Cranioklepty

by Colin Dickey

  Hultkrantz’s paper was delivered as part of the jubilee celebration surrounding the unveiling of Swedenborg’s granite sarcophagus and was extremely well received by the Royal Academy of Sciences. Thus the matter seemed to be closed.

  In London, members of the Swedenborg Society, perhaps out of a desire for closure, still felt a need to resolve Rutherford’s claims. His account seemed so far-fetched, so full of half remembrances and gaps, that it was dubious in the extreme. But in February 1909 a representative of the society sought him out, just to be sure they had gotten the whole story and could dispel any nagging doubts. Rutherford was delighted that someone was finally taking an interest in his tale. As his letter had promised, he was all too willing to assist when the occasion arose, and he offered to track down the “very veracious old gentleman,” a herbalist and antiquarian, who had claimed to have the skull and see what he could find out. Rutherford spent the spring and part of the summer in pursuit of the skull. The antiquarian had long since died, but Rutherford was able to track down his children. Although most of these leads turned out to be dead ends, he did succeed finally in finding one descendant who knew what had happened to the old man’s skull collection and who gave Rutherford the name of the inheritor of the skulls.

  Shortly thereafter Rutherford sent a letter to the Swedenborg Society. He had found the antiquarian’s collection, he wrote, and while the labels identifying each individual skull had long been lost, he believed he knew which one had been Swedenborg’s. Because it was a particularly noteworthy skull, it had been kept in good condition, and besides, someone had pricked a number of dots into the bone that spelled out the letters “E. S’Borg.”

  Rutherford’s tale was becoming increasingly bizarre, but perhaps he was actually on to something. In August another representative of the Swedenborg Society came to Rutherford to see the skull he had uncovered. In the meantime, though, Rutherford had moved—since supposedly discovering the skull he had been institutionalized in an insane asylum. It’s not clear what Rutherford suffered from, only that he was described as having a “periodical mental disease” and was at times “almost completely normal.”216 Regardless, his mental condition did not bode well for his tale. Unsure what to make of this, the Swedenborg Society representative asked to see the skull, but Rutherford didn’t have it, and he refused, under any condition, to divulge the name of the gentleman who did have it or to reveal his location. He instead told the representative that if he wanted to see the skull Rutherford would have to travel with him to London, in the company of two wardens, and locate it himself. Exasperated, the Swedenborgian consulted Rutherford’s physician as to his condition. The doctor found the whole thing dubious; he doubted there even was a skull and thought that Rutherford’s strategy was only to get himself freed from the asylum.

  The story turned out to have been a complete waste of time. In high-profile murder cases, there are always false confessions by those seeking publicity and attention, and Rutherford’s story appeared to be something similar—Swedenborg’s was by then a high enough profile that it was only a matter of time before a crazy like Rutherford tried to write himself into the philosopher’s story.

  The matter thus seemingly resolved, the Swedenborg Society followed the example of the Royal Academy of Science in moving on. But Rutherford, motivated by whatever unknown reason, did not. Eventually released from the asylum, he returned to London and once more tracked down the skull. In October 1911 he sent another letter, claiming that he now had the skull and inquiring again whether Hultkrantz or anyone else would be interested in analyzing it.

  Patiently Hultkrantz responded, noting that since there was now at least an actual skull, it was “most correct to probe quite without bias the import of Mr. R.’s suggestion and its actual basis.”217 He agreed to take a look at the skull Rutherford possessed, but Rutherford refused to send it, perhaps fearing that Hultkrantz would not return it. Instead he sent a lengthy written description of the skull. There was nothing Hultkrantz could do with just a description of a specimen he had never seen, so Rutherford agreed to send tracings and some photographs. These were hardly sufficient either. Finally Rutherford sent a cast of the skull, but under no conditions would he send the thing itself. Hultkrantz would just have to make do with the documentation and the cast.

