by Colin Dickey
It was another fruitless attempt to right the injustice done to Browne, or so Burn thought of the search, though this story would end more quickly than his dispute with the board. Two years later Fitch died, leaving his papers and effects behind in his church office. As the church staff was cleaning out his massive desk, they found a hidden compartment behind a false wall in the back of a drawer. Inside they found the two halves of Browne’s broken coffin plate.
Fitch had warned Skull George not to take the head, but he’d had no qualms about keeping the coffin plate for himself, even going so far as to devise a means to keep it hidden and secret. Later commentators would note that Fitch’s “antiquarian zeal” had perhaps made him unsuitable for church office; it was, at any rate, just one more indignity that Sir Thomas Browne was made to suffer in his afterlife.
THE YEAR 1896 saw another edition of Browne’s works, edited by William Alexander Greenhill. Charles Williams, who was gradually becoming the authority on the Norwich doctor’s head, provided a craniometric reading at the request of Greenhill, who wanted “to make the account more complete by giving the measurements of that great man’s skull.” Regarding the fracas with Reverend Burn and the church, Williams commented only that the skull “has recently been claimed by the vicar of St. Peter Mancroft, but unsuccessfully,” before noting that the skull “is in a state of excellent preservation.”190
“The forehead is remarkably low and depressed,” he went on, “the head is unusually long, the back part exhibiting a singular appearance of depth and capaciousness.” Browne’s “low, depressed forehead” had once been scandalous, as had Beethoven’s—now Williams passed over it without comment.
A few years later another campaign was mounted to have the skull returned. This time the campaign occurred in the court of public opinion. One writer commented in Notes and Queries that “a movement was on foot for the return of Sir Thos. Browne’s skull to its original resting place” and that it had always seemed to the writer that “this step should have been taken long ago by its present custodians, and I very much hope that a record of its reinterment will soon appear in the pages of ‘N & Q.’”191 Another writer published an editorial in the Times of London arguing that “now is the proper time, late though it be, to undo the sad act of vandalism” that was responsible for this “tragical abomination” by hands that had “knav’d” away the skull so many years earlier.192 By now the “tragical abomination” line was becoming somewhat of a cliché, with commentators endlessly citing it either as a reason to have Browne’s head returned or as an ironic prediction that made Browne’s current predicament almost noble.
On the other hand, there were some who weren’t exactly sure that Sir Thomas would have found it such a tragical abomination; one James Hooper, also writing in Notes and Queries, suggested that Browne, were he to be consulted on the matter, might well have sided with the hospital board, of which he had been a member in life, rather than with the church that purported to be acting in his interests.193
Hooper had a point. In Browne’s time there had been no contradiction between being a man of science and a man of religion. They provided different means to the same goal: understanding the works of God. But by the turn of the twentieth century, of course, these pursuits were completely separate. There were fewer and fewer men like Hyrtl and Rokitansky, who were able to inhabit both spheres independently. Had Browne been born in the nineteenth century, which half of his mind would have won out: his zeal for scientific inquiry or his spiritual longing?
The war over Browne’s bones brought the church of St. Peter Mancroft a good deal of notoriety as the not-quite-last resting place of the Norwich doctor, while among the vestry members themselves, the inability to recover Browne’s skull became something of a grim joke. In 1898 the New York Times ran a short dispatch on the church’s remodel, including a lowering of the floor that was sure to disturb the remains of Browne. The Times reporter, oblivious to the generations-old saga, asked Burn if “he did not feel some respect for the last resting place of Sir Thomas Browne,” and Burn replied, somewhat facetiously, “Yes, he is buried there. We shall probably see him again.” The American reporter was incredulous. “The words the rector used were so delightfully comic, this idea of raking up Sir Thomas Browne’s bones, that all hands present indulged in a loud and side-splitting guffaw. Certainly the rector’s reply was flippant and in the worst possible taste. Let us hope that the higher English Church authorities will resent any such desecration.”194 But what Burn and the others knew, of course, was that when it came to matters like these the church authorities seemed utterly powerless. The only thing one could do, it seemed, was laugh.
