Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder

by Lawrence Weschler

  Hence the impulse to collect and catalogue and explore everything—and hence the proliferation of interest in wonder-cabinets. Kircher, for instance, took to filling his Jesuit Museum in Rome with examples of Egyptian hieroglyphs, convinced that they had been invented by Hermes Trismegistus himself and feverishly intent on cracking their secret code (see Yates, p. 417). As for Ashmole, Yates convincingly suggests that his own intellectual genealogy wends back to Bruno’s visit to Oxford in 1583–84, during which this “Hermetic magician of the most extreme type” preached his new philosophy, grounded in its Egyptian revelation. Some two generations later, she goes on to note, Ashmole became England’s “first known Freemason” (p. 415) and as such a secret initiate in a similar set of supposedly Egyptian-derived mysteries.

  19. … things that were “Strang.”

  In addition, such letters testify to a wealth of human responses—notable among them, petulant envy—that, alas, are far from strange. When the Danish cabinetman Ole Worm’s son, Willum, visited the Ark in 1658 and subsequently wrote his father to tell him about the experience, Ole wrote back, concerning Tradescant the Elder, “I have heard that he was an Idiot.” (Quoted in Tradescant’s Rarities, p. 21, n. 17.)

  The cabinetman of Copenhagen (illustration credit nts.6)

  20. … any stray pilgrims from the Jurassic.

  Nor were these unique instances of such microminiaturist art. In fact, it turns out there was a veritable craze for the microminiature during the sixteenth century, so much so that many of the Wunderkammer cognoscenti of our own day, such as several of the contributors to the Origins volume, are given to ho-humming the occasional “obligatory cherry stone” they’re forced to include among their own various inventories (p. 154).

  The Tradescants’ collection alone included such other feats as “a nest of 52 wooden cups turned within each other as thin as paper,” a cherrystone containing a dozen wooden spoons and another inscribed with the faces of “88 emperors,” and a “Halfe a Hasle-nut with 70 pieces of householdstuffe in it” (Tradescant’s Rarities, p. 93).

  In part, this fascination was but a microminiature rendition of the Wunderkammer passion itself—the world in a cabinet as recalibrated in terms of the roomful in a nutshell. Such an analogy was rendered virtually explicit on the Tradescants’ own family tombstone, upon which a poet celebrated, inter alia,

  Whilst they (as Homer’s Iliad in a nut)

  A world of wonders in one cabinet shut.

  (Tradescant’s Rarities, p. 15)

  But the taste for microminiaturism was as much a celebration of the sudden advances in the new technologies, both of the lathe and the lens, that made such efforts possible (technological advances just as portentous as those that were suddenly allowing the circumnavigation of the globe), as it was of any individual craftsman’s specific virtuosity. In Dresden, according to MacGregor, the lathes, tools, and magnifying glasses were every bit as venerated as the objects they produced (including, for instance, one cherrystone carved with 180 faces!) and were frequently exhibited right alongside those objects on their own elaborate mounts (Tradescant’s Rarities, p. 75).

  Settala, in Milan, faced a problem which we in turn have faced in the production of this book, for, according to Adalgisa Lugli, he complained in the manuscript catalogues to his own collection about “finding it impossible to adequately portray through illustration the ‘minutiae’—such items as an ivory cherrystone enclosing in its pit a full complement of chess pieces, ever-fine strands of ivory, a camel that passes through the eye of a needle, or a loom on which to weave a spider’s web, all of which he himself fashioned at the lathe” (Lugli, p. 119).

