The problem for scientists interested in comparing people’s brains with their personalities was how to get their hands on the best and brightest brains. There were plenty of lower-class brains in hospital morgues to be dissected, but relatively few exceptional brains, because exceptional people had the means to protect themselves from such a demeaning fate post mortem. The solution was to lead by example. In the decades either side of 1900, scientists started to donate their brains to each other, so much so that bequeathing your brain to your colleagues became something of a ‘cottage industry’. Formal and informal ‘brain clubs’ sprang up in Munich, Paris, Stockholm, Philadelphia, Moscow and Berlin, where distinguished members agreed to leave their brains to their fellow anatomists, who expressed their gratitude by reading out the results of their investigations to other members of their club. One of the most famous was the Paris Mutual Autopsy Society, which was founded in 1872. Members could die happy in the knowledge that their own brain would become central to the utopian scientific project they had pursued so fervently in life.
Brain clubs solved two problems inherent in collecting other people’s heads: first, by providing well-educated brains for research, they counteracted the heavy sample bias towards lower socio-economic groups; and second, they meant that researchers could examine the substance of a person’s brain knowing something about that person’s character. Usually, when heads, skulls and brains were acquired illicitly, scientists knew nothing about their subject’s personality, making it impossible to link a person’s character with their physiology in any detail. In contrast, members of the Paris Mutual Autopsy Society were required to write a short essay detailing their health, intellect, sensations and abilities, that could be studied alongside their brains. The problem was, the investigations themselves were invariably inconclusive and, in the end, barely scientific at all.
The first autopsy report produced by the Paris Mutual Autopsy Society shows the level of subtlety achieved by many of the investigators: Louis Asseline, an anthropologist and city councillor in Paris, was found to have a particularly heavy brain with thick convolutions, which seemed ‘a remarkable thing’ to his dissectors, because Asseline had an intelligence of ‘exquisite delicacy, to the point of subtlety’. Even this kind of simplistic reasoning all but vanished in later reports by the society, which merely described the brain in question. Since the physical shape and texture of people’s brains varied so much, and these variations were hard to define, never mind link to specific character traits that were, themselves, hard to define, brain clubs became little more than another way to remember the dead. Their findings were rarely included in comprehensive studies of brain anatomy. Instead, they formed part of a new kind of memorial culture, in which members of a restricted audience expressed their intellectual reverence for the dead through the examination of the brain, and afterwards preserved the ‘relics’ of their ‘saints’ for veneration in the appropriate museum collection. Some of the Paris Mutual Autopsy Society brains were kept in jars labelled ‘intellectuals’, alongside a large collection of brain casts and skulls, at the museum of the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris.
One of the oldest extant brain collections from this time was created by Burt Green Wilder, an anatomist at Cornell University in upstate New York. In 1889 Wilder founded the Cornell Brain Society, a more modest version of the Paris Mutual Autopsy Society, as a supply source for his brains. He collected more than 600 brains, kept in labelled glass jars filled with formaldehyde. Like most other brain collections, Wilder’s collection was forgotten about during the twentieth century, as the cutting edge of medical research moved from the museum into the laboratory. By the late 1970s his brains sat neglected in the basement of an undergraduate biology building at Cornell, until a professor of cognitive science, Barbara L. Finlay, took pity on them. Recognizing their value to the history of neuroscience, Finlay organized a team of students to pass 200 brains, in their glass jars, out of the basement window and across the street to a new home. About 70 survive today. Most are kept in a basement closet, but Finlay says, ‘They see a lot of action in the elementary schools around here.’ She uses them not for research, but as props to get her students to confront the brain as an artefact and ask, ‘Is there something else or not?’
All those brains which survive in collections like Wilder’s, harvested one hundred years ago as scientific data, are now just people’s brains, with no recognized scientific value. And the underlying question that motivated Wilder – concerning the nature of the relationship between mind and matter – remains unanswered. Neuroscientists are still trying to correlate the physical structure of the brain with personality. Most neurobiologists would agree that the brain is a great mystery to science. Richard Wingate, a neuroscientist at King’s College London, has written: ‘Despite all that we intuitively understand of the rich complexity of the mind, the brain itself gives little if anything away. As an isolated object, its inner workings are completely inscrutable.’
Today, researchers use samples from brain banks to shed new light on conditions like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis, and to explore possible therapies for these conditions. A typical brain bank, such as the New York Brain Bank at Columbia University, comprises office space, a dissection room, a laboratory, a storage room for samples that are fixed in formalin, and a freezer room. The donor’s brain is removed in the mortuary and transported to the brain bank, as with any other organ donation. On its arrival, staff at the brain bank examine, photograph and weigh it. They take a sample of cerebral spinal fluid with a syringe and cut out some parts of the brain, such as the optic nerve and the pineal gland, which are then kept in separate bar-coded vials. Then they divide the brain in two. One half is preserved in formalin, while the other half is cut into ‘blocks’ which are placed in bar-coded containers and frozen in liquid nitrogen to minus 160 degrees centigrade. Hundreds of segmented brains are kept in these brain tissue freezers until they are needed for research.
