Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

by Frances Larson

  Some information about a person’s nationality, age and sex was usually the best that could be hoped for when a skull was received, and criminals’ heads tended to be the most thoroughly documented accessions to cranial collections. But craniologists, like phrenologists, spent considerable time remarking on the individuals that did not fit with their expectations. Take the French anthropologist Paul Broca, who diligently measured Parisian skulls from the twelfth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, expecting to find a gradual increase in size. When the eighteenth-century crania turned out to be the smallest, he managed to demonstrate that they had been collected from a cemetery populated by poor people and concluded that this must account for the unanticipated results.

  When dealing with so many skulls, so many variables and so many measurements of those variables, arguments could be made for pretty much any theory of racial classification. And all the while, more and more skulls accumulated, for more and more measurements, in the hope that results from a larger sample size would be more statistically valid. But however many more skulls they got their hands on, the story never seemed to get any clearer. The skull, such an attractive object for study, proved increasingly elusive and difficult to pin down. Craniometrists who undertook ambitious comparisons ran the risk of drowning in their data.

  Barnard Davis, for his part, may have had some awareness that the endless quest for numbers tended to obfuscate results. As he pondered on the relative usefulness of language, art and statistics in helping to adequately describe the variety in human skull shape, he admitted that ‘every mode of investigation and representation is likely to prove somewhat imperfect and inadequate to the full conception of the varieties and peculiarities in the originals’. It did not help that as he revised his own manuscript he came across ‘thousands of corrections’, which left him wondering how many more of his own errors remained to confuse the picture further. Accuracy was another recurring problem. No matter how many new measuring devices came on the market, too often the results did not quite add up. In 1914, Aleš Hrdlička, a curator at the US Army Medical Museum declared its existing catalogue of 2,000 skull measurements, published in 1880, ‘more or less inaccurate’ and therefore of little use. So he set about creating a new, more accurate catalogue.

  The drive towards ever more precise measurements has continued to the present day. Morton and Barnard Davis were by no means the last to devote their lives to brandishing callipers and tape measures. Aleš Hrdlička became one of the great craniometrists of the twentieth century. During the course of his career, Hrdlička made between ten and sixteen separate cranial measurements for an estimated 8,400 individuals. William Howells, an American anthropologist forty years younger than Hrdlička, made up to eighty individual measurements for more than 2,500 crania. Howells and his wife spent their retirement in the 1970s and ’80s measuring people’s skulls.

  In the twenty-first century, the majority of skulls are photographed, using a special camera lens that minimizes distortion, and the images are then digitally marked at specific points. This means that rather than comparing separate measurements, researchers can compare the spatial relationships between various points on the skull as a whole. Some skulls are scanned. One of the most ambitious scanning projects is the Open Research Scan Archive, which aims to produce a database of high-resolution three-dimensional CT scans of all the crania housed in the Mütter Museum, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History, including the 1,200 skulls in the Morton collection and all 139 of Josef Hyrtl’s skulls. The database is growing all the time. The resulting archive allows researchers to compare bones in different collections from anywhere in the world, without ever having to touch them. Now, mathematical software calculates volumes, contrasts the geometry of different skulls and tests the accuracy of earlier measurements.

  Meanwhile, the field of craniometry, when it is applied to ancestry or race, is still dominated by debates about its own validity, and scholars publish papers testing the precision of their own tests. The database of cranial measurements set up by the Howells is one of the most widely used today by those attempting to estimate the ancestry of individual skulls. It forms the basis of a computer program called CRANID which uses statistical tests to assign a likely geographical origin to any skull that has been measured according to a set protocol. But CRANID, and another leading program called FORDISC which is also based on the Howells’ numbers, have recently been shown to have poor accuracy for predicting the ancestry of a skull. William Howells might not have been surprised, because his own research into skull shape convinced him that humans were remarkably uniform as a species. He cautioned that the variation within populations substantially outweighs the variation between groups, and any study which takes one specific morphological feature as a definitive marker of population affinity is suspect.

  It is hard to think of a more comprehensive condemnation, coming as it did from a man who devoted his life to the cause. The use of craniometry as a predictive tool is fraught with difficulties. Scientists are not comparing skulls, they are comparing measurements of skulls, and even when you disregard the mistakes that must occur when so many measurements are involved, the way in which measurements are taken differs among all the individuals who set about the task. A recent comparison of Hrdlička’s measurements with those of Howells found that only five were comparable and could be used across the databases. What’s more, Hrdlička’s own measurements varied during the course of his career. Every person who provides a measurement may introduce error or inconsistency. Then there are the very real problems involved in correlating human variation with skull shape, as Howells pointed out.

  Variation in head shape is affected by climate, health and what people eat, as well as by who their parents and grandparents were, which, in itself, has little to do with where they live. Quite apart from the fact that roughly 90 per cent of global craniometric variation occurs within local populations, there are the problems with the definitions of ‘geographical region’ in the first place. If ‘race’ is a cultural construct, with no basis in biology, studies of ‘ancestry’ or ‘regionality’ suffer from the same problem because scientists have to define their geographical regions first, then use their tests to decide how far the skulls match the regions they have defined. Different cultures will divide up a map of the world in different ways, so that the regions, like races, have their own cultural history. But the fact that there are any number of outliers as well as widely accepted reasons for doubting the validity of correlating head shape with ancestry does nothing to deter people from measuring skulls to predict their provenance.