  The problem of reproducing microminiature details has also lately been confounding computer technologists who’ve been trying to digitalize the contents of major art museums. According to a recent article by Phil Patton in the New York Times (August 7, 1994), technicians at the National Gallery in Washington have been having a particularly difficult time scanning the fifteenth-century Flemish master Rogier van der Weyden’s painting St. George and the Dragon into their computer files: “On the painting’s background, behind the knight and the monster, is a walled city. So finely rendered is the detailed landscape that [when scanned,] the image ‘dithered,’ or began to ‘pixilate’ into a gridlike pattern not unlike what one would expect if a snapshot were taken through a screen door.… The dithering of ‘St. George’ lent new meaning to an inscription in rather shaky Latin on the back of the painting: Videatur et ponderetur. Ab arte reperitis. (Look and ponder. One discovers things from art.) Seen close up, through a photomicrograph, the background of the picture shows street scenes in the walled city, people passing on the streets, even an open window on whose sill sits a microscopic waterjug—all virtually as invisible to the human eye as to the scanners. Trying to put ‘St. George’ on the computer inspired wonder at how the painting was done in the first place. With a single-hair brush, under a magnifying glass? ‘That detail was there all along,’ said Ms. Vicki Porter, the computerized Visitor Center’s director, ‘just waiting to be discovered.’ ”

  Of all the microminiaturist feats I came upon during my own mock-scholarly dalliances, perhaps my own favorites were a pair I stumbled upon in a footnote in Tradescant’s Rarities, to wit: the achievements of a London smith named Mark Scaliot who, in 1578, produced “a lock, of iron, steel and brass, of eleven several pieces, and a pipe key, all of which weighed but one grain of gold. He also made a chain of gold, of forty-three links, which chain being fastened to the lock and key, and put about a Flea’s neck, the Flea drew with ease. Chain, key, lock, and flea weighed but one grain and a half” (p. 94, n. 199).

  Ricky Jay was similarly taken with that footnote, it subsequently turned out, for in Volume II, Number One, of Jay’s Journal of Anomalies (which appeared after the first edition of this book had already gone to press), an issue entirely given over to flea circuses and flea arcana, he likewise alluded to Scaliot’s astounding achievement, going on to aver as to how it may have inspired the following lines of verse, attributed to the seventeenth-century poet John Donne:

  One made a golden chain with lock and key

  And four and twenty links drawn by a flea,

  Which a countess kept in a box kept warm

  And fed it daily on a milk-white arm.

  Indeed, it appears that a whole wing of any future microminiature museum would have to be given over to the absolutely over-the-top (under-the-bottom?) exertions of various flea impresarios. As Jay notes, “Not the least remarkable aspect of flea exhibition was the opportunity it presented for great feats of engineering in small compass. In 1745, Londoners could witness at Mr. Boverick’s clock shop in The Strand, ‘A Landau, which opens and shuts by springs, hanging on braces, with four persons sitting therein; a crane-neck carriage, the wheels turning on their axles; a coachman’s box, &c., of ivory; together with six horses and their furniture; a coachman on the box, a dog between his legs, the reins in one hand, and whip in the other; the footman behind, and a postilion on the leading horses, in their proper liveries;—all so minute as to be drawn along by a flea.’ ” (Jay in turn attributes this specific sighting to an 1839 book called Wonders of Nature and Art [London, Halifax; pp. 179–80]).

  21. … secret operation in 1893.

  The Mütter Museum recently earned the top ranking on a “one-of-a-kind museums” list compiled by Weissman Travel Reports, an information service for travel agents (according to an item in the February 12, 1995, Philadelphia Inquirer). Runners-up, in descending order, included the Barbie Museum in Palo Alto, California; the International Friendship Exhibition in Myoyangsan, North Korea (gifts to the country’s leaders); the Museum of Two-Headed Animals, Bamberg, Germany; the City Museum, Iquitos, Peru (decaying bodies); the U.S.-Chiang Kai-shek Criminal Acts Exhibition Hall, Chongqing, China; and the Museum of the Inquisition, Lima, Peru. The Museum of Menstruation in New Carrollton, Maryland, just missed making the list. The compilers of the list appeared
never to have heard of the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

  It was probably fitting that Mütter’s collection found a home in Philadelphia, the very city in which Charles Willson Peale had opened his own museum back in 1786. For that matter, both collections remind us how, even as the Wunder sensibility faced decided opposition during its own period of hegemony, so it has managed to persist (if in somewhat attenuated form) through the centuries since its seeming overthrow by its more positivist rival.

