Given the filthy conditions of early dissecting rooms and the distasteful activities that went on there, it can be no coincidence that doctors went to considerable lengths to ensure their own bodies would not be dissected after death. The public abhorred dissection, which they saw as a cruel, disrespectful and invariably unjust punishment that destroyed body and soul, and therefore constituted ‘a fate worse than death’. Anatomists were popularly portrayed as indecent, callous, dirty and foul-mouthed. One doctor noted in 1840 that ‘drinking smoking and brawling were the very rational [his emphasis] occupations of the dissecting room’, which implies that the work could be objectionable even if the ‘repulsive objects’ of study were treated as little more than scientific specimens.
Medical specimens, polished and jarred, arose out of these grimy workplaces to start a new life on the museum shelf. Collectors placed some value on the quality of the transformation from putrid corpse to gleaming bone. Craniologists often described their collections in glowing terms as ‘splendid’, ‘fine’ and ‘superb’. To Joseph Hyrtl, his skull collection was a thing of beauty: ‘perfect snowy-white, teeth complete, inferior maxilla moveable, with elastic wires. Such a collection will never again be brought together.’ The techniques of the transformation – from the disarray of a disembowelled body to the neatly stacked and bottled artefacts that could be described as beautiful – received considerable critical attention. The finest skulls were creamy white, but not brittle, and various methods circulated as to the best way to clean people’s heads.
The sixteenth-century anatomist Andreas Vesalius had advised using lime and boiling water to take the flesh off human bones without damaging them, but there were other options. The simplest way was to leave a corpse sealed in water for weeks, changing the liquid periodically, but this method tended to leave the bones greasy and discoloured, so collectors used alum water or pearl ash to achieve the desired ‘fine, white, ivory complexion’. A collector might simply bury the corpse and wait for it to decompose, or even use insects to clean the bones. Richard Harlan, an anatomist in Philadelphia who mentored George Morton, claimed that tadpoles, with their delicate ‘suction mouths’, produced beautiful skeletons. He also suggested putting a body near an ants’ nest, because ‘these industrious operatives rapidly remove the flesh from the bones’. The French naturalist Georges Cuvier, writing at the turn of the nineteenth century, advised travellers to boil heads in soda or caustic potash to clean the bones or, if possible, use a solution of corrosive sublimate to preserve the flesh, adding that should any sailor oppose ‘those operations which seem barbarous to their eyes … it is the duty of the chiefs, in such an expedition which has as its purpose the advancement of science, that they allow themselves to be guided by reason only and that they inspire it to their crews’.
Joseph Barnard Davis wrote down his thoughts on the topic in an exercise book under the title ‘Notes on the preparation of Crania in hot climates, and chiefly applicable to India’. Collectors should remove the ‘soft parts from the head whilst fresh’, then macerate them in a large body of cold water, ideally a beer barrel with a drain. The brain should be broken down and removed through the foramen magnum beforehand, both to ‘diminish the intolerable fetor’ and to improve the ‘beauty and whiteness of the preparation’. The French anthropologist Paul Broca was more offhand when he explained, in 1865, that ‘[o]ne scrapes bones, puts them in to soak, then exposes them to fresh air, and, in a short time they become superb and without odour’, as though the transformation took place with magical effect.
On the contrary, as Barnard Davis’s note suggests, taking the bones out of people’s heads was hardly pleasant. Collectors complained of the ‘most abominable stench’ from boiling down corpses. The physical demands of decapitation could also be considerable. It was hard work. One tubercular Scottish doctor who worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company in British Columbia and who wanted to make his mark on science, dug up the grave of a local chief, but found the task of beheading the corpse so great that he suffered a haemorrhage. The ground was splattered with blood, not from the chief, who had been dead for three years, but from the doctor’s own lungs. He battled on regardless and brought away his prize, which he promptly boxed up and sent to a colleague in Britain.
