Descartes' Bones

by Russell Shorto

  Having thus hitchhiked his way into history, Sparrman spent the next three years at sea with Cook, skirting the pack ice of Antarctica and rounding the Antarctic Circle, circumnavigating New Zealand and exploring Tahiti and other islands of the South Pacific. One part of Cook’s mission was a modern challenge to received wisdom much as William Harvey’s theory of the circulation of the blood was a challenge to the older system of bodily humors—or indeed as Descartes’ philosophy represented a confrontation with the medieval system of knowledge developed by the Scholastic philosophers. The Royal Society had charged Cook with finding the continent of Terra Australis, which had been theorized by Aristotle and later writers to lie at the southern pole. The ancient thinking was that a giant land mass must exist at the bottom of the earth to counter those at the northerly extremes. Many members of the Royal Society remained convinced of the logic of this, though Cook himself had all but concluded, based on his first voyage, that it was not so.

  Besides assisting in the voyage that would disprove the existence of Terra Australis—and that would in several other ways broaden knowledge of the world—Sparrman took copious notes and from them wrote A Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, which became one of the classics of eighteenth-century naturalism and a standard source on Cook’s career. Later, after mounting an inland expedition of his own into South Africa, Sparrman returned home to Sweden laden with specimens. He then made a trip to London to visit what were widely considered the greatest cabinets of natural objects.

  By the time he settled down again in Stockholm he had been showered with honors as one of Sweden’s great scientists. He took up a position as professor at the School of Surgery in the 1790s. In 1802, the young Berzelius won a position as his unpaid assistant. Three years later, Sparrman retired, and Berzelius eventually assumed his professorship. About that same time, Ahlgren, the tax official, apparently communicated to his friend Sparrman that he had come into possession of an object that he thought might interest the professor. The poignancy could not have been lost on Sparrman. He had traveled the globe gathering skulls and femurs, fibulas and fossils from every variety of creature. The skull that had given birth to modern philosophy would crown his collection.

  So it was that while Alexandre Lenoir was tending to what were purportedly the rest of the bodily remains of Descartes in the garden of his Museum of French Monuments in Paris, the skull was in Stockholm in the collection of Berzelius’s former mentor. Berzelius, who happened to be in Paris when the remains were removed for burial, thus became the link that reconnected mind and body, so to speak.

  Or was he? Could the savants at the French Academy of Sciences conclude that the skull was authentic? None of them knew much of this history of the skull’s life in Sweden, but the information from Hof supported the case. Cuvier and Delambre held a follow-up meeting at the academy five months after the first viewing of the skull, and Delambre presented a supplemental report in which he commented on the new information provided by Hauterive. It had its compelling features, Delambre admitted, but he remained skeptical, and he had some justifications for skepticism, for new difficulties came with the evidence of headmaster Hof. Hof asserted that “Isaac Planström, officer of the guard for the city of Stockholm, removed the skull from the bier of Descartes, for which he substituted another.” If that was true, it would explain why those who dealt with the remains later—the customs officials who opened the coffin at the French border in 1666, among others—did not report anything amiss. But it added a new mystery: what became of this second skull, the ersatz head of Descartes?

  While the French scientists were puzzling over these questions, Berzelius happened to write to a Swedish friend telling him of the strange circumstances surrounding the skull of René Descartes and what he believed to be his satisfactory resolution of them. The reply he got may have incited a groan. The story sounded quite fascinating, wrote Hans Gabriel Trolle-Wachtmeister, a nobleman and government official with an amateur interest in chemistry, “but are you completely sure it’s the right skull?” In Lund, Trolle-Wachtmeister informed Berzelius, was another skull of Descartes, “to whose authenticity the rector and council are prepared to swear.” He added drily that in the scheme of things it wouldn’t be unjust if it turned out the great Descartes had had two heads since “we see how many fools have one.”

  Was this, then, the second skull? Were there indeed two skulls of Descartes in circulation, one genuine, the other a placeholder slipped by Planström into the copper coffin? But if so, how was it that both had remained in Sweden? Wouldn’t one of them have ventured to Paris with Terlon’s party?

  The complications were only beginning. In Paris, the savants were puzzling over another item. The information about Sven Hof was embedded in a four-volume biography of Queen Christina by a man named Johan Arckenholtz; it was in the first volume, which was published in 1751, that he included Hof ’s account of the encounter with Descartes’ skull. By volume 4, which appeared in 1760, Arckenholtz had himself entered this exotic subplot: he reported that in 1754 he had “made the acquisition of a part of this skull that is attested to be genuine and of which the other part rests in the cabinet of the late M. Hägerflycht.” So it seemed that there were now four skulls or skull pieces that had supposedly once belonged to Descartes. The situation was beginning to mirror the relic trade of early Christianity, when saints’ bones proliferated and, as John Calvin wrote with Protestant scorn, there were enough pieces of the “true cross” circulating around Europe to fill a ship’s cargo.