  Hultkrantz’s second monograph, “Additional Note on the Mortal Remains of Emanuel Swedenborg,” is a good deal shorter than the first, reflecting his increasing impatience with the sometimes insane “Mr. R.” Rutherford offered two indications that might aid Hultkrantz in identifying the skull. First, there was a scar on the right temple “that might have been caused by a sabre or cutlass and that should form a mark of identification if it could be proved that he had received such in his lifetime.”218 And second, there were the pinpricks, the dots that spelled out “E. S’borg.”

  Hultkrantz was unimpressed with both of these: “They were not sufficiently well produced on the photos and the cast to enable us to form a decided opinion as to their nature and origin.” Hultkrantz added that even if the scar was genuine and had not been made postmortem, that would argue against the skull being Swedenborg’s, since no record of such an injury existed in his journals or biographies. And as Delambre had with Descartes’s skull, Hultkrantz found the name written on the skull of no importance at all: “Even if there were a quite distinct, unabridged name instead of the rather dubious ‘tiny dots,’ it would be of no consequence since we do not know at all who has written it, at what time, and for what reasons.”219

  Without any reliable positive indications of the skull’s owner, Hultkrantz turned to the skull itself. Its chief characteristic was that it was scaphocephalic, a pathological deformity that was somewhat rare. The main features were “a ridge-like vertex and (at least in the majority of the cases) a more or less complete fusion of the parietal bones with an alteration of the growth of the skull, so that it becomes extraordinarily long and narrow, often with an overhanging front and a prolonged back of the head.”220 In other words, this long, narrow skull gave the head a pronounced shape that was not likely to have gone unnoticed or unremarked on by Swedenborg’s contemporaries. Hultkrantz thought it extremely doubtful that so prominently deformed a skull could belong to the great philosopher and scientist. Not only would it have been noticed by his contemporaries and commented on somewhere in some document, it was unlikely in the extreme that great creativity or intelligence could flower in such a deformed head.

  The “Swansea” skull.

  Hultkrantz happened to have access to another scaphocephalic skull from the Anatomical Institute of Uppsala, belonging to a tinsmith who had suffered from dementia and died poor. In addition, a death mask had been made of this individual, owing to the peculiar shape of his head. Based on this cast, Hultkrantz claimed, scaphocephaly indicated an abject physical appearance and a high degree of mental deficiency; thus he felt confident in ruling out the scaphocephalic skull from Rutherford as even remotely likely to have belonged to Swedenborg.

  Finally there was a question of gender. When John Flaxman had examined the Swedenborg skull, then in Charles Tulk’s phrenological cabinet, he had stated, “Why I should almost take it for a female head, were it not for the peculiar character of the forehead.” Hultkrantz took this as one more piece of corroborating evidence: “Everyone who is acquainted with the sexual differences of human crania must admit that this skull is of a decided masculine type, and that if it in any point at all approaches the female type, it is just in regard to the forehead!”221 Once again it seemed impossible that the skull that had been in Tulk’s phrenological cabinet was the same as Rutherford’s.

  Hultkrantz ended, perhaps now long tired of Rutherford’s antics, with a fairly dismissive note: “With regard to the considerable value that a collector of curios may attach to such a rarity as a skull of Emanuel Swedenborg, I should be very much surprised if not more than one ‘genuine’ skull of the great mystic should make its appearance in the future. Still, judging f
rom the present case, it will probably be fairly awkward to find any real proofs countervailing those on which the opinion expressed in my account is based.”222

  Hultkrantz had now publicly disproven Rutherford twice, this time in far more detail. He had the weight of science behind him, and Rutherford, in addition to being a sometime lunatic, had only the word of a long-dead antiquarian and some dots that seemed to spell out a name.

