Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

by Frances Larson

  Haydn’s head became a kind of shrine in Rosenbaum’s house. Set inside its special case, like a precious museum specimen or a relic to be shown to select admirers, the skull demanded respect and reverence. It became a musical icon, embodying the legacy of a great composer. The people who saw it did not know Joseph Haydn; even Rosenbaum, who liked to count him as a friend, had not been on intimate terms and was more enamoured with Haydn’s public achievements than he was familiar with the man’s private idiosyncrasies. The skull was not so much a personal memorial to the man as a tribute to his professional success. It confirmed, and enhanced, his celebrity. Rosenbaum’s actions magnified one aspect of Haydn’s character at the expense of many others. This was a man who had been trimmed and tidied for posterity.

  Rosenbaum was one of the earliest disciples of a craze that would sweep through Europe and America in the nineteenth century – the craze for human skulls. He was fascinated by the ‘new science’ of the human head that became known, in the English-speaking world, as phrenology. It was his interest in phrenology that had persuaded him to steal Haydn’s head, despite the risks and the disgusting realities of dealing with dead bodies, and he had probably heard lectures by the famous Viennese phrenologist Franz Joseph Gall, who was responsible for popularizing skull collecting at the turn of the century. Gall’s Schädellehre (‘doctrine of the skull’) was based on the idea that a person’s character could be read by studying their head. He identified twenty-seven personality traits that he claimed were localized in the brain and physically impressed on the cranium, from memory and language to guile, arrogance, wit and constancy. According to Gall, a person’s character was literally inscribed in the lumps on their skull. It proved an irresistible theory.

  Franz Joseph Gall leading a discussion on phrenology with five colleagues, among his extensive collection of skulls and model heads. Coloured etching by T. Rowlandson, 1808.

  Gall was a brilliant lecturer and he always addressed his audience from in among his collection of heads. He filled tables with rows of human and animal skulls, busts of eminent men, plaster casts and colourful wax models of human brains. Large illustrations and diagrams of heads hung on the walls. Gall would pick up a skull while discussing a man’s vanity or his sense of colour and indicate the areas of the cranium that were particularly well developed in this respect. When fresh specimens were available, his assistant would dissect an animal brain, or occasionally a human brain, in front of the audience. Gall’s talks became famous in Vienna, and later throughout northern Europe, and they were attended by a wide cross-section of the public, from tourists and tradesmen to ambassadors and academics. The combination of medical terminology, visual aids (few members of the public can have seen a dissection before) and talented oratory was intoxicating. After a lecture, people queued up to have their own heads read by Gall. This was science endowed with psychic powers: the scientist knew you better than you knew yourself, and all thanks to the secrets inscribed in the shape of your head.

  Before long, phrenology was sweeping through northern Europe, leaving hundreds of converts in its wake. Historian Roger Cooter has described how, by 1826, ‘craniological mania’ was said to have ‘spread like a plague … possess[ing] every gradation of [British] society from the kitchen to the garret’. The phenomenon was like ‘a species of intellectual mushroom or scarlet-bean’. One visitor to London found it was difficult to walk the streets and ‘not be struck with the number of situations in which phrenological busts and casts are exposed for sale’. Shop fronts displayed casts of heads which could be bought for a couple of shillings. Enthusiastic amateurs could buy a series of casts illustrating particular faculties – benevolence, combativeness or wit – or could pay to have a cast made of their own head. One of the most successful purveyors of phrenological paraphernalia in London, James de Ville, claimed to be able to take an accurate head mould in less than seven minutes with minimum discomfort to the sitter, and from this a cast would be made which could be used in ‘Phrenological studies or as family memorials’.

