The human skull lends itself to a whole range of measurements because it is a hollow, three-dimensional object. It has an inside and an outside, allowing for measurements of the bone itself as well as studies of the volume and shape of the brain. There are eye sockets and mastoid processes and zygomatic arches and any number of wonderful protuberances and apertures to chart. The varied ways of calculating a skull’s height, depth and breadth gave rise to numerous debates among craniologists when it came to deciding how these dimensions might be correlated.
The skull served as the perfect specimen at a time when scientists went about their business trusting that the natural world would succumb to their enquiries and believed that life on earth was governed by laws, that men held the key to those laws, and that scientific merit would be determined by a man’s ability to stand outside the world he surveyed and not be swayed by any prejudice, but deal only in observing the evidence to hand. Skulls – idiosyncratic, resilient and practically inert – persuaded men that they were dealing with unambiguous facts. Embarking on a quest to discover some kind of rulebook that explained the extraordinary diversity in people’s bony heads proved too tempting to resist. There must be some pattern to the endless variety, so men set about gathering data.
There were already some very large collections of human skulls in Europe by 1850. The ‘father’ of craniology, a German doctor called Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, had collected 245 human skulls during the early nineteenth century, and his collection was kept at Göttingen University. The Army Medical Museum at Chatham in Kent contained about 600 crania from 70 different tribes and nations. The Phrenological Society of Edinburgh, founded in 1820 by George Coombe, had a collection of ‘national skulls’ from various parts of the Empire. Then there was James de Ville’s phrenological collection of 1,800 casts and skulls (although it was gradually broken up after his death in 1846) and Gall’s collection, which had been divided between Baden in Austria and the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, and which contained some 350 of his casts and skulls.
Medical collections invariably included human crania. John Hunter had created a large collection of comparative anatomy in the late eighteenth century which became the founding collection of the Royal College of Surgeons and included numerous human skulls which he arranged in order of complexity. He encouraged his medical students to do likewise, and during the early nineteenth century a burgeoning network of anatomy schools, teaching hospitals, learned societies and universities began to build up more systematic collections of human bones and body parts, skulls chief among them. Physicians and surgeons often displayed their medical collections in their homes, but increasingly medical schools and hospitals invested in purpose-built museums to display their growing ‘libraries’ of human specimens, both normal and pathological. Since skulls were of interest to researchers across the range of academic disciplines that proliferated in the mid-nineteenth century – from anatomists and medics to zoologists, archaeologists, ethnologists and naturalists – the fashion for skull collecting flourished throughout the academic community, regardless of nationality or institutional affiliation.
The striking aesthetic of human skulls led scholars to arrange them in linear series. The earliest cranial collectors, including Hunter and Blumenbach, displayed their skulls in rows. Blumenbach hinted at the visual force of this practice when he noted that, ‘seen from above and from behind, placed in a row on the same plane … the racial character of skulls … strikes the eye so distinctly at one glance, that it is not out of the way to call that view the vertical scale’. Hunter arranged his crania from those belonging to apes through to human skulls. Even though these men made no claims about the superiority of particular races, their skulls seemed to lend themselves to linear display, and skulls arranged in a graded, racial series became a scientific commonplace. The Austrian anatomist Josef Hyrtl collected 139 skulls that were bought by the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia in 1874. They can still be seen there today, in their original wooden cabinets, laid out in rows, stretching from floor to ceiling, a ‘grinning wall’ of human cranial variation which must have been a commonplace in medical museums and universities in its time.
The Hyrtl skull collection on display at the Mütter Museum, Philadelphia.
When Hyrtl sent his collection to Philadelphia, every case on the wagon was placed on a pillow and the whole lot was surrounded by railings, such was his pride in his skulls and his concern for their safety. In fact, Hyrtl’s collection was one among many in Europe. Crania entered collections at a greater rate than any other human body part so that, for example, by 1880, the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris had acquired 130 skeletons, 2,000 dried preparations and 4,000 skulls. Laid out like ossuaries to present a new, but no less theatrical, vision of man’s triumph over death, these particular scientific specimens celebrated the power of rational science over the individual.
One of the earliest and most avid skull collectors was an American named Samuel George Morton. A professor of anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania, Morton had collected more than 1,200 skulls by the time of his death in 1851. Stephen Jay Gould noted dryly, ‘Friends (and enemies) referred to his great charnel house as “the American Golgotha”.’ Morton’s skulls had been taken from battlegrounds, sent to him by jailers and workhouse attendants, pillaged from Native American burial grounds and unearthed from archaeological sites around the world. Far from marginalizing him, Morton’s collection brought him fame and respect within the scientific community. The Swiss natural historian Louis Agassiz visited Morton in 1846 and wrote to his mother, ‘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.’
Morton set out to measure the relative capacity of his skulls in cubic inches, first by filling them with sifted white mustard seed, and then with lead shot measuring one eighth of an inch in diameter, which he found more reliable. Each skull he received was cleaned, varnished and measured, and Morton might spend hours, even days, contemplating an unusual skull in his study. His powers of observation were said to verge on the prophetic: when one ancient skull arrived without any identifying mark or label, Morton meditated on it for days before announcing his conclusion. ‘He had never seen a Phoenician skull, and he had no idea where this one came from, but it was what he conceived a Phoenician skull should be, and it could be no other.’ Sure enough, six months later, a note arrived explaining that the skull had been found in a Phoenician tomb in Malta.