  It’s possible, though, to wade through at least some of the cranial debris. Trolle-Wachtmeister was correct about Lund University’s possessing an object its keepers took to be a piece of Descartes. This object was probably what spurred Liljewalch to track the skull’s owners in the 1860s. In fact, the object is still there. In common with many other historical museums around Europe, the Historiska Museet in Lund is built around a long-ago bequest of somebody’s cabinet of curiosities. The museum has its touches of twenty-first-century museum studies—some breezy labeling and interactivity—but mainly it preserves its reassuringly old-fashioned origins. Kilian Stobaeus, a scientist who left his collection to Lund University in 1735 and in so doing founded what would become Europe’s first archaeological museum, had a particular fancy for tribal objects from all over the globe. It’s pleasantly jarring to encounter a sweeping collection of American Indian artifacts—arrows, baskets, jewelry, whole birch canoes—in the middle of Sweden. Hampus Cinthio, the historian on the staff who guided me through the collection, told me that American museums lust after these objects dating from decades before the American colonies fought their revolution, most of which are in an excellent state of preservation.

  In the same room as the American Indian collection is a glass case that contains, among many other items, a portion of a human skull labeled in an antique hand “Cartesi döskalla 1691 N.6.” In a juxtaposition surely not coincidental, it sits beside a pair of embroidered purple slippers, so small they look like they would fit a doll, that once covered the feet of Queen Christina. The curved piece of bone, about the size of a cupped hand, is the object to which Trolle-Wachtmeister referred. It is also what Arckenholtz had referred to sixty years earlier as the “part [that] rests in the cabinet of the late M. Hägerflycht.” Liljewalch’s work showed that this bone had a history of its own, which closely parallels the history of the skull in Paris. The problem is that this skull portion—the left parietal bone, which forms the left side of the crown of the head—is not missing from the skull in Paris. Both cannot be relics of René Descartes.

  In 1983, the curved parietal bone in the display case in Lund caught the attention of C. G. Ahlström, a professor of pathology at the university, and together with two colleagues, he conducted a detailed scientific and historical investigation of it. Besides reporting anatomical particularities—measurements, coloring, a slight indentation on the frontal part of the sutura sagittalis (the joint between the two parietal bones)—they note
d the fact that the bone is whole, which is suggestive. The human skull is not a single mass but comprised of twenty-three separate bones, which are connected by the ridged joints called sutures. The Lund bone is complete, including its intricate sutures, which means it was not sawed off or broken. “The totally intact character of the bone indicates that it has been extracted from the cranium very carefully, probably by using the so-called blast method,” Ahlström and his colleagues reported. “With this method the cranium cavity is filled with dried peas or millet and is then filled with water and left to swell, whereby the various cranial bones slowly separate from each other through the increased intercranial pressure. The method, which is still in use, has been applied for a very long time and was used when preparing skulls from both humans and animals for natural cabinets during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”

  The curious picture that emerges, then, is of someone painstakingly pulling a skull apart in order to spread pieces around—to multiply relics. Presumably what Arckenholtz got was another piece of the same skull, which is now lost. Equally curious is the fact that, beginning with Hägerflycht in the mid-1700s, several of the successive owners of the complete skull also owned the skull piece. The records of Lund University indicate that the parietal bone entered its collection in 1780, as a gift from a woman whose maiden name was Stiernman. Stiernman was also the name of one of the owners of the complete skull, and it turns out that the donor was the wife of Bishop Olof Celsius and daughter of Anders Anton Stiernman. This together with the information from Arckenholtz—that in 1754 Hägerflycht had owned the skull piece—means that three successive owners of the complete skull (Hägerflycht, Stiernman, Celsius) also owned the separate parietal bone. There’s no telling what they might have had in mind. Perhaps the first, Hägerflycht, obtained one, which he took to be genuine, then happened upon the other, which he bought out of amusement, since one or the other piece was obviously not what it was purported to be. Or, since each by this time came with a pedigree, maybe he was hedging his bets in owning both, embellishing his cabinet of curiosities with a double curiosity. His collection, then, with its Descartes anomaly, would have passed in toto to Stiernman, and from him to Celsius. Then Celsius’s wife—who maybe was creeped out by the whole business—gave the parietal bone to the university, while the skull went to the paramour Fischerström and so onward.

  In the original 1780 entry recording the parietal bone in the Lund collection its authenticity was taken for granted, but very quickly doubts crept in. If it had spent years beneath the ground, why was it so pearly white and unblemished? How could the skull of a man nearly fifty-four years of age be so papery thin? Keepers of the Lund collection gradually distanced themselves from claims that it had actually been part of Descartes’ skull. Hampus Cinthio, who gave me a tour of the collection, only chuckled at the notion.

  A succession of Swedes ranging across the first century and a half of the modern era had, apparently, been taken in. Was it Planström’s doing? Or was he guilty only of swiping the true head and holding on to it as a personal charm? The parietal bone doesn’t appear in the historical record until a century after Descartes’ death. One hundred years is too big a curtain even to guess what may have gone on behind its heavy drape.

  IN 1821, THE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES in Paris—which was by now used to voting up or down on the legitimacy of whole branches of science—had taken considerable time over a single skull, and there seemed to be a consensus. The chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet wrote to his friend Berzelius in Stockholm after the first meeting over the skull, telling him that “the Academy of Sciences received last Monday with a religious reverence and a vivid sensibility the present that you sent. We compared the skull with the portrait of Descartes and recognized a correspondence between them that, together with the proof that you have brought together, leaves no doubt of the personage to whom this head belonged.”

