norwich for a murder.”179 Sir Thomas’s skull remained, almost like the mascot of a rival school held for ransom—the church and the hospital each laying claim to it as symbolic property.
IN 1888 BEETHOVEN’S remains were exhumed for the second time, and the small committee of scientists was given twenty minutes to examine the skull fragments. Though they barely remarked on the missing pieces (still in Seligmann’s possession), their report did make one oddly emphatic point: Even taking into account Wagner’s hatchet job and the subsequent treatment of the skull, one fact was beyond question: Beethoven’s head was ugly. “It is an undeniable fact that Beethoven’s skull agrees in no way with our concepts of beauty and harmony of form,” they wrote in an uncharacteristically strident conclusion. “The hitherto quite pathetic quibbling and fault finding which we have seen from time to time lack any basis in fact.”180
At issue was the forehead, which seemed too low and too sloped back to match the image of the composer with his lion’s mane of hair. As discussed above, Breuning had suggested that because Beethoven’s skull had been segmented and kept in such damp conditions prior to 1863, moisture had caused it to warp. The image of Beethoven in life had already become iconic: wild, disheveled hair, unkempt but with a burning look in his eyes. Not beautiful, perhaps, but a powerful appearance nonetheless. Based on the figure he cut in life, it was generally assumed that his skull would be equally stately, and if it didn’t conform to our notions of what a beautiful skull should look like, if it didn’t seem to fit the mold of all those paintings of Jerome and Mary Magdalene—well, Wagner and his botched autopsy were to blame. The 1888 committee asserted that this was nonsense, though they didn’t mention Breuning by name: “The pronounced slope of the forehead,” they wrote, “cannot be attributed either to prior loosening of the suture lines or post-mortem changes in the bones.”181
Similar speculation had long dogged Browne’s head, which also had a low, sloping forehead hardly becoming a European male of great renown. Some simply believed it could not be his skull. There were those who argued, against all other prevailing evidence, that it was the skull of a woman. And then there was the American surgeon who was shown the skull of Sir Thomas Browne, whereupon he “laughed heartily and replied that for his part he should class it as that of a Peruvian!”182
The inability of these skulls to conform to the notion of what a genius’s head should look like would lead to continual disputes about their authenticity. As with Browne, the gender of Swedenborg’s head had been repeatedly called into question. The sculptor John Flaxman had examined it in Charles Tulk’s phrenological cabinet and declared, “How beautiful the form, how undulating the line here; here’s no deficiency. . . . Why I should almost take it for a female head, were it not for the peculiar character of the forehead.” The phrenologist Anna Fredrika Ehrenborg was even more emphatic when she visited the tomb in 1853. Ehrenborg was a close friend of the famous John Didrik Holm and was widely respected in phrenological circles. “One needs very little knowledge of phrenology,” she later wrote, “to see that the skull could not have belonged to an excellent scientist, who, for 80 years, had preoccupied his brain in mental tasks from the lower and uttermost to the highest and innermost. It looked most like that of a woman, with fine harmonious organs.”183
The doctors who looked at Beethoven’s skull in 1888 had no patience for this type of unfounded speculation and wanted to make one thing clear: As the craniometry wars of polygenism versus monogenism and Broca versus Gratiolet receded into the distant past, it was absolutely clear that the shape of one’s skull was no measure of genius.