IF BROWNE’S HAD become the example of a skull that could not get out of a museum, back in America the paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope was trying to get his head into a museum. Cope had been a pioneering paleontologist who had become embroiled in a legendary battle with his rival Othniel Charles Marsh in the 1860s and ’70s.195 What had started out as a friendship had quickly turned ugly after Marsh had quietly bribed men working for Cope to send Marsh any fossils they found. As a result the two became bitter enemies, each trying to outdo the other in discovering and naming new prehistoric species—in the process they identified more than 130 of the 287 known species of dinosaur. Things came to a head—literally—when Cope published his findings on a new species of aquatic dinosaur, which he named Elasmosaurus. Marsh quickly pointed out that Cope had not discovered anything new—he had just put together the bones of a preexisting species in the reverse order, putting the head at the tip of the tail.
Humiliated, Cope conceded the point, but he hoped to yet get the last laugh. What he and Marsh coveted most, as taxonomists, was the discovery of a “type specimen”—the first appearance of a new species of animal and the fossil by which all future such animals are judged. Cope realized that in paleontologists’ zeal to identify type specimens for the hundreds of dinosaurs they had discovered, they had forgotten to name a type specimen for the most central animal of all—Homo sapiens. And so in his will Cope directed that his bones be cleaned and prepared for display as the type specimen for the entire human race. But upon his death in 1897, his request was rejected—his bones already in bad decay from syphilis, Cope’s skull was deemed unworthy of type status and was ingloriously shelved in an anatomical warehouse in Philadelphia.
BUT BACK TO the skull of Sir Thomas. In addition to his craniometric report on that skull, Charles Williams would yet be known for one other contribution to Browne’s afterlife. At some point during the skull’s tenure at the hospital, Williams took what has since become the iconic photograph of the specimen: in profile, resting atop three of Browne’s books. The photo has since displaced even the portraits made of the scholar during his lifetime. When the antiquarian and bibliographer Charles Sayle published an edition of Browne’s works in 1804 to commemorate the three hundredth year of his birth, he used Williams’s photograph as a frontispiece.
The skull of Sir Thomas Browne.
By placing Browne’s head on books, Williams had symbolically moved him out of the pathology museum and back into the library, connecting Browne to the same legacy as Schiller, seventy-five years earlier, when Duke Carl August had placed the writer’s head in his personal library. Of all the photographs of skulls taken during this time, Williams’s seems the most dignified. Beethoven’s skull is ghastly, already cut up and badly mangled. Haydn’s leers up out of its ornate cabinet, gothic as any death’s-head. But in the Williams photograph Browne’s head manages to preserve something like poise. Of fundamental importance are the copies of the books on which the head rests. Browne’s head, emblematic of the secular saint, rests not in the crypt or altar but in the library.
But who is really qualified to interpret what these skulls say? Who can speak on their behalf? Lombroso tried, as did Topinard and Broca and Morton before him, as had Gall and Spurzheim before them. In each case what they asserted were not truths but self-reflective prophecies
. The only truth to be found was that no one is in any real position to speak for these skulls—not the living and certainly not their owners. They sit, mute, endless ciphers, and reflect our minds back to ourselves.
NEARLY THIRTY YEARS after the iconic photo was taken, Virginia Woolf published a novel about a curious figure named Orlando, who ages a scant thirty years over the course of four centuries, changing from male to female somewhere along the way. Early in the novel Orlando (still a young man at that point) descends into his family’s crypt to contemplate the bones of his ancestors: “‘Nothing remains of all these Princes,’ Orlando would say, indulging in some pardonable exaggeration of their rank, ‘except one digit,’ and he would take a skeleton hand in his and bend the joints this way and that. ‘Whose hand was that?’ he went on to ask.” Echoing Hamlet, Orlando contrasts the mortal works of these long-dead men and women with the immortal word of literature, which solidifies his desire to be a writer: “What remained? A skull; a finger,” he muses, turning to the writings of Thomas Browne, “and Orlando, comparing that achievement with those of his ancestors, cried out that they and their deeds were dust and ashes, but this man and his words were immortal.”196
Why did Woolf choose Browne as the figure for immortality? In life Browne had been a quintessential renaissance man: doctor, philosopher, amateur anthropologist, and theologian. Now he was becoming something like Renaissance Man—Homo Renaissancus— the archaeological specimen that told the story of an entire age.