Joseph Rosenbaum, the Viennese phrenologist who stole Haydn’s head, knew the discomforts of cleaning skulls from personal experience. In October 1808, he had practised his anatomical skills on a young Viennese actress, Elizabeth Roose, who had died during childbirth. Rosenbaum may well have met Roose – he certainly admired her talents as an actress – but this did not weaken his resolve. If anything, it made him more determined: brilliant skulls were the only ones worth the risk. And so, ten days after Roose’s death, at eight o’clock in the evening, Rosenbaum, his friend Johann Peter and the local gravedigger met in the cemetery and dug her out. It took two hours to unearth the coffin, prise it open and remove her head. ‘The foul smell beggars all description,’ Rosenbaum noted in his diary, ‘and we were actually concerned for the gravedigger’s life. She had begun to decompose so badly.’
The next day, Rosenbaum took the actress’s rancid head to Peter’s house, hidden under his coat, and put it in a jar of water to try and suppress the smell. Roose’s flesh was swollen, greenish-black and yellow, and her bloated mouth hung open, revealing her teeth. Peter paid a doctor to excise the actress’s flesh and her brain, which were dumped into a bucket and buried in the garden while the two friends burnt incense furiously to try and disguise the stench. Then they put her skull and lower jaw into limewater and kept it in the garden for four months, by which time it was turning ‘spotted, wild and greenish’ and growing algae. This was a mistake. They had left the bones soaking for too long, making them dry and brittle. Next time, when they were dealing Haydn’s head, which really mattered, they would be sure to employ professionals at every stage.
The professionals might give you a better product, but their dealings were no less deplorable. Most skull collectors, even the doctors who requisitioned corpses from hospital morgues, were used to working in the shadows, stealing and smuggling human bodies illegally. This, in itself, could influence their techniques. Joseph Barnard Davis, who was a practising doctor, formulated a method for extracting the skull from a corpse without damaging its external appearance, precisely so as to escape detection. He advocated cutting down the side of the head, behind the ear, and peeling back the skin of the face. The cranial bone could then be extracted through this incision and a replacement skull inserted to disguise the theft of the original. Finally, the skin of the face could be carefully replaced and the wound neatly stitched up, leaving the casual observer none the wiser. Barnard Davis once described this procedure to an acquaintance in Tasmania. He boasted: ‘Were I myself in the colony I could with very little trouble abstract skulls from dead bodies without defacing them at all, and could instruct any medical gentleman to do this.’ ‘Difficulties,’ he later asserted, ‘always stand in the way and may always be overcome.’
These ‘difficulties’ no doubt related to the fact that such meddling was illegal, invariably practised without permission from the dead person’s next of kin, and would almost certainly cause a public scandal if discovered. At least one physician tried to follow Barnard Davis’s instructions, thirteen years later, with disastrous results. The doctor was William Crowther, a surgeon in Tasmania, who let himself into the Hobart General Hospital on the night of Friday, 5 March 1869. Crowther, an honorary medical officer at the hospital, was accompanied by his son and apprentice, Bingham Crowther. The two men went to the hospital dissecting room, where the corpse of an elderly man had been examined and remained laid out on the bench. Working quietly, by candlelight, Crowther took a knife, cut out the man’s skull and carried it to the hospital’s dead house. In the dead house, another body awaited them. This was the real reason for their nocturnal activities: the body of a Tasmanian native, named William Lanney, was being stored there before his burial. Crowther imme
diately set to work on Lanney’s body.
Just as Barnard Davis had described, Crowther made an incision down the side of Lanney’s face behind his right ear; then he peeled back the skin and pulled out Lanney’s skull. He inserted, in its place, the cranium he had taken from the elderly white man in the dissecting room, before replacing the flesh of Lanney’s face. Then Crowther stitched up his incision and disappeared into the night with the Tasmanian man’s skull.