THE PATHETIC QUIBBLING was to go on a bit longer. In the early 1890s controversy erupted surrounding the head of Charlotte Corday. Corday was not so much famous as infamous: During the French Revolution, she had come to the Jacobin radical Jean-Paul Marat’s home and stabbed him while he was taking a bath (an image shortly immortalized by the painter Jacques-Louis David). Corday was a noteworthy specimen not because she was a representative of genius but because she was utterly unrepentant about her act, even as she ascended the scaffolding to the guillotine, and was a virgin, a fact conclusively proven by a rather barbarous autopsy.184
In the inaugural issue of L’Anthropologie, Paul Topinard, Paul Broca’s talented student and inheritor of his methods, published a craniometric analysis of Charlotte Corday’s skull, which had been kept by Napoleon Bonaparte’s descendents since 1815. “The skull, before my eyes,” he wrote, “is yellow like dirty ivory; it is shiny, smooth, as, in a word, those skulls that have been neither buried in the b
osom of the earth, nor exposed to the open air, but which have been prepared by maceration, then carefully placed and kept for a long time in a drawer of a cupboard, sheltered from atmospheric vicissitudes.” While he offered a detailed analysis of the skull, he wasn’t out to prove anything about it— no attempt was made to demonstrate any particular facet of Corday’s character through her head. “Our project is not to describe the skull as if it were that of a known person,” he explained, “with the objective of comparing craniological characteristics with the moral characteristics historically attributed to this person. We merely wish to take the opportunity for a study which could be carried out on any other skull.”185 Craniometry had reached the point where it recognized that individual skulls were useless for scientific study and could have meaning only in large samples.
But the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso was aghast at the sloppiness of Topinard’s thinking. Of course, he argued, one could make connections between skull shape and the subject’s moral characteristics. Lombroso had discovered this revelation some twenty years earlier while working on the notorious criminal Vihella: “At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal—an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals.” This animalistic tendency that gives rise to criminal behavior, Lombroso asserted, was particularly problematic in women: “If female born criminals are fewer in number than the males, they are often much more ferocious.” Lombroso’s explanation was simple: Atavistic tendencies in women are normally held in check by “piety, maternity, want of passion, sexual coldness, by weakness and in undeveloped intelligence.”186 But when these checks are absent, the inherent criminality of woman is unleashed.
Corday was a prime specimen for Lombroso, since her virginity and lack of repentance seemed completely to exemplify his theories. “Not even the purest political crime, that which springs from passion, is exempt from the law which we have laid down,” he wrote in The Female Offender. “In the skull of Charlotte Corday herself, after a rapid inspection, I affirmed the presence of an extra-ordinary number of anomalies,” Lombroso proclaimed, singling out “Topinard’s very confused monograph” for the inability to see what was plainly obvious.187 Lombroso argued that had Corday been married and raised children, as she ought to have done, she would never have become an assassin. It took some work to make Topinard seem enlightened—Topinard who, not much earlier, had argued that African brains might grow larger in the intellectually exciting climate of Europe. But Lombroso’s claims were yet one more version of the story that stretched as far back as Gall and even earlier: Biology is destiny, and it can and should be used to maintain social, sexual, and racial hierarchies.
Such an argument was anathema to Rokitansky, who had presided over massive changes in the medical industry and been responsible for countless breakthroughs and advances—today half-a-dozen conditions are named after him. Rokitansky had hoped that this age of scientific discovery would bring with it an equal advance in freedom and progress. And in 1848 the brief and intense flowering of democratic movements throughout Europe seemed to promise such great things.
But in the years since, the august doctor had seen the high tide ebb. Rokitansky believed firmly that all animal life was driven by the same “protoplasmic hunger” that led to a constant war of all against all in the animal kingdom, and that humanity alone was capable of transcending this. But humanity had proved, time and time again, unwilling or unable to do so, and when Rokitansky looked around him he largely saw the squandering of a great legacy. By way of a valediction to future generations of scientists, Rokitansky summed up his life of achievements with the phrase “Sorrow is knowledge,” a quotation from the heavy-brained, small-hatted poet, Lord Byron.
ROMEO SELIGMANN DIED in 1892, and his vast collection of treasures passed on to his son Albert. Albert, who was born in 1862, grew up not so much in a house as in a museum. “My elderly father,” he wrote in his memoirs, “even though he loved me, was for me primarily an authority figure whose presence was enough to dampen my childish doings. I hardly saw him except for meals and then only through the open door of his study working in mysterious candle light among tomes, papers and skulls.”188 Albert, who would go on to be both a painter and an art collector, inherited his father’s “Goethiana,” the expansive collection of Goethe treasures. Among this invaluable art were two small zinc boxes in which were some small pieces of bone. They looked like they might be from someone’s skull, but it was not clear to Albert where they had come from or what their significance was.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
HOMO RENAISSANCUS
By the end of the nineteenth century Sir Thomas Browne’s skull had sat for over fifty years in its case in the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital Museum and had presided over enormous changes. “Gnawed” from the ground in the name of phrenology, it had seen that so-called New Science pass into nothing but a sideshow, just as it had stood mute when the great men of science had first changed the world and then retired and died. While it stood steadfast, one of Joseph Hyrtl’s former students, a young doctor named Sigmund Freud, began fundamentally to alter the study of the mind. By the time Freud was done, hardly any vestige of Gall’s legacy would remain.
