Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

by Frances Larson

  With few donors, and high demand for cadavers from medical schools and scientific collections, Victorian medics followed the lines of least resistance and gathered up the remains of criminals, lunatics, the poor, the destitute, enemies, rebels, slaves and foreigners to meet their needs. These are the types of nameless deceased people who still populate research collections in their thousands.

  Throughout history, the apparent absence of family and friends related to the deceased has been invoked as justification for the scientific dissection and preservation of people’s bodies. The British Anatomy Act of 1832 and similar American acts in the decades that followed permitted medical dissection of the ‘unclaimed’ dead, and in so doing consigned thousands of impoverished people to scientific collections because they could not afford to pay for a plot in their parish churchyard. These people had friends and families, but they were, in effect, ‘unclaimed’ because they could not secure a burial. More often than not it was money, not family, that had the power to save you from the surgeon’s knife, and as a result, these impoverished people were treated, after death, as though they were mere objects, to be dealt with as though they had had no social ties to the living. Professional grave robbers, who supplied cadavers to the medical profession for dissection in the nineteenth century, were careful to leave behind in the grave all clothing and personal items that might aid identification, because a nameless body was harder to trace and less likely to be claimed by family members.

  In the United States, unmarked graves and potter’s fields – where people were buried at public expense – were the prime targets for body snatchers, since their occupants had been, at least symbolically, abandoned by their family and community. Other reliable sources included the bodies of suicide victims, who had been denied the right to burial in a Christian graveyard. And for the same reasons, almshouses and workhouses provided a steady supply of dead bodies to the scientific profession. African American graves, which were located in separate graveyards, were frequently targeted. Not only was the disappearance of a black person’s body hardly noticeable to upper-middle-class society, but their families had little means of resistance in a deeply segregated society.

  Many members of the academic community believed African Americans and so-called primitive people were barely human at all. Samuel George Morton, for example, believed that the different races of mankind had been established in the divine creation and could not change, and that they constituted separate species. The notion that foreigners were different species, or sub-species, not only rendered them ripe for scientific analysis, it may also have eased a man’s conscious should he experience any qualms about the ethical implications of his work. Even when friendships eroded the distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’, science had the final say, as it did for Ishi.

  Ishi was a Native American who was found destitute in the grounds of a slaughterhouse in northern California in 1911. He was emaciated, understood no English, and was naked except for a strip of wagon canvas that he wore around his shoulders. While newspapers reported the discovery of the last wild man in North America, anthropologists at the University of California ascertained that he was a member of the Yahi group of Native Americans. With no surviving family or friends, Ishi had been forced to flee his homeland, hungry and desperate. He was taken to the University of California Museum of Anthropology in San Francisco until proper arrangements could be made for him. In the event, he continued to live at the university museum, providing research information about his people and his language, and earning a salary as an assistant janitor, until his death a few years later in 1916.

  Ishi had expressly asked that his body not be subject to a postmortem. One curator wrote, in the days before Ishi’s death, ‘… science can go to hell. We propose to stand by our friends.’ He added, ‘Besides, I cannot believe that any scientific value is materially involved … The prime interest in his case would be of a morbid romantic nature.’ But his letter arrived too late. Staff at the museum, who declared themselves Ishi’s friends, made ‘a compromise between science and sentiment’, and performed an autopsy against his wishes. They removed his brain and sent it to the Smithsonian. Those who undertook the autopsy comforted themselves that it had been minimally invasive, and certainly not as disrespectful as a dissection: his brain, after all, was preserved rather than destroyed. The rest of Ishi’s body, which was kept whole, was cremated in a California cemetery. Thus the autopsy was seen as a compromise, despite the fact that it went against the dead man’s wishes.

  Ishi’s body was divided after death just as his identity had been in life: he was both a man and a scientific specimen. Like so many others, he had supposedly been ‘the last of his tribe’, was apparently without living relatives, and was considered too ‘valuable’ to lose in death. The lament that men and women represented ‘the last of their tribe’ was sounded surprisingly frequently. Foreigners and ethnic minorities were regularly portrayed by scientific collectors as people without land or lineage. It was a backhanded compliment that granted a person romantic status while inferring their social isolation and powerlessness in death. Many people believed that indigenous groups were rapidly becoming extinct in the face of international trade and colonialism. Ironically, this compelled collectors to work ever more fervently to gather up objects, clothes and bones for study, with the result that their narratives of ‘salvage ethnography’ became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  It is a great irony that the golden age of skull-collecting was founded on the belief that the skull retained the essence of a person in a way that long bones and shoulder blades do not, when the vast majority of skulls in our museum collections are entirely bereft of their personal identity or history. Most of these heads have been rendered both faceless and nameless, expressly for the purposes of rational inquiry. All skulls are icons of identity, perhaps more than they are individual people, because they are simultaneously unique and impersonal. A skull is still someone’s face, but because it has been stripped down to its bony structure it seems remote and other-worldly, so that while the skull retains its immediacy, its power has been depersonalized. The skull has long been seen as a messenger from the afterlife, because it stands for the person, and yet that person is absent. He or she has been transformed into something new. Maybe this is also why skulls have appealed to scientists, because they are, at once, human and inhuman. Instead of representing an individual, they came to represent a group, or ‘type’. Cleaning away the flesh from somebody’s face not only creates a startling ornament, it is one of the most effective ways to turn an individual into a generic specimen.