The joke is that Orlando is, by virtue of Woolf’s imagination, already immortal. But then again, so was Browne, whose time on earth continued to lengthen with each rebuffed entreaty from the church. In 1814 Sigismund Neukomm had placed a stone tablet above Haydn’s grave with the inscription “Non omnis moriar”—“Not all of me shall die.” Hyrtl, also quoting Horace, had added another line referring to immortality to Mozart. The belief that one is made immortal through one’s art is certainly as old as art itself. But for this bizarre handful of cases, a kind of immortality had been achieved literally as well as metaphorically.
THE BATTLE WAS to go on, as Browne’s fate lay in limbo. The march of scientific progress moved inextricably forward, with new advances and breakthroughs every day. Forlorn and forgotten, Browne’s skull gathered dust as its uselessness became more and more absolute. He was to receive his glass case, belatedly, in 1902, but the hospital museum allowed the tercentenary of his birth to come and go with no movement on his return.
One hundred years earlier Angelo Soliman’s daughter had learned a bitter lesson as she had made endless entreaties to have her father’s taxidermied remains removed from the emperor’s wonder cabinet and finally buried. Entreaties to Christian virtue or common decency, she learned, inevitably fell on deaf ears, a lesson Pelham Burn gathered a century later. It is hard to relinquish something so precious, even if the relic is ultimately useless. With no higher authority to which to appeal, Browne’s status had become an endless source of frustration for Burn and for others who continued their attempts to reclaim the great man’s skull so that he might rest in peace.
But for every skull belonging to a great man like Browne, for whom the church and other learned men would fight, there were thousands of others—those of Peruvians, Eskimos, Egyptians, Mongolians—with no one to argue on their behalf. The cobbler’s apprentice, dead by suicide after his crime had been discovered, or the young girl dead from meningitis at age nineteen, her luminous body cut apart on the autopsy slab, or the reformist guerilla executed by hanging—who would speak for them?
PART FOUR
REPATRIATIONS
The relics of many lie, like the ruins of Pompey’s, in all parts of the earth; and, when they arrive at your hands, these may seem to have wandered far, who, in a direct and meridian travel, have but few miles of known earth between yourself and the Pole.
• Sir Thomas Browne, Urn Burial
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
HOMECOMINGS
Bones cannot travel by themselves—they need labels, they need identifying marks, and most of all they need stories. Medieval saints’ relics were usually accompanied by a reliquary or other identifying feature—an inscription or an image that could testify to the owner or the power of the remains. The history of bones, transmitted through oral and written stories, is central to their significance. Especially when a saint’s relic moved from one community to another, or when it was passed down from one generation to the next, the story attesting to its power mattered as much as—if not more than—the bone itself.
Increasingly this became an issue with the skulls of these great men as well; as generations passed and their collectors passed on, it wasn’t always clear how authentic the skulls were. Saints were lucky enough to have reliquaries and narratives accompanying them, but when a skull was taken under deliberately obscure or illegal circumstances, it was likely to lack reliable documentation.
Such was the situation in which a group of French scientists found themselves in 1821 when a curious artifact came their way. Jacques Berzelius, a Swedish naturalist, had been working with Georges Cuvier in the Museum of Natural History in Paris since 1819 and had recently returned to Sweden. There he came across a notice in a newspaper concerning Rene Descartes’s skull. The French philosopher and mathematician, founder of much of modern science and philosophy, had died in Sweden in 1650, and now, over 170 years later, it seemed that a rather disreputable entrepreneur in Sweden had bought the head of Cartesius at an auction, to be used as decoration in his casino.197
Fortunately Berzelius was able to buy back the skull, and he shipped it off to Cuvier and his colleagues in Paris for analysis. In May 1821 they met to consider whether the skull really belonged to Descartes. The rest of the philosopher’s remains had been sent back to France in 1666 and had been celebrated as the relics of a secular saint during the French Revolution. So why had his skull now shown up in Sweden? And was it authentic?
