Cranioklepty

by Colin Dickey

  In such a position Rokitansky could have had any famous head stolen—but Haydn’s head came to him as a gift. When Rosenbaum had given the skull to Peter, he made him promise to eventually turn it over to the Society for the Friends of Music. But after Peter’s death his wife had tried to return it to Eisenstadt, only to be informed by the Esterhazy sexton that they already had a head of Joseph Haydn, thanks all the same, and were not in need of another one. So the skull went to Peter’s physician, Karl Haller, and then to Rokitansky, both times with the provision that it ultimately get to the society. Rokitansky agreed to this, but like Haller he saw no hurry and would keep the skull for some years in his collection.

  Likewise Hyrtl added the skull of Mozart to his other specimens, attaching a note identifying its provenance that included a line from Horace: “Musa vitat mori!”—“Inspiration outlives death.” By the time the skull of Mozart came into Hyrtl’s possession in 1868, Rokitansky had had Haydn’s skull in his collection for sixteen years, and Romeo Seligmann had had the Beethoven skull fragments for five years (which he was obliged to keep secret). Thus, the skulls of three of Vienna’s greatest composers had found their way, each through different means, into the hands of three of the shining lights of Viennese medicine. It was a changing of the guard, of sorts, an acknowledgment that the soul of Vienna lay in medicine as much as in music—the heads of the city’s old masters, in glass cases and zinc boxes, conferring legitimacy on the next generation of thinkers.

  And while Rokitansky could proudly display Haydn’s head in his cabinet, it wasn’t clear that the doctor had much clinical use for it. For Gall the three important categories were the criminal, the insane, and the genius. The heads of the famous had been pilfered, sold, and treasured as representatives of this final category. They had value to the scientific community as more than simple relics so long as “genius” as a category was still worth studying and so long as one could hope to “fix the organ of imagination” somewhere on the skull. But as the Romantic gave way to the modern, so too did the correlation between mind and body on which Gall had based his insights.

  Instead of the criminal or the genius or even the insane, there was now increasingly just one overarching category, the diseased. Rokitansky’s Handbook of Pathological Anatomy discussed the skull at length, but one is hard-pressed to find any trace whatsoever of Gall. “Increase in the size of the skull, when congenital, involves an excessive development of the brain, or, what is more frequent, hydrocephalus,” one passage reads. Exponentially more useful for the treatment of disease, and exponentially less poetic than Gall or Spurzheim, the medical discourse surrounding the bumps on the skull no longer spoke of amativeness or acquisitiveness but of anomalies: “The dimensions of the skull rarely enlarge at any period after birth . . . without some appearance of absorption of the vitreous table, or separation of the sutures; still more rarely does it occur at mature age when the bones are completely formed, and almost never when the sutures are closed.”157

  The difference between Gall’s and Rokitansky’s regimes of medicine is stunning, a massive paradigm shift of seismic significance. They seem to be of different millennia, not simply forty years apart. And, in a real sense, they were. Gall’s medicine, for all its fidelity to the Enlightenment, proceeded from a belief that metaphysics and anatomy were basically two extensions of the same inquiry: the understanding of humankind. In contrast, Rokitansky understood that even though both might take the human as their starting point, their methodologies were of such different ilk that one had to begin by completely separating them. One could philosophize and one could anatomize, but not at the same time.

  THE PASSION FOR pathological anatomy that Rokitansky had helped spark reached all over the globe. Vienna became an essential stop for doctors the world over, particularly from America and England. The Viennese universities held special six-week courses for foreigners, which, while enormously lucrative, were so numerous that they threatened to encroach on the city’s supply of bodies. The Irish physician William Wilde—who had examined Jonathan Swift’s skull when it had been unearthed and would one day father a son named Oscar—wrote from one such course of “the many opportunities to gain knowledge” in anatomy where “the supply with dissectible bodies is plentiful.”158

  In 1848, the same year that Vienna burned with revolution, the Norwich Pathological Society was formed. Its members met quarterly in the Norwich and Norfolk Hospital Museum, where they were joined by the museum’s newest occupant, Sir Thomas Browne. For the most part, it was a bad time for specimens of suspended animation; in the same chaos that had destroyed Angelo Soliman, Hyrtl’s house caught fire and his entire collection of preservations burned, forcing him to start again from scratch.

  THE FOLLOWING YEAR Romeo Seligmann petitioned for a chair in the history of medicine. Seligmann’s interests had always stretched beyond the medical arts: He had been a regular at the Silver Coffee House, where a circle of artists and philosophers, including Grillparzer and Schubert, habitually talked long into the morning hours. For Seligmann, this was just as fascinating as the study of medicine; he was a renaissance man in the old mode, interested in the vast history of thought and its expressions in science and art through the millennia. In this he was similar to Hyrtl, whose romantic passions for the secrets behind life sometimes fell out of step with the rigid empiricism of the Second Vienna School. But at least Hyrtl had his two great practical achievements—corrosive anatomy and the Handbook of Topographic Anatomy—guaranteeing his influence and relevance. Seligmann faced a much harder road.

