Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

by Frances Larson

  The experiences of heart-transplant patients are perhaps the most astonishing of all. It is relatively common for people to experience changes in their personality. A study of 35 male heart recipients in Israel found that nearly half had a notion that they had taken on the personality of their donor. A similar survey in Vienna showed that 20 per cent of patients reported personality changes, which they attributed either to the trauma of nearly dying or to the new heart they had received. People report changes to their temperament, to what they eat, to their musical taste, to their daily routines and sleep patterns, and even to their sexual preferences after a transplant operation. Occasionally a patient’s story hits the headlines when they claim to have taken on the personality of their donor even before they knew what their donor was like. One man said that he had developed a great love of classical music before discovering that his donor was a keen violinist. A woman claimed that she inexplicably craved beer and chicken nuggets after her transplant, and later learned that her young male donor had loved these foods.

  Patients like these may have picked up information subconsciously during their stays in hospital that has helped to shape their new identity. And personality changes are likely to be linked not only to the ordeal of a near-death experience, but also to the powerful immunosuppressant drugs patients have to take for the rest of their lives. Nevertheless, the phenomenon is so well recognized that researchers have started to posit other theories. The heart, for example, produces hormones and has its own nervous system which send messages out into the body through an extensive pathway of neurons and synapses akin to those in the brain. This has been termed the heart’s ‘little brain’. The gut has an even more extensive ‘little brain’ with over 100 million neurons that control some of your emotional response – that feeling of ‘butterflies in your stomach’ really is the brain in your stomach communicating with the brain in your head. The neurons in the gut may not influence conscious thought, but they do influence our mood, making the distinctions between the mind and the body less clear-cut than you might assume.

  Although the possible physiological aspect to a patient’s response to having an organ transplant is intriguing, the psychological response can be overwhelming. As many as two thirds of heart-transplant recipients feel distressed afterwards, and a third experience sustained distress for the rest of their lives. A small number of patients have even attempted to cut themselves open to try and undo the operation because they are so tormented by the intrusion in their bodies. For these people, their new heart is not just a ‘replacement part’, it is an intruder, or a second being, like a guest whom they have to harbour inside themselves. Recipients talk of their new heart as though it is a kind of foetal life, like a different person growing within them, a feeling that can be either special or sinister. They talk about ‘the heart’ instead of ‘my heart’, and fear that ‘the heart is rejecting me’. They may feel as though they are living two lives, so that when someone asks, ‘How are you today?’, the reply is, ‘We are okay.’ A minority of recipients report these feelings, but it is not uncommon for patients to feel they have to stretch, double or split their personality after a heart-transplant operation. In some cases it can lead to psychosis and major psychiatric problems. A procedure that is ‘successful’ as far as the doctors are concerned may not be all that it seems.

  The sheer complexity of the human response to organ transplantation makes the prospect of a head transplant alarming, to say the least. A small number of full-face transplants have been performed since 2010 (the first partial face transplant took place in 2005), but so far there is a lack of data on the psychological effects. Most of the ethical controversy has focused on the fact that a face transplant inflicts a life-time of immunosuppressant drugs upon an otherwise healthy person and brings with it the risk of infection, rejection and disease. When it comes to the psychological implications of incorporating somebody else’s face into your own, commentators agree that we simply do not know enough about people’s faces to be able to predict the consequences.

  The face is unique among the organs as an ‘organ of expressivity’. Unlike the heart, the lungs and the kidneys, which no one sees, our face helps to define and redefine us by connecting us to the other people (and objects) that shape our identity. Our face mediates our creative interdependence in the world. ‘Our sense of ourselves as fully human, that is, as having dignity and moral worth, is not a given,’ philosopher Diane Perpich has written on the ethics of face transplants. ‘It is an incredibly fragile, intersubjective achievement.’ Face transplants do not simply replace the recipient’s face with the donor’s face; instead, they create a new face by incorporating two people into one. Surgeons may mark out on their patient’s head where one body ends and another one begins, but it is far from clear where (or how) those lines are drawn within the new person they have helped to conceive.

  Transplanting a head and all its contents would be even more radical. It is telling that Robert White’s team referred to the monkeys they had operated on as ‘preparations’ – echoing ‘the wretch – the miserable monster’ that Frankenstein brought to life – as though they were acknowledging that their creations were no longer monkeys at all, but were on their way to being something new. White and leading cryonicists prefer to call the procedure in general a ‘body transplant’. Why is transplanting a body more acceptable than transplanting a head? From its lofty position, the head has long been thought to rule the body. It sees, hears, smells and tastes the world around it; its muscles express themselves with more subtlety than all the others put together; it keeps the hub of the nervous system safe inside. There are so many reasons for the history of our obsession with our own heads – some practical, some aesthetic, some biological, some philosophical. The head has a presence of its own. Maybe one day we will be able to make the head’s apparent autonomy a physical reality, and then we will have to decide whether we really want to know if our heads can be made to rule over our bodies once and for all.