It certainly claimed to be the skull of Descartes. On the forehead were a few lines written in Latin, which read:
This small skull once belonged to the great Cartesius,
The rest of his remains are hidden far away in the land of France,
But all around the circle of the globe his genius is praised,
And his spirit still rejoices in the sphere of heaven.
Not only that, the skull had inscribed on it a record of its travels through the years. The names Isaak Planström, Stiernman, Celsius, and Ahlgren could be made out written on various parts of the head. They seemed to speak of a chain of ownership through the years.
But as Cuvier’s colleague Jean-Baptiste Delambre pointed out, what proof did these names offer? During the discussion surrounding the skull, Delambre asked his colleagues, “What proof have we from elsewhere regarding its authenticity? Some inscriptions, more or less effaced, that one makes out on the convexity, which are the names of the successive owners, with some dates and nothing more.”198 Delambre argued that there was no conclusive evidence that the skull belonged to Descartes, and certainly the words on the bone couldn’t be taken as reliable testimony.
To complicate the matter, while this discussion was taking place one of Berzelius’s colleagues wrote to tell him that there was a different skull, in Lund, Sweden, that was also believed to be Descartes’s. In addition, a third candidate for Descartes’s head was announced by a man named Johan Arckenholtz, who claimed that the French philosopher’s head had been split in two— Arckenholtz had kept half, and the other half had ended up with another Swede named Hägerflycht. The longer Descartes had been dead, it seemed, the more heads he had managed to grow.
It took months to untangle the histories of the separate heads, and while the Planström skull was ultimately judged to be the philosopher’s actual head, there would never be anything like definitive proof. You could trace the owners, you could match the bone structure to known portraits, but beyond that you could only hope for the best. Even in the twentieth century, as forensic techni
ques became more and more advanced, there would never be anything like 100 percent certainty, particularly if anyone voiced any doubt about the provenance of a skull. And there was always doubt about skulls stolen under the cover of night.
The skulls stolen throughout the early nineteenth century now sat mostly in libraries and museums, some with inscriptions bearing the names of their owners. But who could say for sure where they had really come from? Joseph Carl Rosenbaum, Skull George Potter, Ludvig Granholm, even Gerhard von Breuning— they had all followed their quarries to the grave, as had those who had inherited the skulls. But as the chains of ownership grew longer and memories grew dimmer, questions about the skulls’ origins became increasingly important.
In the beginning of the twentieth century, studies were carried out on the heads of both Haydn and Mozart. Both had been traveling through the world long enough that questions about their origins had become unavoidable. Besides, there was already a head supposed to be Haydn’s buried with the rest of his remains—the one turned over by Rosenbaum in 1820. Both skulls couldn’t belong to Haydn. And as for Mozart, well, any head that was picked out of a mass grave several years after the burial was bound to raise some suspicion.
Skull identification was far from an exact science. Prior to the development of DNA testing in the 1980s, there was no definitive means of matching a set of remains to its owner. One could perform any number of tests that involved matching the skull to known portraits and descriptions, but in the end it came down to educated guessing, such as when Julius Tandler published an exhaustive study of the Haydn skull in the Society for the Friends of Music’s possession in 1909.199 He compared the bone structure of the skull to that evident in the available busts and portraits of Haydn as well as the death mask made of the composer. This last was the most reliable method, since it most closely mapped the form and contours of the skull at the time of death. Tandler found that the skull in the society’s possession seemed much more genuine than the one currently entombed with the rest of Haydn’s remains, given the available evidence. But in this conclusion he relied heavily on the testimony of Rosenbaum and Peter, which he attached to his own findings. Without this written record, his measurements—whatever their exactness—would not have held the same weight.