  A lot of the work done by museum collectors involved depersonalization. Just as the gravediggers carefully left behind all identifying belongings when they took a body to sell for science, so curators often showed little interest in the personal history of their ‘specimens’. Ishi was unusual in this regard because he transcended the divisions between generic specimen and famous relic. (In any case, Ishi’s fame came from his perceived status as the last of his ‘type’.) Other individuals of anthropological or anatomical interest were given a number, but their names went unrecorded. All artefacts entering a museum collection are given an accession number, and with that stroke of ink they become re-categorized as objects of study, scientific shadows of their former selves.

  Morton’s successors at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia carefully inked numbers onto the forehead of each of the skulls in his collection, along with the place where it was collected, and sometimes the name of the person who collected it. In museums, the identity of the collector often got a higher billing than the identity of the person they had collected. A list of respectable donors emphasized the prestige of the institution in question. It would be a serious error if generous donors were forgotten, but it was inconsequential – perhaps it was even easier – if no one knew the names of the dead people being studied. In contrast, a person’s age, sex and place of origin were often written on skulls, because thi
s information was important in considering their demographic value. Joseph Hyrtl was unusually replete in his labelling and wrote the name, age, occupation and cause of death on the skulls in his collection. Today, Hyrtl’s labels are a popular talking point because they are so unusual, and because they unsettle our tendency to treat skulls in collections as objects rather than as people’s heads.

  Removing a person’s name and replacing it with a number is one of the ways in which collectors of human remains have detached dead bodies from their social relationships with the living. Stripped of their names, these dead people were separated from their friends and family, from the kin who might claim them back, and became instead things to study. Someone’s father or great-great-grandfather was transformed into an Australian male who died at the age of 36 in 1901. In many cases, this process of social detachment, which is in itself a form of power play between those who label people and those people who are labelled, was a continuation of the process that had started long before a person’s skull arrived at a museum, since, as we have seen, it was usually the people ‘without’ names or families who ended up headless in the first place.

  The Morton collection of nineteenth-century skulls at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

  As the big scientific institutions of the late nineteenth century followed the lead of men like Morton and Barnard Davis, intent on acquiring collections of skulls in a more systematic way, thousands of people’s heads were sent to the cities of America and Europe to be labelled, studied and stored. Relative to their great size, however, these collections of skulls rarely formed the basis of published research into human diversity. They were painstakingly catalogued by museum curators, but few detailed comparative works were published in the late nineteenth century. It was as if, once they were securely stacked up, safe from harm, in a suitably ‘civilizing’ institution, there was little more to be done with all these skulls. When they were carefully measured and compared, most notably by Morton and Barnard Davis, the results were frustratingly difficult to pin down.

  Samuel George Morton published Crania Americana in 1839 and Crania Aegyptiaca in 1844, and Barnard Davis brought out Crania Britannica in 1856 and his monumental Thesaurus Craniorum in 1867. Between them, these books listed thousands of skulls and tens of thousands of skull measurements. Thesaurus Craniorum contained an astonishing 25,000 measurements of skulls. Barnard Davis admitted: ‘When I first commenced it, the idea of having to make more than 25,000 minute and careful measurements with my own hands was almost oppressive.’ Almost! For some reason, perhaps because he developed a kind of immunity through repetition, he found the work easier as he proceeded. One obituary noted that his ‘strong points were untiring energy in the collection and record of specimens, rather than any deep power of observation, judgment or induction’, and Barnard Davis might well have agreed. His primary goal, it seems, was to create a database of skull shapes for reference rather than a revolutionary work of racial theory.

  There was no shortage of instruments available for this endeavour. Barnard Davis used a simple tape measure, callipers and rulers fitted with pegs, but as the century progressed the apparatus became more and more sophisticated. The profusion of measuring devices alone shows the extraordinary popularity of the subject: more than 600 different instruments for measuring skulls were on offer in the late nineteenth century. There were goniometers, craniophores, craniographs, spreading callipers and sliding callipers, osteometric boards, dynamometers and anthropometers. There were mandibular goniometers, stereographs, cephalometers, cyclometers and orbitostats. Morton chose to use a facial goniometer, a craniograph for drawing skulls and a craniophore for taking cranial capacity, as well as the more basic craniometer and callipers. The craniograph consisted of a large plank of wood, six feet long and a foot wide, with a stand at one end to hold the skull and an eyepiece at the other end for viewing it at a reduced scale. Morton’s office must have been a veritable forest of yardsticks and straightedges.