Joseph Barnard Davis might have had reason to criticize Crowther’s technique, because his actions were quickly discovered, and they led to the further desecration of William Lanney’s body. The hospital authorities were determined to prevent the thief from coming back for more, so they ordered the resident surgeon to cut off Lanney’s hands and feet. The next day Lanney was given a public burial, but it was little more than an act for public appearances, because after dark his grave was robbed of its contents and Lanney’s mutilated body was taken back to the hospital again. The following day, the resident surgeon worked there in a back room removing the remaining bones from Lanney’s corpse and cleaning them.
Meanwhile, the grave robbers had been careless. Lanney’s empty coffin had been left poking out of the ground, the surrounding soil was bloody, and the white man’s skull had been discarded nearby. Before long, the local newspapers were ablaze with accusations of sinister practices at the hospital. Questions were asked about the morality of the scientific enterprise. Had the settler-colonists of Tasmania, that remote penal colony, degenerated into barbarism to become ‘murderers, and something worse’?
It was Lanney’s own supposed ‘savagery’ that made his bones so valuable in the first place. He was thought to be the last ‘pure-bred’ Tasmanian man in the world, but Lanney’s life had little in common with the savage instincts he was meant to embody. He had grown up in an orphanage, lived in a government-run Aboriginal camp, and earned his living on whaling ships. No matter, the facts of Lanney’s life were incidental to his status in the eyes of the scientific community and much of the popular press. Like Ishi, and countless others, he could not escape his classification as a ‘primitive’ man. Tasmanians had the unfortunate distinction of being labelled the most archaic of all surviving races, and were thought to be on the verge of extinction. All Tasmanian bones were valuable, but, as the last man of his race, Lanney’s death transformed his bones into prized scientific specimens, and none was more precious than his skull.
Lanney’s cranium was held hostage in the hunt for a theory of race. Crowther had promised it to the Royal College of Surgeons in London, but the authorities at the hospital in Hobart had offered it to the Tasmanian Royal Society. When the Colonial Secretary ordered an inquiry into events at the hospital, Crowther recoiled from the hostile publicity and kept hold of Lanney’s skull. Today, the fate of most of Lanney’s bones remains a mystery. One of Crowther’s colleagues had a tobacco pouch made out of a portion of his skin, and his ears, nose and a part of his arm ended up in scientific collections. His hands and feet were found later at the Royal Society of Tasmania.
Lanney had been transformed from a person into a series of pseudo-scientific products (it is hard to credit the scientific value of a tobacco pouch), and the public response to the episode illustrated the tensions inherent in the scientific enterprise. On the one hand, there was universal outrage at the illegal desecration of an innocent dead man by medical professionals, which constituted no less than a stain on the national character. On the other hand, the incident raised questions as to why the Royal Society of Tasmania had not previously taken ‘steps … in the interests of science to secure a perfect skeleton of a male Tasmanian aboriginal’ for the local museum. Just like those gleaming collections of skulls, the methods may have been deplorable, but the results could be admirable.
It was the manner of Lanney’s dissection, not his perceived value to science, that was criticized. The process – the unscrupulous doctors working in dark and disgusting dissecting rooms – was insufferable, but the products were enviable. Some medical specimens, particularly human skulls, were almost works of art. The medical historian Samuel J.M.M. Alberti has likened medical museums to an art gallery, displaying the ‘crafted material’ that emerged from the dissecting room thanks to the creative talents of generations of anatomists and medical technicians working there. Good medical ‘preparations’, then as now, could take many hours of work, as well as patience and skill. The professionals might not have worked in particularly salubrious surroundings, but when the public gaze was politely averted, as it usually was, they took pride in their achievements, refined their techniques and guarded their secrets. There was a magic to making organic matter defy decay.
Preparation of the nerves within the orbit, from The Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, 1836.