  Of course, sensible questions will produce sensible answers. When criteria are carefully drawn and different tests are used in support of each other; and when the data from skull measurements are combined with other information, such as the archaeological context or genetic makeup of the bones in question, craniometry is a useful tool. What is more, skulls offer a range of important insights into the human condition, because, just like all the other bones in our body, they have been shaped by the course of our growth, as well as by our health, nutrition, environment and parentage, and any physical trauma, wear and tear and medical interventions we have endured. But skulls have proved attractive to scientists in the past for reasons that run deeper than any specific question we might now ask about the cause of a person’s death or their staple diet.

  There was more than a whiff of trophy-taking to the clandestine exploits of earlier generations of cranial collectors. In their audacious fervour to categorize the people of the world, they often tyrannized them, and the huge stores of human remains in our museums are an uncomfortable reminder of the oppression and inequalities of our past.

  Over the last thirty years, more and more indigenous communities have requested the return of their dead ancestors so that they can be given a proper burial and laid to rest in peace. New laws have come into force in the UK and the USA to regulate the treatment
of human remains in museums, and guidelines have been revised, at both national and institutional level, to structure negotiations between institutions and descendants of the dead whose body parts they possess. Meanwhile, many human remains in museums have been taken off display as a mark of respect, to be given a different kind of burial, packed in acid-free paper and foam, in cool, dark, solitary and silent surroundings, away from the prying eyes of the public.

  Heads, bones and body parts of dead people from all over the world have been returned to their descendants in recent years. Skulls have been sent from London to the Torres Strait, from Birmingham to California, and from Edinburgh to Australia, to name but a few examples. The head of a king from Ghana who was executed by Dutch colonists in 1838, and whose head was kept in a medical museum in Leiden, was returned in 2009. Twenty people’s skulls were sent back to Namibia from the Medical Historical Museum in Berlin in September 2011. When these heads had first arrived in Germany, on the eve of the First World War, they were preserved whole, in formaldehyde, with their skin and hair intact, but progressive dissections during the 1920s left only the skulls behind. The Smithsonian returned Ishi’s brain to his tribal descendants in 2000, to be reunited with his ashes and reinterred on his homeland. The Redding Rancheria and the Pit River Tribe decided to keep Ishi’s final resting place a secret.

  Indigenous groups all over the world have rekindled those links to the living that were lost when their ancestors were first made into ‘specimens’ years ago. The skulls of thousands of criminals and poorhouse residents are, for the most part, left undisturbed because there is no comparable living community to claim them. In Turin, however, people have called for the heads and skulls of criminals in the Lombroso Museum to be given a proper burial. Cesare Lombroso was a nineteenth-century Italian physician who collected 400 skulls, brains and wax models of heads in his search for a biological theory of criminal behaviour. Many of them were taken from prison morgues without permission from the families of the dead prisoners concerned. The Lombroso Museum is determined that the collection should stay intact, as a testament to its creator’s contribution to the history of science, but the debate may be a sign of changing attitudes towards human remains regardless of their provenance.

  The New Zealand Maori have undertaken one of the most exhaustive campaigns for the return of the preserved heads of their ancestors. Since 2003, more than 70 toi moko (preserved heads) have been returned to Te Papa Museum in Wellington from public collections in Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Australia, Scotland, Argentina, France, Hawaii, the Netherlands, Ireland, Canada, the United States and Germany. There are currently more than 120 toi moko at Te Papa, and it is thought that at least 100 more remain in collections worldwide.

  At Auckland Museum and Te Papa Museum in Wellington the remains of Maori men and women are not accessioned or given a number like other artefacts in the collections because they are not considered to be museum objects. They are ancestors, and as such they are kept in a separate area of the museum, in consecrated repositories called wahi tapu, to which only kaitiaki, or custodians, have access, and where appropriate rituals are followed for viewing the dead. Today, museum curators observe rituals in their storage areas, in accordance with the wishes of indigenous communities, such as talking to the dead, wearing appropriate clothing, visiting at certain times, or asking staff in nearby offices to remain silent. The very definition of a museum is shifting as people are given the space to honour their dead.

  7

  Dissected Heads

  Bill Hayes, who joined a dissecting class at the University of California, San Francisco while researching a book, described the moment when one of his instructors produced a ‘hemihead’ from a sloshing Tupperware container: ‘Dana reaches down with gloved hands and lifts out what I can only describe as a horror: a severed head, split clean down the middle. A human profile from the inside out.’ Two students turn away as Dana lifts out the half-head, and clear embalming fluid runs over the man’s exposed brain, throat and severed neck into the container. Dana puts the head, face side down, on a towel on the table.