  HOWEVER, RUTHERFORD, STUBBORN to the end, refused to concede. Instead he realized only that he could not count on the scientific establishment for support. He took matters into his own hands, publishing a note in the local East London Observer titled “A Swedenborg Mystery: The Rival Skulls,” which compared the heads and laid out his admittedly thin reasoning for the importance of the skull in his possession. In response to Hultkrantz’s argument about scaphocephaly, one of the editors of the journal feebly noted that there “is absolutely no evidence that this cranial deformity (scaphocephaly) is accompanied with any type of mental or moral development. The two I have known during life were essentially commonplace persons.”223

  If he had hoped to draw Hultkrantz back into the dispute once more, it didn’t work. Nothing else was forthcoming from Sweden about Rutherford and his skull. He did, however, manage to convince at least one person, selling it to one William A. Williams on the premise that it was the authentic head of Emanuel Swedenborg. Williams was a phrenologist in the old mold, arguing not just for the relatively uncontroversial localization aspects of Gall’s theory, but also for the highly dubious aspects of cranioscopy—not long before buying the head from Rutherford he had argued that “the skull is as much a living tissue as the brain,” and thus that accurate readings of the mind’s activities could be traced through the skull.224 Williams was also a student of Swedenborg and understood phrenology as the first science to be developed since the Second Coming that Swedenborg had identified in 1758.

  And so the matter might have ended—the true skull in Sweden with the body, Rutherford’s diseased head in the possession of a quack phrenologist, and all best left forgotten—if not for a young Swede named Folke Henschen, living in London studying anthropology, who read Rutherford’s article in the East London Observer and took notice.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE RUINED BRIDGES TO THE PAST

  By 1922 St. Peter Mancroft had a new vicar, Reverend F. J. Meyrick, and among his named duties he inherited the task of endlessly badgering the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital Museum for the return of a certain skull. But where Pelham Burn had had to rely on appeals to decency and common sense, Meyrick had the help of a medical celebrity. The Canadian physician Sir William Osler had pioneered the practice of residencies for medical students and had helped to establish Johns Hopkins in Baltimore as a preeminent hospital when he had become chief physician in 1889. As a sixteen-year-old theology student at Trinity University in Toronto, Osler had fallen in love with Browne’s work—Religio Medici was the second book he had ever bought, and it would end up buried with him. It was Browne’s book that convinced him to become a doctor; he found it to be “full of counsels of perfection which appeal to the mind of youth, still plastic and unhardened by contact with the world.”225

  Osler had first visited Browne’s skull in 1873. To be in the presence of his idol stirred him deeply; as he wrote to a friend, “Say what people will about pictures, emblems, relics & the like, they have been and ever will be the most delightful & I think reasonable means of raising the thoughts to higher and holier hopes.”226 In 1902 Osler had donated a glass case to hold the skull of his idol, the base of which was inscribed with the Norwich doctor’s thoughts on the body and death: “At my death I mean to take a total adieu of the world, not caring for a monument, history or epitaph, not so much as the bare memory of my name to be found anywhere but in the universal register of God.”

  But only a few years later Osler had changed his mind about the fate of Browne’s bones. In an address on Browne in 1906, he noted that the “tender sympathy with the poor relics of humanity which Browne expresses so beautifully . . . has not been meted out to his own.” Osler began to use his fame to influence the hospital board, asking it to reconsider its 1893 decision in response to Pelham Burn.

  That year the board agreed unanimously that the skull, should eventually be returned, provided that members of the board were present when the grave was opened and that the skull would not be displayed by the church as a “relic” before it went back into the ground. In retrospect, these do not seem particularly complicated conditions, but the negotiations between the hospital and church over Browne’s skull would take another sixteen years. Osler (who sometimes published under the pseudonym “Egerton Yorrick Davis”) died in 1919, with the repatriation of Browne still unresolved, the actual reinterment taking place finally in 1922.