  In fact, the first half of the nineteenth century saw its own small resurgence of the Wunder sensibility, in part for the very same reasons as had pertained in the early sixteenth century, a suddenly expanded exposure, that is, to an entirely new world—in this instance, to China itself, which was suddenly experiencing a marked increase in Western penetration. In this context, Gretchen Worden, the director of the Mütter, alerted me to the existence of a marvelous unsigned item in the May 21, 1845, issue of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (Vol. 32, no. 16). “Our friends from the country who visit Boston on the coming anniversary must not forget to look in at the room in the Society for Medical Improvement,” advises our anonymous would-be host (who Worden is convinced was none other than Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes), for “a new accession has lately been made to its treasures which they will examine with greatest interest”—namely, a series of twenty-eight oil paintings “representing a great variety of cases of surgical disease, principally tumors, observed at the hospital at Canton under the care of Dr. Parker.” As illustrations of disease, these paintings “are in the highest degree curious and instructive, and as works of art they may challenge the admiration of artists themselves. The gratitude of the Society for this very handsome gift would have naturally led to a wish that the portrait of the donor might have accompanied the other paintings—but it might have been unpleasant to our liberal friend to have been hung up on a wall as a pendant to a spina ventosa, or a vis-à-vis to fungus hæmatodes.

  “These monstrous diseased growths are very serious things to our fellow-creatures of the Celestial empire,” our suddenly circumspect tour guide acknowledges. “But they are so out of all reasonable proportions, and sprout up in such strange shapes and places—and China is so far off, and a China man is so much an abstraction to our minds—and the almond-shaped eyes, the pigtail, the brown-sherry complexion and the Oriental environments of the sufferers, so blind us to the naked fact of the existence of an unsightly or devouring malady, that we cannot help looking at them with a little twitching about the levator anguli oris, which if not inhuman is at least highly unbecoming.”

  Our contributor, however, immediately endeavors to wipe that unseemly smirk off his face, noting sagely that “The truth is, the practised eye kindles at the sight of any very remarkable excrescence, as the traveller’s does at that of lofty mountains or colossal edifices.” He goes on to note that one must journey to precisely such places as China—only just recently, and barely, touched by modern Western medical practices—if one is going to be able to witness them at all: “The pathological sublime and beautiful is so tamed down by the science of highly civilized countries, that the grander and more captivating efforts of nature in that department must be looked for among ruder people. We [in the West] nip the most promising growths of disease in the bud. Morbid products stand no better chance among the surgeons than apples in a schoolhouse yard; they are all picked off long before they are ripe.…

  “Not so in the pathological Eden of the Flowery Land:

  Nature here

  Wantons as in her prime, and plays at will

  Her virgin fancies.

  “The first opening of the Chinese Hospital,” our guide continues, “was to the worshipper of morbid nature what penetrating a Brazilian forest was to the botanist who first explored its depths. The enormities of Asiatic hypertrophy put his most extravagant steatomas and osteosarcomas to the blush.” And so forth, at considerably greater and more florid length.

  Finally our host urges that “friends who dine with us, and are always in such a hurry for the afternoon cars, must not forget to see these pictures and the cabinet. They had better give up the nuts and raisins than not to see them. Indeed, if the question were between giving up the pictures or the pudding itself, we would sacrifice the latter—unless of a higher order than we have a right to expect it to be.”

  22. So, go figure.

  And I did.

  It turns out that human horns, anomalous growths consisting entirely of concentric layers of keratinized epidermal cells with a tendency to originate on the sites of sebaceous cysts, warts, or scars, are “far more frequent than ordinarily supposed,” according to Drs. George Gould and Walter Pyle (Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine; New York: Julian Press, 1956; p. 222). They can arise anywhere on the body, growing at a fairly slow but steady rate and often curling in on themselves, though generally nowadays they tend to get removed in the course of standard dermatological practice before they ever achieve any recognizable form as horns. And, in fact, they aren’t exactly horns: they share the keratinized gloss and surface of standard animal horns, but they lack the bony core. Notwithstanding which, they have exerted a wondrous fascination on humankind, across cultures and centuries.