  Conclusion

  Other People’s Heads

  Writing a book about decapitation is an exercise in the kind of strategies it describes. I have never watched a person being beheaded, or seen a freshly severed head. Books contain the horror, like the surgical drapes in a dissecting room or the glass cases in a museum. They provide a frame that permits our scrutiny, and promises to protect our integrity. They keep us at a distance. A sense of detachment, and the power it can unleash, links the narratives I have told here, despite their infinite differences.

  The physical detachment of a person’s head is often preceded by an assumed social detachment that separates the perpetrator from his victim. This social detachment has often taken the form of racism, as in the Pacific campaign of the Second World War, or the early anthropological quests to measure human cranial variation. In some instances, the racism was so extreme that victims were perceived to be virtually subhuman. The same could be said of the class-based prejudice that enabled earlier generations of anatomists to distance themselves from their poverty-stricken ‘patients’. In these cases, the alienation of the poor helped to transform their nameless dead bodies into ‘clinical material’ in the hands of the doctors who dismembered them in hospital dissecting rooms.

  Social distance of a different kind has been shaped by religious beliefs about heaven and hell, which set certain people – saints or sinners – outside normal society and rendered their bodies more suitable for cutting up. In the past, criminal bodies were stripped of the right to remain intact after death, and dissection became part of their eternal punishment. Divine bodies, on the other hand, transcended the laws of nature and were so powerful they were routinely divided up and redistributed among the living as saintly relics. Criminal bodies and holy bodies were set apart and treated differently from everyone else.

  Today, a sense of detachment is created through a carefully regulated system of professional anonymity, as in the systems put in place in medical schools which help transform people
’s bodies into numbered specimens so they can be more easily examined. Now, social distance is deliberately generated, as part of a contract between the medical profession and the people who choose to give their bodies to science.

  Whatever the specific circumstances, usually the people who take heads see themselves as inherently different from the people whose heads they take. They objectify their target to a certain extent. It is easy to see how cutting off a person’s head transforms that person into a particularly potent kind of object – something that can be opened up, passed around or paraded in public – but frequently that process has already begun before the first cut is made. Put another way, it is a rare individual who decapitates a man known to him personally (although some anatomists have been known to dissect their friends and family). It is far more likely to be ‘the enemy’, ‘the donor’, ‘the specimen’, or ‘the incorruptible flesh’ of a divine being that greets the blade of the knife. This sense of social detachment can turn a person into an object before they are even dead.

  Social distance is often accompanied by physical distance. Decapitation, and its products, belong far away from everyday life. It is extremely unusual for a person to be beheaded in the street, or at home, or while doing any of their daily chores, because heads are usually taken in places that are separated from the domestic sphere. This geographical remoteness can allow the perpetrator to assume an alternative identity and occupy an alternative reality, one where normal moral codes are inverted.

  The best example of this is on the battlefield. In the jungles of the Pacific Islands during World War II, soldiers who performed atrocities frequently looked back on their experiences as though they were contemplating someone else: ‘That is not me. Something happened to me’; or, ‘I just started killing any kinda way I could kill. It just came. I didn’t know I had it in me.’ The strange landscape and lack of any links to their civilian life helped to sustain an inversion of the moral order. It is easier to be a different person when you are in a different world. In this alternative reality, far from family and friends at home, men were encouraged to act violently and were praised for killing.

  Echoes of this ‘split-personality’ effect – in which a new persona emerges in the context of a distinct realm that is governed by inverted conventions – are also evident in execution rituals. Executioners and condemned criminals alike were segregated from the community. They ‘performed’ for the public on the scaffold, which marked out a distinct space for them that was governed by different rules. Sometimes victims could pierce through this barrier, by crying out and appealing to the crowd, but ultimately they remained untouchable even in plain sight. Today, spectators watch criminals beheading their victims online. Now, the role of the viewer is mediated by a video camera, which simultaneously confirms that the events on film are complete and happened in another time and place. The separation keeps us at a distance, but it can also encourage us to watch despite our reservations, or help to excuse us for taking part.

  Perhaps the same notion of people sharing an interaction but occupying different worlds informed the colonial enterprise, which was itself, of course, pursued far from home. Men like James Jameson not only saw themselves as distant in time and space from the indigenous people they collected up for study, they also felt empowered by being in foreign lands, where it was possible to experiment with new personas and escape retribution.

  In the medical profession, procedures are permitted behind the doors of the dissecting room or in the operating theatre that would be shockingly transgressive on the streets outside. Medics, too, occupy a different world from the rest of us. Graduating medical students, learning the ‘necessary inhumanity’ required to practise their profession, often reflect on the distant and uncomprehending lay culture they have left behind, and how far they have travelled from their previous identity and frame of reference. This new identity is partly sustained by the choreography of professional life. Rituals like scrubbing up, wearing theatre gowns and surgical masks, and working in rooms that are closed to the public help doctors to behave in extraordinary ways.