  Berzelius wrote back thanking him for the information and then launching into a lengthy discussion of his work with alkaline sulfur and whether “in alkaline sulfur liquids the sulfuric acid forms before or after the addition of water.” In his reply, Berthollet noted that at a follow-up meeting of the academy, Delambre had done his best to discredit the skull as being that of Descartes. But “his observations seemed not well founded,” Berthollet observed.

  The world’s greatest assembly of scientists had reached a conclusion, one that rested not on an ideal of certainty but on the modern notion of probability. They had applied their doubts to the very head that had introduced doubt as a tool for advancing knowledge. And in the end they gave the head a nod.

  Cranial Capacity

  OMEWHERE AROUND 1767, A BOY IN THE VILLAGE of Tiefenbronn in the German state of Baden observed that, among his classmates, those who had the best verbal memories—those who were most able to learn and recall lengthy passages of the Bible, for instance—tended to have bulging eyes. Franz Joseph Gall was nothing if not consistent throughout his life, and twenty years later, now a physician in Vienna, he began holding public lectures on what he called “organology.” He had developed a new technique for dissecting the brain—not by slicing into it like a ham, as scientists had been doing previously, but by teasing apart and analyzing its separate structures—and based on this work he formed the idea that different parts of the brain controlled different types of mental activity. Had he stopped at that, Gall would have merited a noble spot in the canon of scientific pioneers, for the field of neuroscience is built upon the localization of brain functions, but he went further. He posited that the regions of the brain worked like the muscles of the body, so that those that were more highly evolved were more developed physically. That is to say, they bulged. By knowing the various regions of the brain and what mental faculties were located there, he reasoned, one could “read” someone’s skull and determine his or her natural propensities.

  It was one of Gall’s acolytes who coined the term phrenology. Gall himself didn’t like it, nor did he agree with many of the tenets of this new science of the mind as it was developed by others, but his is the name most associated with it. One reason is the aggressiveness with which he promoted it. His public talks and demonstrations in Vienna became wildly popular, as people grabbed on to this new, “modern” way to understand the human being in general and themselves in particular. Gall promised specificity: there were no fewer than twenty-seven brain regions in which individual functions or propensities—guile, courage, tendency to commit murder, sense of proportion, architectural talent, sense of satire, benevolence, obstinance, language ability (which indeed Gall situated behind the eyes)—were localized. One hundred and sixty years earlier, Descartes had all but proclaimed that science would unlock the mysteries of the human being; Gall was declaring that he had done it.

  And, just as had happened with Descartes, Gall found himself opposed by the highest authorities in the land for promoting a philosophy that would undercut the established order. “This doctrine concerning the head, which is talked about with enthusiasm,” wrote Francis, the emperor of Austria, in an edict forbidding Gall to continue expounding organology, “will perhaps cause a few to lose their heads and it leads to materialism, therefore is opposed to the first principles of morals and religion.” The reasoning was much the same as what Regius encountered when he gave the first public lectures on Cartesianism in Utrecht in the 1630s. “Materialism” described a philosophy in which everything that goes to make up a human being is accounted for by material forces, thus leaving no room for theology. If goodness and a tendency to evil were somehow preprogrammed into the brain, what role was there for the church in governing human behavior? And since church and state were bound so closely in most of Europe (Francis had sent forces to oppose the French revolutionary government), such a categorical threat to religion was equally a threat to political power.

  Like all good self-promoters, Gall made use of the controversy: he and his colleague Johann Spurzheim left Vienna and took their cranial road sho
w on a thirty-city tour, becoming famous throughout Europe. When Gall arrived in Paris in 1807, crowds greeted him; the “head science” was caricatured in the press, and at parties young people began a semicomic fad of fingering one another’s heads. Gall wanted to have it both ways: he relished the popular attention but he craved legitimacy, and the Academy of Sciences was indubitably the bestower of scientific legitimacy. He put an overview of his work before the academy in 1808. Its initial response was careful and mixed: in a tightly written fifteen-page report, the committee found Gall’s anatomical work impressive but remained judiciously reticent on the subject of reading bumps.

  Gall settled in Paris. He was determined to win official approval, and he continued to develop his ideas. The flaw in his organology theory was that it had little connection to his brain dissections. Then again, he relied heavily on a principle that ought to have endeared him to Georges Cuvier, who, as permanent secretary of the academy, was in a position to grant legitimacy to Gall’s work. Cuvier was one of the founders of comparative anatomy, and this was the basis of Gall’s argument. In Vienna, Gall had glimpsed the outlines of his localization idea while working at a mental hospital with patients suffering from one or another form of monomania; he reasoned that obsessive fixation on a certain subject or type of behavior might relate to a particular area of the brain. Later, working at a prison, he studied the heads of inmates and decided that he had discovered a common skull abnormality in most. This spot (just above the ear), he concluded, reflected a tendency toward criminality or antisocial behavior.