  Drs. Gould and Pyle cite the 1820 case of a “Paul Rodrigues, a Mexican porter, who from the upper and lateral part of his head, had a horn 14 centimeters in circumference and divided into three shafts, which he concealed by constantly wearing a peculiarly shaped red cap” (p. 223). This cap-wearing strategy, however, doesn’t always work: Martin Monestier (Human Oddities; Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel, 1978) cites the case of “a French peasant brought before a regional magistrate on September 18, 1598, for refusing to remove his hat in the presence of a nobleman. Forced to do so in court, he uncovered a well-developed ram’s horn which, he explained, had begun to grow when he was five. The magistrate packed him off to see the king, who, according to one chronicler, ‘sought to breed him with the courtesans.’ ” After a few months of this life, the poor fellow unfortunately gave up the ghost. On the other hand, Monestier also cites the example of François Trouillu, who was quite proud of his horn, “which closely resembled a panache.”

  Perhaps the most famous case in the early nineteenth century was that of the Parisian Madame Dimanche, “the Widow Sunday,” whose horn grew outward from her forehead and then down ten inches past her nose, almost to her chin. According to Monestier, “one day, at the age of 84, she suddenly decided to have it cut off. She knew her end was near and did not wish to meet her Maker wearing what she had begun to consider a Satanic ornament” (p. 111). She survived the operation of removal (by the famed Dr. Souberbeille) and lived another seven years. Mütter himself included a spooky wax cast of Madame Dimanche’s face and horn among his collections, although there is some indication that several versions of the cast were in relatively common circulation at the time.

  François Trouillu

  The Widow Sunday

  As for Mary Davis’s allegedly lost horn, leave it to the indefatigable Arthur MacGregor, assistant keeper at the Ashmolean, to have tracked down every conceivable reference (see his piece in The Ashmolean; no. 3, 1983; pp. 10–11): a horn did indeed exist, in fact several. The Cheshire midwife cast off several pair, each set larger than the ones before (“in shew and substance much like a ram’s horns,” according to a contemporary pamphlet, “solid and wrinkled, but sadly grieving the old woman, especially upon the change of weather”). One of her horns was presented to the King of France “for the greatest rarity in nature, and was received with no less admiration.” Her portrait was painted at least twice in 1668, when her age was given as seventy-four. One of those portraits went to the Ashmolean but was also lost (it appears, however, to have formed the basis for a surviving engraving). “From a historical point of view the disappearance of any part of the Museum’s earliest collections is always to be regretted,” MacGregor consoles himself, “but it has to be admitted that the loss of some is easier to bear than other
s. I for one can summon only the mildest regret at being denied the opportunity of first-hand contact with Mary Davis’s horn.” (And, in fact, he may now be spared even that mild regret, since the horn appears in the meantime to have surfaced in Culver City, California.)

  Mary Davis of Saughall (1668) (illustration credit nts.7)

  “Many ancient peoples believed that strength and fertility were concentrated in horns,” Monestier points out, “hence the numerous cults worshipping bulls and rams.… Jupiter, the supreme Roman god, was depicted with horns, as was Isis, the Egyptian goddess of fertility. When Alexander the Great declared himself the son of Jupiter [or, actually, of Zeus], he ordered that all coins bearing his likeness should henceforth show him with horns. Moses was sometimes depicted with horns, as was Christ Himself. Many rulers had horns affixed to their helmets, as a symbol of power” (p. 110).

  Monestier suggests that the association of horns with adultery and cuckoldry dates to Roman times, but in fact a primordial sense of the interrelationship between horns and sexuality—an understanding of the “horny,” as it were—is embedded deep in the linguistic roots of our civilization. The master text in this regard is R. B. Onians’s seminal, and in fact mind-boggling, The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate (Cambridge University Press, 1951). Norman O. Brown draws heavily on Onians’s work, as for instance in this passage from Love’s Body (New York: Random House, 1966):

  In the unconscious, cerebral is genital. The word cerebral is from the same root as Ceres, goddess of cereals, of growth and fertility; the same root as cresco, to grow, and creo, to create. Onians, archaeologist of language, who uncovers lost worlds of meaning, buried meanings, has dug up a prehistoric image of the body, according to which head and genital intercommunicate via the spinal column: the gray matter of the brain, the spinal marrow, and the seminal fluid are all one identical substance, on tap in the genital and stored in the head. The soul-substance is the seminal substance: the genius is the genital in the head. (pp. 136–37)