  The students are learning about how humans swallow food. As their discussion turns to the intricacies of the anatomy of the tongue, the swallowing mechanism and the gag reflex, Hayes finds that the head loses much of its gruesomeness, and he concludes that it has a certain aesthetic appeal of its own. ‘[B]y comparison with our adventures in the abdominal cavity, the hemihead is neat and clean, practically free of fat, and looks carefully packaged. Each part has its own tidy little chamber. It is hard to imagine how a headache could ever fit in there.’

  Hayes even volunteers to put the hemihead back in its Tupperware box at the end of the session, and as he does so he takes a moment to look at the man’s face and reflect on his appearance and the life he may have led. The man has a pale bushy eyebrow and appears to be in his eighties. ‘Maybe he had been a criminal, maybe a doctor.’ Hayes finds that he can explore the anatomy of this dead man’s head without denying the cadaver its humanity. He does not need to ‘objectify’ the head completely in order to be able to work with it as an object, wrapping it up in gauze and lifting it back into its Tupperware box. ‘This was someone, I think, caught in a upswell of awe, a thinking, dreaming person.’

  Dissecting a person’s head is physically hard work that requires great delicacy and precision. You have to sever the neck with a saw, peel the skin from the face, bisect the head between the eyes, and chisel around the skullcap before sawing it off to extract the brain. It is smelly, messy, complicated and difficult to identify all the tiny structures in the face and neck, not to mention having to cope with the emotional ordeal of treating a human body in this way. Some students are disgusted, terrified and haunted, others are angry at having to do it, but many, despite everything, report an overwhelming sense of wonder at the beauty of the human body even when faced with such butchery.

  Human dissection teaches students the physicality of the body through touch. They learn the textures, shapes and structures of the human form, and how they are related to each other. They learn the mechanics of bones and tendons and muscles and nerves. They explore how specific conditions impact different parts of the body: the circulatory system, the nervous system, the respiratory system, the immune system, and so on. These are some of the academic objectives of an anatomy class, but there are other lessons under way too. Students also learn how to perform emotional tasks without emotion. They talk of ‘shrugging off what you are seeing’, ‘desensitizing’ and ‘distancing yourself from’ the job in hand. They learn to manage the dual nature of the cadaver – or patient – as both human and object. As one student explained, ‘When you cut a cadaver’s head in half, you don’t let yourself think about the fact that this was a person who had lived and loved and you know had sex and kissed people, that the tongue has kissed someone, you just kind of shut yourself off from that thought’.

  Some parts of the body make it hard to ‘stop yourself thinking about’ what you are doing to the cadaver. The head, hands and genitals are constantly singled out as particularly challenging dissections, and studies have shown that stress among students is more likely to increase during these classes, because these are the most human, the most personal and intimate parts of the body. They are more likely to remind students that their actions are destructive, and that the corpse in front of them has other significances in the world beyond the anatomy lab. It is at these moments that the cadaver becomes a person again. Heads, hands and genitals almost invite students to see their own vulnerabilities, their own fragile humanity, in the physical form of the cadaver. Confronted by the idiosyncrasies of the dead donor, they find that their own personhood is reflected back at them and realize that they are ‘only human’ too.

  It is easier when human bodies do not look like human bodies. Usually, the cadaver is shrouded in protective gauze and drapes, leaving one small part accessible to the scalpel, so students only have to deal with one ‘disembodi
ed’ section at a time. And when you have cut through the skin of the stomach or the arm and ‘it begins to look like an anatomy book and it doesn’t look like a human being anymore’ it helps psychologically. These are the straightforward dissections. Which is why most medical schools leave the ‘head and neck’ classes until the end of the syllabus.

  Psychiatrist Christine Montross, in writing of her experiences in the dissecting room, says that ‘the most alarming moments of anatomy are not the bizarre, the unknown. They are the familiar.’ There is nothing more familiar than a person’s face. People often say that they find the head ‘too real’ or ‘too human’ to dissect with ease. One student who had to bisect a head in anatomy class wrote:

  Today, watching my classmates switch from the electric handsaw to an actual hand held saw, furiously trying to get through the remainder of the skull and facial skeleton, all I could think about was how horrifying this was … What kind of initiation process is this? I know I’m in medical school, no one ever said this was going to be easy, but my god I wish we had prosections [specimens dissected for the purpose of demonstration] for the head and neck. It is far too personal. The head, the face, the neck are far too human. I cannot dissociate this from cutting into a woman’s head.

  It does not help that the head is the most difficult part of the human anatomy to dissect, because it is the most intricate and technically challenging. The dissector needs to be both brutal, to saw through the skull bone and chisel it off, but also gentle and cautious so as not to damage any of the soft tissues beneath. The membranes within the skull are stuck fast to the surface of the bone and have to be wrenched off. To remove the brain, the dissector must hold it steady within its cramped, dark chamber while the spinal cord is cut below, as well as the many arteries and nerves that attach it to the body. Even then it has to be pulled out with unexpected force to sounds of tearing tissue. Anatomists wield electrical saws, hammers and chisels to explore the head, but there are also intricate components, like the eye and the ear, that are minute and unforgiving, and require the use of tiny scalpels, tweezers and steady fingers. Dissecting a head is physically and mentally tiring.