In the 1890s Haydn’s skull was given to the Society for the Friends of Music, and shortly thereafter Mozart’s skull would find its way to the Mozarteum. Still unburied, these two were at least given some respect, which their owners certainly deserved. But Sir Thomas’s head remained sorely out of place amid the kidney stones, beside the rickety, murderous dwarf. Finally, in 1893, the clergy at St. Peter Mancroft decided to do something about it.
That year the vicar of the church, Reverend Pelham Burn, who had gone to Oxford (Browne’s alma mater) and had himself been on the hospital’s board of management for a time, was traveling in London when a friend pointed out the disgraceful treatment of Browne’s skull. The vicar’s friend was especially animated about how poorly the situation reflected on the church, and he succeeded in goading Burn into taking some kind of action. Given his association with the hospital, Burn hoped his opinion would hold some weight, and so he wrote a lengthy request to the board. He argued that the skull’s theft had been an act of wanton sacrilege, something the board members—themselves, he was sure, good Christian men— should find disturbing. Furthermore, Burn pointed out what had become increasingly clear in the fifty years since the theft had taken place: that Browne’s skull held no scientific interest, that it was a perfectly ordinary skull with nothing to distinguish it. Considering all this, the vicar asked in conclusion, would the board consent to returning the skull so that Browne’s head might be reunited with the rest of his remains and his soul allowed to repose in peace?
The hospital board spent a long time considering the request and then sent back its reply. Its decision was unanimous: absolutely not. After a “prolonged and careful consideration of all the circumstances pertaining to the request,” the board gave the following reasons:
That as there is no legal title to, or property in, any such relic, so there can be no question that this and all other specimens in the Hospital Museum belong inalienably to the Governors. That no instance is known of such a claim for restitution having been made after nearly half a century on any museum, and were the Governors to yield to this request they might be unable to resist similar claims. That the presence in a museum of such a relic, reverently preserved and protected, cannot be viewed as merely an object of idle curiosity; rather it will usefully serve to direct attention to, and remind visitors of, the works of the great scholar and physician.189
The hospital board’s response sums up the status of Browne’s skull at the dawn of a new century. The board provided no real reason for keeping the skull other than some rather pathetic legal quibbling and a claim that its usefulness lay in its ability to remind people of Browne. But the board members
saw no legal reason to give it back, so this thin rationale carried the day. And thus the skull hung in a state of limbo, somehow still valuable even as it had lost its scientific usefulness.
THUS REBUFFED, PELHAM Burn took the issue back to the vestry, who decided by a vote of eight to six to let the matter rest.
And that would have seemed to be the end of it—at least as far as the skull was concerned, though there were other loose ends surrounding Browne and the “desecration of 1840.” There was still the question of the missing coffin plate, the one with the inscription about turning lead to gold that had been broken in half in 1840. It had been missing for decades.
Charles Williams took it upon himself to try to locate it. No one had been able to figure out when it had disappeared, or where, but Williams knew where to start: Robert Fitch, the same Fitch who had reported on the skull when it had first been discovered. Fitch was now ninety-one years old but still an active member of the church. And, as everyone knew, he still had some rubbings he had done of the plaque. Williams thought he might have a lead on where the plaque had ended up.
When the good doctor asked him about it, Fitch was terse. The old man stated only that he had returned it to George Potter, the sexton at the time, who had probably locked it away in some church chest somewhere. Williams returned to Burn, and the two of them decided to search the church premises in an effort to find it. But nothing came of the search.