  The history of medicine, as a field, had always been valued in the same way that the history of any discipline was useful, in learning from one’s forebears and joining a larger conversation. Such was Seligmann’s goal; he sought out obscure medical treatises in Arabic, Persian, and Greek, tracking these different cultures through the eons, looking for traces of modern knowledge in ancient wisdom. But Rokitansky and the men who followed him had changed Viennese medicine to such a degree that it was no longer clear that this archaic history had any use. The revelations of the autopsy’s knife swept away thousands of years of medical knowledge in a stroke.

  So when Seligmann applied for the establishment of a professorship in medical history in 1849, he knew he might have an unreceptive audience. His application to the collegium of professors was for the establishment of a chair of history of medicine and epidemiology, this last term added because it was still believed, at least by some, that “the history of mass diseases must be regarded as an inseparable part of the cultural history of mankind.”159

  Despite help from his many friends, the majority of the board was not impressed, and his application was turned down by a vote of eight to three. “The history of medicine is no necessity,” stated Joseph Skoda, who was in many ways equal to Rokitansky in terms of fame and impact. “With regard to epidemiology it must be stated that the students receive information on epidemics in the lectures on pathology.”160 A chair in the history of medicine would ultimately come about, but Seligmann would be appointed only at the lower rank of associate professor, so it would be clear where this pursuit stood in the hierarchy of knowledge.

  Seligmann’s troubles revealed the depth of change that Viennese medicine had undergone. He was easily the intellectual equal of Hyrtl, if not Rokitansky, yet he didn’t flourish. He was a polymath, not unlike Thomas Browne, and was as interested in the obscure bits of Sanskrit on the humors as he was in modern pathology. But the era had little use for such knowledge. Those who advanced did so through specialization and by careful attention not to the past but to what lay before them on the operating table.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  SCIENTIFIC GOLGOTHAS

  In 1851 the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital Museum formally put on display its hundreds of calculi. The calculi (the general term for calcium deposits that form in the body, most notoriously in the kidneys and urinary tract) were its prized possessions: Since the hospital had opened in 1771 the doctors
had made a habit of collecting passed stones from their patients as part of an ongoing project. By 1796 there were already nearly a hundred, and the collection had outgrown the cabinet designed for it. Until 1844 it had been kept in the operating rooms, but when the new hospital museum opened they were transferred and in 1851 finally placed in display cases “where, for the first time, the real value and beauty of this unmatched collection may be appreciated.”161 The museum also contained one former board member’s skull, of course, but from the present board’s point of view his head was far less exciting than the ever-growing collection of stones and other detritus spit out by the body.

  That same year, in Philadelphia, Samuel George Morton died, bringing to an end a long, distinguished career that spawned an increasingly problematic legacy. Morton wasn’t the first to suggest that intelligence was associated with cranial volume, or that some human races were more advanced than others. But he was to become iconically associated with the branch of science known as craniometry, partly because he came of age at a particular moment in history and partly because he had more skulls than anyone else.

  If Gall had taught science anything, it was that if you wanted to say something about a skull, you first needed lots of them. And the second half of the nineteenth century saw a proliferation of skull collections that would have made Gall envious. But it wasn’t just phrenologists like the Fowlers who collected skulls—all manner of scientists began collections, taking heads from anywhere they could find them.

  Everyone wanted skulls. Joseph Barnard Davis had begun building a collection in Britain, and in Vienna Joseph Hyrtl collected them for his ongoing project of comparative anatomy. There was of course the collection of Franz Joseph Gall himself, who had died in Paris in 1828. Gall’s collection was subsequently acquired by the natural historian and zoologist Georges Cuvier on behalf of France’s Museum of Natural History. Cuvier had been extremely doubtful of Gall’s methods, believing cranioscopy to be utterly baseless. But when Gall died in 1828 and his possessions went up for sale, Cuvier saw that there were any number of things one could learn from Gall’s specimens beyond locating the supposed organs of personality. And so he fought hard to purchase the collection for the museum where he worked. Phrenology’s loss would be natural history’s gain. As Gertrude Stein might have said, a skull is a skull is a skull.

  In this growing frenzy for crania, no one’s collection was greater than that of Samuel George Morton. For years Morton had been developing a collection that would rival the Fowlers’ store on 308 Broadway for the title of “American Golgotha.” Skulls were Morton’s overriding obsession. His friends and colleagues sent him heads from all over the world. A particularly rich supply came from his friend George Gliddon, who was the U.S. consul for Cairo and who sent Morton over a hundred skulls and heads of mummies that he had plundered from Egyptian tombs. In addition to such gifts, Morton spent somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand dollars acquiring specimens for his collection, an astronomical sum in the years before the Civil War.