Morton published two volumes on his collection, detailing the results of his investigations into skull capacity, but even Morton’s collection paled in comparison with that of one of his peers, Joseph Barnard Davis, from England. Morton and Barnard Davis, born a year either side of 1800 and separated in their pursuits by the Atlantic Ocean, were the two most acquisitive craniometrists of all time. Barnard Davis accumulated an astonishing 1,700 skulls. He kept them stacked up in his house in the market town of Shelton in Staffordshire. In 1880 he sold them to the Royal College of Surgeons, as it was felt by this institution that ‘it was most desirable that such a collection should be kept entire, and not permitted to leave the country’. Barnard Davis’s collection was deemed to be ‘the richest and most valuable ever formed by a private individual’.
Barnard Davis owned so many skulls that it took twelve months to transfer them all from Shelton to the Royal College of Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inn Field. His house was completely packed to the rafters. As he started to organize his skulls for the move he took to hunting through his loft to try and find misplaced crania. His attic was full of cupboards and cabinets, each laden with human bones, and he sometimes had to pick the locks because the keys had long since disappeared. Even then, around 100 skulls were unaccounted for in the mix.
A charwoman at the Royal College of Surgeons cleaning the collection of human crania in the early twentieth century.
In the end, struggling w
ith the magnitude of the task before him, he paid a china packer to come and help, making sure that each skull was wrapped in paper and placed in a nest of hay before being stacked in a wooden crate to be picked up by the railway porter and taken to the nearby station for the London train. When at last the final crate was sent on its way, Barnard Davis felt decidedly lonely. His house must have appeared twice as big and felt very empty. ‘I feel a good deal dismantled, so to speak, now that I am left alone and deprived of my collection,’ he wrote to the curator at the Royal College of Surgeons. All he could do was hope that the bones he had said goodbye to (there were fourteen complete articulated skeletons in among the hundreds of skulls) would be taken care of and properly catalogued in their new home.
As a physician, Barnard Davis showed few qualms when it came to head collecting. John Beddoe, a fellow doctor, remembered that he ‘looked on heads simply as potential skulls’. Beddoe recounted introducing Barnard Davis, during his rounds at the hospital, to one of his patients, a sailor from Dubrovnik who had nearly drowned and was being cared for at the Bristol Royal Infirmary. Beddoe was treating the man for gangrene on the lung. Barnard Davis’s curiosity was immediately piqued. ‘Now,’ he said to Beddoe, ‘you know that man can’t recover; do take care to secure his head for me when he dies for I have no cranium from that neighbourhood.’ Luckily for the sailor, Barnard Davis had been too enthusiastic in his diagnosis. The patient made a full recovery, and, to Beddoe’s amused relief, he ‘carried his head on his own shoulders back to Herzegovina’.
This was the reality of skull collecting. It meant chatting to doctors and orderlies and making arrangements for deliveries from hospital dissection rooms, city morgues, prisons and asylums. Barnard Davis and Morton drew on a wide range of contacts in their work as skull collectors. Morton was remembered for ‘a most winning gentleness of manner, which drew one to him as with the cords of brotherly affection’, which no doubt played a key part in his professional accomplishments. The historian Ann Fabian records that 138 people contributed skulls or heads to Morton’s collection, and that they came from many different walks of life: medics, government officials, missionaries, soldiers, explorers, and even the President of Venezuela. Barnard Davis was no different, relying on friends and colleagues to send or sell him specimens. On the front line of this vast enterprise of accumulation, which stretched far beyond Morton and Barnard Davis’s circle of contacts, people negotiated in all sorts of shady circumstances to acquire human heads and skulls. Behind almost every one of the thousands of human skulls that began stacking up on museum shelves across Europe and America, there was a story of trade, trickery, suppression or subterfuge.
Collecting heads from ‘primitive’ lands could be reasonably straightforward, because the geographical and cultural distance – and in some cases the colonial bureaucracy – allowed myriad ills to go undetected. And, occasionally, people were receptive to a collector’s demand for heads, as Wilhelm Junker, a Russian explorer who travelled amongst the Zande of north central Africa, found out in the 1880s. When he decided to add some human skulls to his collection of flora and fauna, he simply put out ‘a general order to procure bleached skulls, should the occasion present itself’. Luckily for him, his request coincided with a local conflict between neighbouring groups, and he was soon presented with a ‘gruesome gift’: three baskets filled with human heads, which he buried temporarily before shipping them home to be cleaned.
It was more common for visitors to face considerable local resistance to their interest in dead bodies. In many places, people started to practise their burial rituals in secret to frustrate European and American thieves, and some collectors searching for heads in cemeteries feared for their safety. One of Morton’s contacts, an ornithologist called John Kirk Townsend, claimed to have risked his life to rob a Native American burial ground in Oregon, writing that it was ‘rather a perilous business to procure Indian sculls [sic] in this country. The natives are so jealous of you that they watch you very closely while you are wandering near their mausoleums and instant and sanguinary vengeance would fall upon the luckless night [sic] who should presume to interfere with their sacred relics.’