  Phrenological books were often bestsellers. The Scottish phrenologist George Combe wrote a book called The Constitution of Man that had sold 100,000 copies by 1860, dwarfing early sales of Darwin’s Origin of Species, which reached only 50,000 by the end of the century. At its peak, The Constitution of Man was outsold only by the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe. Robert Louis Stevenson himself commented on the popularity of phrenology in Edinburgh in the early 1820s. ‘The law student,’ he remarked, ‘after having exhausted Byron’s poetry and Scott’s novels, informed the ladies of his belief in phrenology’ – with the implication that phrenological knowledge could enhance your status in polite society. Every city and many towns had a Phrenological Society, where members met to discuss the heads of criminals, famous thinkers or local lunatics. Phrenology’s potent blend of entertaining subject matter and academic pretensions together with its hands-on approach appealed to the aspiring classes, and many attenders were from the lower middle classes or were tradesmen or skilled artisans. By the mid-1830s in Britain it was ‘no unusual thing to hear the mechanic discourse of [phrenology] as he handles the implements of his trade’. Not surprisingly, lecturers and ‘experts’ cropped up everywhere, hawking training courses, charts, manuals and head readings.

  Few devotees were driven to dig up dead bodies in the middle of the night, as Joseph Rosenbaum had been, but every good phrenologist needed a collection of skulls. After all, phrenologists regarded themselves as scientists, and scientists dealt with physical evidence. It was vital to collect data.

  Gall’s appetite for skulls became so well known that eminent men began to fear for the safety of their crania. One poet, Michael Denis, amended his will to ensure his head would not end up as an exhibit in Gall’s public lectures. Some phrenologists found that their collections of skulls brought them almost instant fame. When George Combe first became interested in phrenology he decided to order some plaster casts from London, each of which was supposed to illustrate a different character type. They arrived in two large sugar casks and he eagerly prised open the wooden lids and laid out the skulls on the floor of his drawing room, but ‘they looked all so white, and so exactly alike’ that he feared he would never be able to see any differences between them. Cursing his folly, all Combe wanted to do was to hide his horribly homogeneous hoard and forget all about it, but it was too late. His friends were fascinated by the new skulls ‘and they came in troops to see them’, peppering him with questions which he felt he had to try and answer. Before long, Combe’s collection was displayed in his attic and so many people wanted to see it that Combe had to limit his demonstrations to twice a week and ask his sister, Jean, to show people round the rest of the time. Combe’s cast collection had propelled him into the limelight and he quickly became Britain’s most famous phrenologist.

  Much of phrenology’s popularity must be put down to the skills of those who touted it. The most convincing phrenologists balanced an air of scientific authority with the drama of a theatrical performance, whether that was on stage addressing a crowd of onlookers or in the more intimate surroundings of a head reading.

  Phrenologists were often reluctant to offer character readings by correspondence or from the cast of a person’s head, simply because so much could be gleaned from meeting their subject face to face, and the experience of measuring and feeling a person’s head proved captivating to the punters. During a head reading, the general size and shape of a person’s head was determined using a measuring tape or callipers, then the phrenologist used the balls of his fingers to determine the topography of the cranium, moving across the scalp, measuring the distance between various regions of the head. Each ‘organ’ was assessed in turn, and the phrenologist talked to his client all the time, explaining the various faculties and their relationship to each other. Customers could sometimes buy a written report for an additional fee, and then, of course, there were the charts and manuals and porcelain busts that could
be purchased as souvenirs.

  Part of the appeal of phrenology lay in its novelty, because the science of the brain was still a mystery. Gall had located the human mind firmly within the human brain. His insistence on this point has a long legacy: today, psychology is generally seen as something that happens inside the brain, and the brain has come to be accepted as the emotional centre of the person – as opposed to the gut, for instance, or the heart. Other organs were merely parts of the body, governed by reflexes and separable from the self, but the brain became synonymous with the mind. As the ‘source of all the feelings, ideas, affections and passions’, the brain was heralded by Gall as the source of the self and his theory was accepted by a greater number of people than ever before.