  Similarly, the products of decapitation, the heads themselves, often command a separate sphere of life. Today, they are invariably kept behind glass in museums or churches, or locked up, out of sight. Our interactions with them are governed by strict codes of behaviour and only a small number of trained professionals can handle them. When ‘showmen’ like Gunther von Hagens ‘remove the frame’ it leads to controversy. Similarly, when trophy skulls or shrunken heads do turn up in domestic settings – found hidden in an attic or basement after many years – people usually find their presence unsettling. Since these are artefacts with no traditional role in our society, they tend to remain perpetually ‘out of place’.

  If preserved heads are incongruous in daily life today, many of them were created in places well populated by dead bodies. Not only can the environment create a realm that is ‘set apart’, it is frequently one in which people live in intense proximity with the dead. We live in a society where the living have little to do with the dead, but in theatres of war, in medical schools and hospitals, and even, one could argue, in museums, dead bodies are plentiful. And when you witness death every day – when you see a lot of cadavers – you get used to it.

  Soldiers and medics adapt to dealing with death, and even to dismembering corpses, remarkably quickly. People find that they can cut, rip and deflesh dead humans much as they could any other dead animal. And since medical students rarely report any deep personal trauma, the horror lies not so much in what you can do to another person’s body as in the circumstances in which you find yourself doing it. The fearful fury of hand-to-hand combat is a world away from the meticulous investigations of medics who dissect the cadavers of voluntary donors, but in both scenarios, what was shocking at first can become almost mundane.

  Nonetheless, perpetrators often defer to a higher authority in the course of their actions. This authority not only provides a structure to their dealings with the dead, but also relieves them of their personal responsibility. A professor, a sergeant, a judge, or even God may encourage, guide or order acts of brutality on the understanding that this is the price that must be paid for a higher cause: ‘for the good of society’. Once those acts become part of a social system they are not necessarily condemned as evidence of individual psychosis. Instead, they are given cultural value. This value may be contested and troubling, but it frames our attitude to horrific events nonetheless. In various walks of life, gruesome decapitations have become part of our cultural fabric, and part of our collective heritage.

  Such violent acts can inspire a surprising range of emotions. Feelings like grief, disgust and shame are to be expected, but these negative reactions are often mirrored by a sense of intimacy and wonder. Holding a severed head in your hands, even cutting off another person’s head, can be a thrill. Owning somebody else’s head can be a fascinating and deeply moving experience. It can be an expression of respect or an act of abuse, or both at once. People invariably treat severed heads as prized possessions, since they are hardly commonplace objects. Whether as a religious relic, a pseudo-scientific icon, an artist’s muse or a soldier’s memento mori, countless human heads have been transformed into vessels for reverence. Despite the trauma of decapitation, or perhaps because of it, severed heads retain something of the spirit of the living, and can therefore inspire nurturing instincts. From the ‘sweet fragrance’ of Oliver Plunkett’s head to the enemy skulls adorned with hats and pipes by soldiers in the Second World War, other people’s heads can be surprisingly intimate objects. Some enjoy a more extensive social life after death than their owners did in life.

  Regardless of the context, positive and negative emotions often intermingle in confusing ways when people confront a severed head, which may be one of the reasons many resort to humour to distance themselves from the strange sensations they are feeling. It may also be one of the reasons heads are so compelling: they inspire an unfamiliar mixtu
re of emotions. They make us feel odd and different, and this is part of their power.

  Although they are often horrific and distressing, and embody great personal injustice, severed heads demand our attention in complicated and conflicting ways. Both familiar and other-worldly, they remind us of our own fragility. They draw us in to peer inside ourselves, and invite us to survey the limits of our humanity. We may not like what we see, but that in itself is no reason to turn away.

  Sources

  This book is a work of synthesis and I have relied on the research of many other scholars. I would like to thank them all. Since this book is intended as a popular account, I have refrained from citing names in the text. Detailed notes are available at www.franceslarson.com/Severed. I would particularly like to mention the work of Simon Harrison, Paul Friedland, Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Daniel Arasse, Colin Dickey, Helen MacDonald, Mary Roach and Barbie Zelizer. A full bibliography follows, arranged alphabetically by author, then by title where there is no known author, followed by unpublished manuscripts and/or websites.

  Prologue: Oliver Cromwell’s Head

  C. Donovan, ‘On the Reputed Head of Oliver Cromwell’, Phrenological Journal, vol. 17, 1844, pp. 365–378.

  Jonathan Fitzgibbons, Cromwell’s Head, Kew: National Archives, 2008.

  Henry Howarth, ‘The Embalmed Head of Oliver Cromwell’, Archaeological Journal, 1911, pp. 237–253.