In the process of transforming a person into a specimen, anatomists inscribed their own individuality into their work. They all had their favourite tools and their own style. Thomas Pole, a surgeon working in London in the early 1800s, used dried peas, which expanded when soaked in water, to ‘gently’ separate the bones of the human skull, and brass tea-chest hinges to join the top of the cranium. Anatomists often used carpentry and blacksmith’s tools. Bones could be joined with wires, tinplates or saddler’s leather; wet specimens were suspended in jars using whalebone, hair or dentist’s silk. Since the best preparations disguised the method of their manufacture, there was skill, and value, to the fiddly work of putting them together in the first place. They were judged by the aesthetic rules of the day, just like a work of art. Pole stated that bones should not ‘acquire a disagreeable blackness’ associated with the impurities of city life, or lose ‘one of the greatest ornaments of a skeleton – a fine, white, ivory complexion’. He might as well have been talking about the skin of a beautiful studio model as about the bones laid out on his work bench. Anatomists invested considerable emotional labour in their preparations – so much so that when museum specimens were damaged it could cause acute distress.
Anatomists became known for their techniques, and new techniques brought increasingly impressive results. Joseph Swan, a Victorian surgeon from Lincoln, developed a method for drying parts of the body which preserved the smallest networks of nerves in the hands and face. He made ‘sculptures’ which show the ‘superficial nerves and arteries of the face and neck’. Some of the most striking results came from ‘corrosion casts’, where the surrounding flesh and organs were corroded away, leaving only an impression of the remaining blood vessels. This method was deemed ‘the most elegant of all, requiring great care’. They were fragile, and were often kept in special vitrines; some people criticized them as display for its own sake. It was acceptable for the craftsman to take pride in his trade, but to elevate the human body to a work of art crossed the boundaries of taste.
The same has been said of Body Worlds, Gunther von Hagens’ exhibition of plastinated human bodies, which has been seen by more than 30 million visitors worldwide. The bodies have been turned into dry, hard, clean, odourless artefacts that can be touched safely, by a process that replaces water and fat in the body with plastics. The success of von Hagens’ show is partly because the cadavers are arranged in lifelike positions. Von Hagens notes that ‘the aesthetic pose helps to dispel disgust’ and believes that fewer people would come to see a more didactic display, even though his stated goal is for the show to be educational. Visitors are offered authentic contact with real corpses, but of course that is not what they get, because real corpses rot and smell. Dead people do not play basketball or ride bicycles. Indeed, these particular individuals may have never played basketball or ridden a bike in their life. The aesthetics of Body Worlds transforms human beings into something new, the un-dead.
If the corpses in Body Worlds had not been transformed into works of art they would be revolting. At the same time, it is the aesthetic decisions – the poses and the makeup – that many viewers find ‘disturbing’ and ‘in poor taste’. Jus
t as artists like Marc Quinn challenge our assumptions by incorporating organic matter into their work, so an anatomist like von Hagens unsettles us with his aesthetic transformations of the human body.
Plastinated split head, on display at the Body Worlds exhibition, Seoul, 2012.
An aesthetic impulse was integral to the educational remit that drove generations of medical technicians to try different tools and chemicals on their subjects, and it spurred research in new directions. Today, plastinated body parts – which retain their shape, last for years, and do not rely on harmful chemicals for their preservation – are used in medical schools all over the world, and von Hagens’ Plastination Centres produce hundreds of anatomical specimens a year. The practicalities of preservation prop up the theories, and this is no less true when it comes to the mysterious relationship between mind and matter.
During the twentieth century, skulls gradually lost their place as the pre-eminent physical marker of human identity, and brains became the focus of scientific attention. Before this, brains had never lent themselves to museum collections in the way that skulls had, because a brain sloshing in a jar of alcohol was far less convenient to transport than a lightweight, dry cranial bone. While anatomists sliced up the brains of cadavers in the dissecting room, most nineteenth-century collectors settled for plaster casts and wax models as a substitute for the real thing. But the brain had always promised to provide the ultimate materialist explanation of human nature, and by the turn of the twentieth century, more and more brains were being weighed, measured, compared and potted up on museum shelves for future reference.
Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found Page 22