  Gall was adamant that every individual’s personality was an organic substance – the brain – that could be empirically studied, through observation, in nature. The idea of a science of human character was revolutionary. According to Gall, the mind was just another part of the human body, and its mysteries were to be satisfactorily solved not by philosophers or theologians, but by scientists who were happy to get their hands dirty. This meant that the seemingly haphazard loopy coils of the brain were not really haphazard at all. Each had its own specific function. In this, too, Gall has left his mark on modern science, since cerebral localization has been a tenet of neuroscience ever since. Brains may have looked like ‘macaroni’, but there was a hidden order to the mush.

  So brains were key to understanding minds, and the most convenient way to study a brain, whether your subject was alive or dead, was by charting its impact on the skull. Human skulls were easier to work with than brains. Gall was a doctor, and during his training at the Vienna General Hospital he had plenty of opportunities to dissect brains, and later he performed similar post-mortem operations on inmates at the Viennese asylum. He became very proficient in the art of dissection, but brains were messy – they disintegrated and did not hold their shape very well. Once they had been removed from the body, they looked like slimy amorphous lumps. Skulls, on the other hand, were beautifully hard and durable. They could be carried around and kept for years and had greater visual appeal, as Joseph Rosenbaum had discovered, and he was just one of a growing throng of cranium collectors.

  In the nineteenth century, human skulls became a mainstay of scientific collections and scientific enquiry. Gall and his followers heralded the human head as the intellectual, emotional, moral and social centre of the person, and now it seems incomprehensible to assign such power to any other part of the body; the heart, the stomach, the hands all perform merely supporting roles to the lead part played by our heads. Phrenology raised the abstraction of ‘the mind of man’ to new heights. No wonder it was the rising professional classes – young doctors and lawyers from lower-middle-class backgrounds – whose ambition dwarfed their resources and who had little in life to rely on except their brain power, who were most drawn to the phrenological cause. Power resided in their heads – the power to overcome the limitations of their material lot in life. This was aspirational science. Your head contained everything that mattered and everything that was meaningful; nothing was left out.

  What is more, all that meaning was visible on the surface of the head and neatly arranged. Human nature was clearly laid out, for all to see, and no longer profoundly mysterious, but immediate, measurable and knowable. Phrenology seemed to cast out blind faith and superstition, and usher in a vision of the self that centred on the equality of rational intellect and observation. Just as phrenologists carefully arranged the models and casts in their collections, so the faculties of the human self were neatly organized on the surface of the skull that contained them. Each had its own place, set within a reassuring hierarchy.

  It is amusingly predictable that Amativeness – sexual passion – was positioned at the very base of the skull around the back of the head, while Individuality, and those faculties relating to abstract reasoning, such as Number, Order and Comparison, were promoted to the front and centre, below the forehead. Baser instincts, which had to be kept in check, like Combativeness, Secretiveness, Destructiveness and Acquisitiveness, were nestled together around one ear. Loftier ideals, like Hope, Veneration, Benevolence and Spirituality, were elevated to the top of the skull. Courage, Friendship and Parental Love were low; Hope, Wonder and Wit were high. This unambiguous promotion of intellectual and decorous attributes had a lasting legacy. As the human cranium became increasingly central to academic inquiries into racial profiling, people from supposedly more civilized societies were believed to have larger, higher heads, while more ‘primitive’ types were thought to have low, broad heads. The latter were most definitely ‘lowbrow’.

  Phrenology itself was shunned by many academics, who viewed it as fortune-telling dressed up as science, and by the mid-nineteenth century it had lost much of its credibility, but phrenologists promoted the study of the human head with such verve that its legacy remains. Ever since phrenologists took to the stage, human heads have formed the cornerstone of the science of human identity, being prominent in everything from evolutionary biology to clinical psychology. In the nineteenth century, since so many scientists were interested in the principles – if not the practices – of phrenology, its theories lived on in later studies of the human head, particularly those that tackled the tricky subject of race.