  As with other notable skulls, there was a rush to take some final measurements of Browne’s. Sir Anthony Keith was asked to take measurements of the skull, supervise the making of casts, and determine its authenticity. A prominent anthropologist, Sir Anthony had lately become something of a one-man jury when it came to cranial mysteries. Around the same time he had been asked to identify the remains of a small skeleton found buried in a shallow grave in Rosherville Gardens. It was originally thought to have been that of a chimpanzee or other primate, but when Keith pronounced the remains to be human, an inquiry was launched on “suspicion that here was evidence of some dark crime of bygone years.” Only by chance was the matter mentioned to one of Keith’s colleagues, who suddenly recalled a display in the gardens some seventy years earlier that had included a Peruvian mummy.227

  Keith had been the director of the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons since 1894, but his reputation had been greatly enhanced in the previous ten years as the result of a series of events that became known as the “Piltdown Affair.”228

  ARCHAEOLOGY AND PALEONTOLOGY had changed fundamentally. The notion of a single Great Flood, as described in Genesis, had long given way to a slowly forming picture of epochs and eras, Ice Ages and extinctions, rising out of gravel beds and bits of bone. As the fossil record began to yield its story, the missing links that would establish the evolution of apes to humans became of crucial importance. Hominoid remains such as the Neanderthal Pithecanthropus erectus (“Java Man”) had begun to appear in the previous decades, but it was not yet clear whether they were the direct ancestors of Homo sapiens or if both races had descended from an as yet undetermined common ancestor. The meaning of these bones remained tantalizingly elusive; they were what Sir Arthur Keith called the pieces of a “ruined bridge” that “connected the kingdom of man with the rest of the animal world.”229

  In 1912 the lawyer and amateur geologist Charles Dawson found a fossil that seemed to shed light on the question. Discovered in Piltdown, England, the find consisted of multiple fragments of a hominoid skull—notably, the jaw pieces resembled those of an ape while the brain case was almost as large as that of a human. Given the genus name Eoanthropus (“man of the dawn”), the Piltdown skull changed how anthropologists had come to view human evolution.

  First, though, the skull had to be put together. Only large fragments of the cranial case and some smaller jaw fragments were extant, so Dawson’s friend Arthur Woodward, the keeper of geology at the British Museum, put together a complete reconstruction of what the head might have looked like. There was nothing unusual in this—complete specimens were rarely found—but it did mean that one had to reconstruct the skull based on these fragments and that some amount of imagination was involved. The front of the jaw was missing, so Woodward had to extrapolate from ape anatomy, building a jutting mandible and pronounced lower canines.

  In December 1912 Sir Arthur Keith and a dozen other scientists gathered to discuss the Piltdown skull and argue over its significance. While Woodward was cautious about the meaning of the find, Keith led a contingency of scientists who believed the elusive common ancestor to both human and Neanderthal had been foun
d. Claiming that Dawson and Woodward were not aware of the significance of what they had uncovered, Keith took issue with Woodward’s reconstruction of the skull fragments. He proposed another version of the Piltdown remains, one in which the brain case was significantly larger and the jaw closer to that of modern humans. The missing link that scientists the world over had been searching for, he believed, had been found in England.

  This was the other major reason the Piltdown Man was important. In these years before World War I, nationalism was at its height and anthropology had its own share of chauvinistic rivalries. Various countries were vying for the claim to be the cradle of civilization. In 1907 the so-called Heidelburg Man became a coveted trophy for Germany, and a few years later the paleontologist Florentino Ameghino had claimed that humanity’s earliest ancestors were to be found in his home country of Argentina. Anthropologists had gone from asserting that their respective cultures were the height of civilization to bragging that they held the birth of civilization.

  Battles continued to rage between Keith and others over Piltdown for a decade. To settle the question of the skull’s reconstruction, Keith’s colleagues broke a skull into pieces and challenged him to reconstruct it, which he was able to do flawlessly. As the debate attracted worldwide attention, Keith’s fame continued to rise, and when it was announced that he would investigate the head of Sir Thomas Browne, it was big news indeed.

  AS IT HAPPENED, Keith didn’t have the time to carry out the investigation himself, so it fell instead to Miss Miriam Tildesley. Like Tandler with Haydn and Hultkrantz with Swedenborg, Tildesley made extensive, detailed comparisons of known portraits and other extant data relevant to Browne. The skull’s authenticity was much clearer because it had had fewer owners, but again Tildesley relied primarily on written documents and testimony—ultimately the provenance of the skull was nothing more than the collected stories of Robert Fitch, Skull George Potter, and Charles Williams.