Local opposition to foreigners’ avarice meant that the committed skull collector usually had to work under cover of darkness. One of Morton’s friends, a colonial official who robbed graves in Egypt and sent Morton more than 100 skulls, wrote that it gave him ‘a sort of rascally pleasure, and I would make you laugh at my numerous experiments in the resurrection line’. Passing the activity off as a daredevil escapade in this way was not unusual, and there are numerous stories of travellers heading out into the night to raid battlefields or burial grounds to steal skulls. Alfred Cort Haddon, the Cambridge anthropologist who later collected skulls in Borneo and the Torres Strait, visited a derelict church after nightfall while in western Ireland in the 1890s. His curiosity was rewarded – he found some crania lying in a recess in the church wall – but he had to hide his loot from two men who happened to be walking past as well as from the boatmen who were waiting to take him back to his lodgings. Charles and Brenda Seligman, British anthropologists who were conducting research on the east coast of Sudan in 1912, went to an old battlefield one evening at sunset and set about ‘discreetly loosening from the ground skulls with our walking sticks’. They did not dare to dig more up with their spades, but they came back, after dark, with eleven skulls nonetheless.
People’s heads were appropriated from every conceivable situation, some legitimately and others illegally. Barnard Davis’s acquaintances sent him the skulls of executed criminals and those taken from hospital dissection rooms; he had the skull of a girl, still wearing a hair net, that had been found in a cellar in Pompeii, and the skulls of ten Vanuatuans who had died of dysentry in their local hospital before the attending doctor dug up their bodies, removed their heads, cleaned their skulls, labelled them and sent them to England. He had skulls from inmates of the Manchester workhouse, sent by the local surgeon, and ancient skulls that had been unearthed during the cutting of a new railway line in Kent. Each of these heads had its own story to tell. There was the skull of a Burmese thief from Rangoon, and that of a Chinese pirate executed in Hong Kong, and there was the skull of a Tasmanian man, suspected of stealing sheep, who had been shot dead by a stock keeper in the night.
Then there were the heads of people who had died in battle. The military proved to be a rich source of human body parts for collectors in the nineteenth century, not least for Morton, who relied on US Army officers more than on any other breed of supplier. After Morton’s death, the American Indian Wars provided a steady supply of skulls to be used as data for racial theorizing – so much so that in 1868, the American Surgeon General issued a formal memorandum urging army physicians to collect Native American skulls for the United States Army Medical Museum in Washington, DC so that it could build up a more systematic collection. He was emphatic on the point of quantity: the more heads the better, since the collection was meant to ‘aid in the progress of anthropological science by obtaining measurements of a large number of skulls of the aboriginal races of North America’.
This is the only known time the American government has officially engaged in collecting human crania, and the results were impressive. The US Army Medical Museum had acrued approximately 3,000 skulls by 1900 (2,200 of them had been transferred from the Smithsonian’s collections in 1869, which must have been a sight to see, as cartloads of crania trundled through the streets of the nation’s capital). Over the years, American army surgeons cut off hundreds of dead Native Americans’ heads on battlefields, in medical tents or in army camps, or dug them up from their graves.
All around the world, soldiers were the men most likely to encounter indigenous people and the men most likely to kill them, so it is hardly surprising that all the great anatomical collections owe their stock, in part, to men in the armed services. It was not easy work, and many American medics complained of the risks and difficulties they endured wh
ile searching for bodies to rob, not least because the communities in question were intent on preventing them at every turn. In tacit acknowledgment of their wrongdoings, men hid their activities from their comrades: one described the uncomfortable scene when he revealed to his regiment that he was boiling heads in the camp kitchen. On another occasion, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle was aghast to find an army tent set up like a dissecting room, complete with a table covered in a rubber sheet, a barrel of water and an array of surgical instruments, for the purpose of removing the heads of recently killed members of the Modoc tribe so that they could be sent to Washington, DC.
The countless doctors who cut off dead people’s heads, carved out their skulls, dissected their bodies and cleaned their bones, and who bottled, preserved and labelled human remains for their collections, usually plied their craft on the poorest and most powerless members of society. This was because it was easier for them to get their hands on people whose families did not have the money or social connections to give them a safe burial.
Occasionally, members of the middle classes did donate their bodies to science. It became more common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to request an autopsy after death, usually so that the doctors could investigate a specific ailment, but care was taken to keep these bodies intact and to repair them after the examination so that they could be given a decent burial. Dissection, with its historic connotations of punishment, was another matter. Dissected bodies were rendered unrecognizable by the medical investigations that took place on them. They were discarded in unmarked burial pits or thrown out with the hospital waste. Even when these ‘anatomized’ corpses were given a proper burial, little effort was made to disguise the damage that had been done. Any collector who relied on personal donations for a comprehensive collection of human body parts would be waiting a very long time, for few would consent to such treatment after death, particularly when most people believed that the integrity of the body was crucial for the safe passage of the soul into the afterlife.
Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found Page 18