  A French admirer of Morton’s collection, Louis Agassiz, wrote to his mother in 1846, “Imagine a series of 600 skulls, most of Indians from all tribes who inhabit or once inhabited all of America. Nothing like it exists anywhere else. This collection, by itself, is worth a trip to America.”162 At the time of Morton’s death that number had reached over a thousand, and a fellow scientist remarked of the collection that, “at this moment, it forms one of the greatest boasts of our country in relation to natural science.”163

  Morton’s collection was an astounding scientific record, a wonder of the modern world if ever there was one. Everyone marveled at its sheer volume. Possessed with such a vast set of data, Morton had been in a unique position to make substantive claims about racial differences in skull size and relative intelligence. Because of this he was taken seriously, as if he alone were in a position to make pronouncements on the human head. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had ridiculed “Professors Bumpus and Crane,” singled out Morton’s skulls, which “from their very nature are permanent data for all future students of ethnology,” for praise.164

  The debate raging at the time was between monogenism and polygenism. Monogenists argued that all the various human races—the European, the African, the American Indian, and so on—were descended from Adam and Eve and that the differences in characteristics could be explained by the “degeneration” of certain races, most notably Africans. Polygenists, in contrast, held that there was simply no way to suggest that the variety of human specimens descended from the same source and held that the “inferior” races were entirely different species. Morton was a polygenist, a belief he arrived at in part because the Great Deluge, by his reckoning, had happened only four thousand years earlier, which did not leave enough time to create the diversity he saw before him.

  Morton saw in his skull collection the measure of all humanity. It was clear enough that cranial capacity distinguished humans from other species. If one could show that different races had definitively different brain sizes, one might be able to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that they belonged to different species. The question was one of method, that is, how to measure intelligence.

  The German physician Rudolph Wagner had devised one method of measuring brain size: He cut up paper into tiny squares, which he then inserted into the convolutions of the brain, measuring how far into the brain each slip of paper went. From there he calculated the entire surface area of a brain, taking into account its folds and fissures. It was, needless to say, not the most efficient process.

  The system used by Morton and others was a great deal simpler, and certainly cruder, but it caught on. He simply filled the cranial cavity of each of his heads with mustard seed, then calculated its volume and entered the measure according to his categories of ethnicity. Eventually he discovered that mustard seed produced wildly inconsistent results, so he switched to lead shot, which was apparently more reliable. Plaster casts were of little use to craniometry because they could not give an accurate sense of brain volume. Skull thickness, hair, and other anomalies could all contribute to an unreliable measurement. So for Morton there remained only one true means of calculating brain size—the skull itself.

  Morton’s findings, published in his Crania Americana (1839) and Crania Aegyptiaca (1844), were enormously influential in appearing to demonstrate, by means of his system, that there was a clear hierarchy in brain size between different peoples. At the top of his scheme was the European, followed by the American Indian, and then the African, just one short step above the ape. Morton’s findings seemed to show, through the cold, objective truth of math and statistics, that the European brain was conclusively larger than that of other ethnic groups.

  But there are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics. In his book The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould cited the numerous methodological errors that Morton made in his calculations. For one, he failed to account for differences in sex and body size when calculating brain volume. He tended to include small-bodied Incas in his American Indian sample so as to bring down that average but excluded small-bodied Hindus from his Caucasian sample so as to keep that number higher. His a priori assumptions repeatedly led him to false conclusions— demonstrably false from his own data. On top of this, Morton made elementary computational and methodological errors, all of which coincidentally favored his preexisting beliefs and assumptions.

  Skulls from Samuel George Morton’s Crania Aegyptiaca

  And yet, Gould concluded, “through all this juggling, I detect no sign of fraud or conscious manipulation. Morton made no attempt to cover his tracks and I must presume that he was unaware he had left them. He explained all his procedures and published all his raw data. All I can discern is an a priori conviction about racial ranking so powerful that it directed his tabulations along preestablished lines.” This in and of itself might not be so lamentable, Gould noted, if Morton hadn’t been “widely hailed as the objectivist of his age, the man who would rescu
e American science from the mire of unsupported speculation.”165

  As Rokitansky was developing pathological anatomy into a major field of modern medicine, Morton was working to provide an empirical basis for racism, giving it a scientific justification and laying out a flawed methodological roadmap for others to follow. Morton adapted to the scientific climate that was blossoming around him—one that relied on direct measurement—and used it erroneously to confirm a long-held belief in racial difference and hierarchy. As with phrenology, at the heart of this scientific field was the skull, which once again came to be the locus of classification.

  But there was a crucial difference between the way phrenology and craniometry treated the skull. The phrenologist looked to the skull to find a hidden map of the character and the history of its owner, laid out in physical form just as a seismograph records an earthquake. Craniometrists like Morton were looking for something grander: the history not of an individual but of the entire human race. Each skull, they believed, was a fragment of a grand epic that stretched back to Adam and Eve. One needed only to collect enough fragments to discern the larger picture.

  And in this sense they were right: Modern anthropology, now purged of the legacy of racial superiority, still relies on the skulls of our ancestors, and of the different tribes of the world, to fill in the story of human creation and evolution. But what Morton failed to understand was that even his massive collection—a thousand skulls—was infinitesimal within hundreds of millions of human lives. And as is the case when one has such a small portion of the puzzle, those fragments could be assembled as the basis of many projected pictures.

  Morton didn’t live long enough to see the Civil War or the emancipation of those who had been kept in bondage in no small part because of the racist science he helped to pioneer. But his legacy continued well after his death, and it struck a chord in European scientists looking for conclusive evidence that they lay at the pinnacle of human development.