It is a long way from Wilder’s glass jars, or boiling brains out in beer barrels. Joseph Barnard Davis had advised cutting out the brain and throwing it away ‘to facilitate the discharge of all the blood [from the head] by steeping’ and ensure a whiter cranium. He only had eyes for the skull. Dissection is about priorities: some parts are cut away so that other parts can be seen more clearly. Skulls are sawn through to get to brains; brains are pulled out to yield skulls. And, in the process, a person is turned into a series of artefacts that each belong in their own category: skulls, brains, hemiheads, pineal glands, optic nerves. Each category of thing has its own value to society, a value which rises and falls with the intellectual tide, the technological facilities of the time, and the broader cultural milieu. The rise of the brain has as much to do with the history of chemistry and preservatives as with the theories of the scientists involved.
At different times in history, both skulls and brains have been made to represent an entire person, so that the whole is reduced to one of its parts. That we might one day ‘become’ our skull, or our brain, is an unsettling thought to most people. Through the centuries, countless images of grinning skulls play on our uneasy knowledge that we will be outlived by our bones. And, as a sign of the materialist times, in the twentieth century, the image of the ‘brain in a jar’ became a sciencefiction cliché. The live, disembodied brain, suspended in a container of bubbling liquid, and still conscious in the absence of its body, can be presented as a vision either of great optimism or of a nightmarish hell. Science is endowed with the power to defy death and grant us eternal life, or else to make us the victim of an evil trick that imprisons our consciousness within our own helpless brain. As the historian of science Cathy Gere has written, ‘The brain in a vat is an emblem of our technocracy; a vision of scientists as immortality-bestowing gods and illusion-producing devils.’
Either way, the power comes from conjuring with the boundaries between parts and wholes. Both the very real and messy job of taking whole
bodies apart in the dissecting room and the more – as yet – fantastical ability to bring some of those parts back to life bestow an authority that comes from transgressing social norms. Cutting people up is not the done thing; and yet, for a select few who may be both brave and vulgar, behind closed doors, it is part of an initiation rite into a new world of professional authority and social prestige. These dissectors, through years of hard training, gain sovereignty over other people’s bodies in everyday life.
To many of them, cutting off a person’s head – albeit the head of an informed, anonymous and dead donor – represents one of the greatest physical and emotional challenges of all, but it brings with it undeniable thrills. Medical students often feel the enchantment, as well as the horror, that comes from exploring the boundaries between persons and things. Is the horror greater, or the enchantment sweeter, when, instead of splitting people up into heads and bodies, you try your hand at bringing those heads and bodies back to life? The ‘brain in the jar’ is still a futuristic vision, but not for want of trying.
8
Living Heads
In Roald Dahl’s 1959 short story ‘William and Mary’ a woman discovers that her late husband’s brain is being kept alive ‘in a biggish white enamel bowl about the size of a washbasin’. Mary is given a letter from her husband William, who had been an Oxford don, a week after his death, which explains his decision and asks her to visit him in hospital. She reads it while enjoying the cigarettes William furiously forbade her to smoke when he was alive. When she sees William’s brain in its washbasin with its single remaining eyeball staring up at her, she feels the thrill of power. She takes a deep drag on her cigarette, blows smoke into William’s eye, calls him ‘darling’ and demands to know when she can take him home. Dahl plays on the folly of a man who overestimates his brain and underestimates his wife. William’s white enamel bowl is the ultimate imprisonment. His naked brain is both everything and nothing: without his body it is as vulnerable as it is powerful.
The power play between William and Mary provides the emotional crux of Dahl’s story, but his matter-of-fact portrayal of the medical procedure required to remove William’s brain from his skull is just as sinister and just as fascinating. William’s doctor works methodically in the background, diligently following clinical protocols that are as impressive as they are appalling. In the twentieth century, the ‘brain in a jar’ became a common fictional device for exploring the wonder and horror of science, but how far is Dahl’s tale from the truth? Two hundred years ago, scientists seemed to bring severed heads back to life at the touch of a galvanic probe, while today cryonicists pay to have their own severed heads deep frozen in the belief that they will be awakened to a new life in the future; there have always been those who believe that this fiction will one day become reality. By enabling us to either elude death (as severed heads) or cling to life (as detached brains), could the power residing in our heads render our bodies superfluous? Could decapitation be just another stage in a person’s life?
Saintly relics and dead body parts have long been believed to have a kind of ‘life after death’, but their power was necessarily mysterious. The life in them was not sustained through death so much as it was recast after death, and the workings of the living dead were known only to God. Preserved heads may have had some kind of ongoing force, but it was not the same force that had animated the person in life. Death itself was the moment of becoming something new. But what if earthly life could be sustained beyond death, and decapitation was not as final as it had once seemed? Perhaps the stories of saints reciting psalms while carrying their own heads had some basis in the laws of nature after all.