  One curator at the Army Medical Museum in the 1880s used the skulls to experiment with new measuring devices rather than to produce published research, as though measuring had become an end in itself. The result was great tables of distances, angles and ratios as each individual head, each thief and pirate and pauper, was transformed into a series of numbers on a page.

  Staff ‘ascertaining the capacity of the cranial cavity by means of water’, at the United States Army Medical Museum, Washington, DC, 1884.

  There was something authoritative about this impulse to convert people into numbers. Both Morton and Barnard Davis, as well as many of their contemporaries, were inclined to believe that racial differences were ancient and immutable. Barnard Davis wrote of ‘the essential and irreconcilable diversity of human races’, and both men believed that the offspring of mixed race unions would prove to be infertile, or, at the very least, significantly less fertile. This was clearly not the case, and Morton eventually considered abandoning fertility as a criterion for distinguishing species, such was his conviction that different races constituted incompatible biological groups. Men like Morton and Barnard Davis saw human diversity as though it were a skull: hard and inflexible. Their exhaustive efforts to measure human bodies represented an attempt to fix people in place and draw permanent boundaries between them. The problem was that while they believed they were discovering racial difference, really they were helping to create it.

  All the equipment and statistics gave skull-measuring the demeanour of a science, and converting people into numbers made them seem predictable, but the data had an annoying way of confusing the picture. There were always exceptions, gaps in the data, and groups or individuals who did not fit into the puzzle. People’s heads had a frustrating way of conflicting with prevailing ideas about racial hierarchies.

  Little phrases in Morton’s books betray his struggles to understand the complexity of the picture he was trying to portray – for example, when he declared himself ‘at a loss’ to distinguish between groups he felt should be different. He admitted that he had decided not to calculate an average skull size for the Caucasians in his collection because he recognized that the large number of smaller Hindu and Egyptian crania would bring the average down. At the same time, he included Peruvians in his Native American samples, which decreased the overall average size of this group. And when Native American subsamples had large heads he did not include these in his publication at all. He did not take sex or stature into account, so larger numbers of female skulls brought down the average skull size for his ‘Negroid’ group. Both the Peruvians he included and the Hindus he excluded also had smaller heads simply because of their smaller stature. Morton rounded up his averages for Germans and Anglo-Saxons, but rounded down his average for ‘Negroid’ Egyptians.

  So it went on. This was the problem with all of Morton’s results: because his collection had been gathered haphazardly, through serendipitous meetings and social opportunities, some sample groups were big while others were small, with just one or two skulls; some had more females, others had more children. There was no consistency in his data, or for that matter, in any craniologist’s data, because the nature of the material made ‘systematic collecting’ practically impossible. Representative samples were the stuff of craniologists’ dreams, but in reality they had to draw conclusions from the odd assortment of people’s heads that they had to hand.

  Another substantial problem centred around defining what the word ‘race’ actually meant. Some of Morton’s groups were divided up according to their religion or ethnicity – Arabs, Celts, Hindus, Negros – while others were grouped along national lines – Afghans, Dutch, English. Even more worryingly, Morton claimed to have excluded ‘idiots’ and ‘mixed races’ from his calculations, but these designations only highlight the fluidity of the categories he was trying to pin down. When was a person deemed appropriately idiotic to be left out, and on whose authority? Such definitions are decidedly unscientific, and Morton w
as wrestling with decisions that have plagued the whole history of the concept of ‘race’, because racial classifications always collapse on closer scrutiny. Do you define race according to nations, or regions, or villages, or even belief systems? In the end you have to draw lines somewhere, and there are always going to be ‘similar’ individuals standing on either side of the line you have drawn.

  In reality, the racial designations were created before the measuring had even begun, so that it was really a matter of trying to work out how the numbers corresponded with the Berber, Nubian, Eskimo, Arab, Hindu, African Negro, North American Indian and Bengali skulls you had to hand. The documentation was often vague, particularly for skulls that had been stolen from their graves, unearthed unexpectedly or taken from battlegrounds by men who had no personal interest in the greater intellectual questions of the day. As Morton wrote in 1849, he ‘sometimes had the skulls of both Europeans and Africans sent [to him] by mistake for those of Indians: that these should occasionally be mingled in the same cemeteries is readily understood; but a practised eye can separate them without difficulty’. So he set about categorizing people into groups according to skulls of no known provenance.