  By the 1850s, skulls had become integral to academic debates about human evolution and racial diversity, and mainstream scientists saw the skull not so much as a physical imprint of its owner’s personality as one particular variant within a wider population of similar skulls. As the century wore on, the human cranium became an indicator of population differences rather than individual character traits. Some skulls might be more ‘typical’ than others, but in general, people who were members of the same ethnicity, or sex, or intellectual capacity would have skulls of a similar size and shape.

  The challenge was to get enough skulls to sort out exactly where the boundaries between these groups should be drawn. Were Mexican heads generally smaller or larger than Argentinean heads? And how did they compare with heads from Indonesia or Papua New Guinea? To answer these questions, scientists needed large numbers of specimens. The late nineteenth century saw mass accumulations of skulls, because bigger sample sizes meant better statistics. One or two phrenologists, such as the Fowler brothers in America and James de Ville in Britain, had collected crania by the dozen, but now it was thought to be essential to deal with hundreds, if not thousands, of skulls if you were a serious scientist of the human head. The new generation of craniometrists dealt, as the term suggests, in skulls and numbers, and lots of them.

  By the mid-nineteenth century, craniology was being heralded as the ‘cornerstone’ of the natural history of man. All ‘the best’ anatomy and natural history museums had a decent collection of human skulls, and there was a widely acknowledged need for more. The head was still the essence of man, but now each man, each head, was a specimen in a great classificatory exercise as scientists tried to pin down the history of racial difference.

  The hypothesis, at its most basic level, was similar to that of phrenology, except that assumed racial traits replaced assumed personality traits: small skulls held small brains, and small brains harboured primitive minds, so by measuring and arranging skulls, scientists believed that they were measuring and arranging groups of people. Craniology was based on the premise that people’s intellectual, cultural and physical differences could be reduced to a single set of measurements and then placed on a linear scale. Lumps and bumps still mattered, but the overall size and shape of a person’s head became key to their position within the scheme as a whole.

  In the decades either side of 1850, the idea of ‘race’ became more tightly bound to the physicality of people’s bodies, and studying the way people looked rose higher up the scientific agenda. Education, religion and climate were merely ‘fanciful causes’ for human diversity, but bones and bodies provided hard evidence. If there
was to be a ‘science of man’ – and many were concerned that the study of humanity should display its scientific credentials – it needed to be based on material proof and a suitably scientific method of investigation. The next few decades would be spent gathering the data (that is, the dead body parts) needed to secure a foundation for this science of man, and debating the best way to interpret it.

  All human bones and body parts were important when it came to working out the similarities and differences within the world’s population. The form of the chest, the shoulder blades, the feet and hands, the pelvis and abdomen, as well as the skin shade and the hair texture, all had to be noted down and compared. For generations, helpful colour charts, like paint shade cards, were issued to scientific travellers so that they could try and match a person’s skin tone to the set menu of colours provided on their card. None of these attributes of colour and size, however, had the same cachet as a person’s skull. As Joseph Barnard Davis, perhaps the most prolific cranium collector of them all, put it: ‘The human cranium stands immensely pre-eminent before all others’ – and many of his contemporaries agreed. Phrenologists had secured the unique status of the human head and staked their academic reputations to it, and now craniologists did the same.

  From a practical point of view, skulls had many qualities to recommend them to the enquiring scientific mind. One Victorian physican, James Aitken Meigs, noted that skulls are ‘easily prepared and preserved, may be conveniently handled and surveyed, considered in various points of view and compared to each other’. Skulls are favourable specimens, because they are small, hard and robust. They are more compact than whole skeletons, which means that they can be relatively easily transported, and they are more durable than the messy tissues they contain, surviving for centuries on a museum shelf. They are surprisingly resistant to pressure, partly because of their shape, but also because the skull, unlike long bones, has no marrow. And skulls were thought to be the ‘most characteristic’ part of the human body because there were so many ways in which one could be different from another. Full of nooks and crannies and holes and lumps, they were a statistician’s dream.