At the turn of the nineteenth century quite a few people were in the business of bringing the dead back to life. A chance discovery involving a steel scalpel, a brass hook and a pair of dissected frog’s legs in Bologna in the 1780s started something of a craze. Luigi Galvani’s experiments on muscle contraction led to the rather alarming discovery that an electric charge could reanimate dead animals, causing their bodies to jump and twitch and even thrash around at the touch of a metal probe. Galvani called this energy ‘animal electricity’ and he believed that it emanated from within the animal itself. In other words, with his tools, Galvani thought he was reigniting the very life force of a dead body for a few seconds or minutes at a time. Before long, other scientists were experimenting with the dismembered limbs of small mammals and wondering at the power they could wield over the dead with electrostatic devices and, later, early batteries. Doctors, meanwhile, began to administer little shocks from friction generators to their patients as a cure for everything from partial paralysis to melancholy.
Galvani’s nephew, Giovanni Aldini, was his most fervent disciple and Aldini spent the early 1800s touring Europe with his large batteries of zinc and copper discs, demonstrating the existence of animal electricity. It made for an astonishing show, as various parts of rabbits, sheep, dogs and oxen vaulted around on the table at Aldini’s merest touch. Sometimes Aldini would cut off a dog’s head in front of his audience and proceed to reanimate it with his galvanic probes, so that its teeth started to chatter and its eyes rolled in their sockets, leaving his spectators to wonder whether the dog was still alive and suffering from the torment.
Illustration of Giovanni Aldini’s experiments on decapitated bodies, from his Essai théorique et expérimental sur le galvinisme, Paris, 1804.
In 1803, Aldini caused a minor sensation in Britain when he experimented on the body of a man, George Foster, who had been hanged for murder at Newgate Prison. The demonstration took place in front of an audience at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. The assembled spectators watched wide-eyed as Aldini worked his magic:
On the first application of the process to the face, the jaw of the deceased criminal began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process the right hand was raised and clenched, the legs and thighs were set in motion. It appeared to the uninformed part of the bystanders as if the wretched man was on the eve of being restored to life.
In the face of such compelling evidence, many believed in the theory of ‘animal electricity’. Indeed, some found the evidence a little too credible for comfort. At a similar public demonstration in Glasgow in 1818, as another dead murderer’s chest rose again and he appeared to breathe while ‘every muscle in his countenance was simultaneously thrown into fearful action; rage, horror, despair, anguish, and ghastly smiles, united in their hideous expression’, several spectators had to leave the room and one man fainted.
Aldini had experimented on human heads in Bologna, in one instance connecting two severed heads together by their necks and passing an electric current between them. Beheaded criminals fuelled a number of similar experiments in Europe at the time. By the early nineteenth century, galvanism had reached such a feverish pitch in Germany that the use of decapitated human heads in experimentation was made illegal.
Dr Wendt, of Breslau, must have been one of those who found his work brought to an end by this new law. In an experiment on a human head in 1803, Wendt arranged for two of his assistants to take hold of the head of a man who had been executed by the sword, in the moments after the man’s death. They clutched the head firmly while Wendt touched the severed spinal cord with a galvanic probe. The face contracted in such a lifelike way that Wendt was convinced it felt pain. The eyelids closed when Wendt thrust his finger towards an eye, or when his assistants held the head up towards the sun. When they shouted the victim’s name in his ear his eyes opened, he turned his gaze slowly towards the side and his mouth opened as though he was trying to speak. One and a half minutes after his decapitation the man’s head was less responsive, but deep probing of the spinal cord produced such violent facial contortions – the eyelids slammed shut, the cheeks puffed out, the teeth clamped down on somebody’s finger – that people watching declared, ‘He’s alive!’
Since we are biologi
cally hard-wired to respond – spontaneously, rapidly and unconsciously – to the movement of another person’s face, the horror of a severed head that rolls its eyes and grits its teeth is, essentially, a physical reflex. When a face looks as though it is expressing discomfort or struggling to communicate, our brains react automatically: smiling faces make us feel relaxed; depressed faces make us feel anxious; distressed faces make us feel sympathetic. We cannot help but respond emotionally to the expression on someone’s face. And when that someone is a bodiless head, all those reactions – emotional, physical and rational – must be thrown into turmoil, as our emotional instinct clashes with the logical conclusion that this person must be dead. No wonder spectators cried out, vomited and fainted at the sight of a person’s decapitated head when it showed every sign of trying to communicate. Dismembered arms and legs might wriggle and thrust about on the demonstrator’s table, but a person’s head reached out to its audience in a way that no other body part could, because its movements appeared to be more than just physical – they were the movements of a sentient, conscious, feeling creature, whose plight was horrifically captivating.
Experiments and demonstrations that explored the body’s neurological response to electricity may have been shocking, but relatively few people witnessed them. The guillotine, a machine that took life away rather than seeming to restore it, did far more to raise the spectre of the living dead in the public imagination. The prominence of the guillotine as a method of execution in Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century forced people to confront an extremely sudden and graphic transition from life into death. Victims of the guillotine did not struggle towards death or slide into unconsciousness as they did on the gallows. Instead, heads could be chopped off bodies with astonishing speed. The mechanism of the guillotine was so fast that observers were left wondering whether death could occur so quickly: perhaps life persisted in these unfortunate heads after the fatal blow. Since no one survived decapitation for long enough to satisfy the curiosity of the living, it was impossible to know how death under the blade of the guillotine felt, if it felt of anything at all.
Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found Page 23