Cranioklepty (20 page)

The same year Rokitansky's reforms were finally passed, Hyrtl relocated to Leipzig, claiming his weakening eyesight as his official reason for retirement. There he established a small room and laboratory in a ruin near a cemetery. In his tiny quarters he kept his rarest and most perfect anatomical specimens. In his bedroom, which was barely big enough to admit a bed, the only decoration was his collection of skulls, which adorned the walls and looked down on him while he slept.

Hyrtl had built his collection during the same era as Broca and Morton, but he was fundamentally opposed to craniometry. A devout Catholic, he had come to believe in Darwin's theory of evolution, but only to a point. He did not believe that the brain was subject to evolution; it was instead, he thought, divinely inserted into the body by the hand of God Himself.

A
ROUND THE SAME
time the Norwich and Norfolk Hospital celebrated its centenary, and as a tribute, Charles Williams—who had been appointed house-surgeon in 1858 and promoted to assistant surgeon in 1869—presented to the hospital a collection of portraits of past board members. A gathering of lithographs, photographs, and paintings, it told the hospital's hundred-year history through a line of eminent men, each conferring great dignity on the boardroom where their portraits were hung. In addition to past presidents, surgeons, and distinguished benefactors were three portraits of Sir Thomas Browne, the patron saint of Norwich medicine. Hanging next to him was the portrait of Dr. Edward Lubbock, the Norwich physician who had purchased his head in 1840 and left it to the hospital after his death in 1848.

A
ND LAST, IN
Paris, Paul Broca was running into problems with his craniometrics.

In their famous debate in 1861 Gratiolet had been so thoroughly defeated by Broca that at the subsequent meeting he had gone so far as to apologize for having brought up “the little spark that caused a philosophical explosion.” But in a way Gratiolet had won the war, even after losing the battle. Less and less was said in those years about the great heads of famous men. While the hefty brain of Turgenev could always be singled out as proof of genius and brain size, such a metric inevitably produced embarrassments,
such as Walt Whitman, the poet of phrenology, whose brain weighed a meager 1,282 grams. Leigh Hunt later commented of John Keats that his “head was a particular puzzle for the phrenologist, being remarkably small in the skull; a singularity he has in common with Lord Byron and Mr. Shelley, none of whose hats I could get on.”
¹⁷³
Most embarrassingly, Franz Joseph Gall's own brain was found to only weigh 1,198 grams (though this was a transcription error; the actual weight was 1,312—better, but still not great). Whether you judged by hat size, skull volume, or brain weight, great thinkers and artists were inevitably going to crop up whose measures were below average.

Other anomalies appeared: Broca had measured an African brain that weighed a problematic 1,500 grams, over 200 grams more than the “average” African brain was supposed to weigh. One of his students, Paul Topinard, thoughtfully explained this away by pointing out that the man in question had lived his life in Europe. Topinard went on to inquire, “May it not be asked whether the free negro living among Europeans has not a heavier brain than if he had remained in his own country, far removed from great intellectual excitement?”
¹⁷⁴

But as more and more of these “anomalies” came to light, craniometry had a harder time reconciling them with the general
theory. Whereas a phrenologist, as Mark Twain had famously demonstrated, could find some indication of superlative genius on
any
head, determining the size of a particular brain was a bit more of an objective process (though obviously not entirely so). When it came to truly small-brained geniuses, there was little that could be done by way of fudging the data. Both, it turned out, were self-fulfilling hypotheses, each using the skull as a
means to verify what was already believed, but whereas phrenology excelled at specifics, craniometry worked best as a science of averages.

Craniometric Devices, from Paul Topinard's
Anthropology

Small-headed geniuses were a problem, to be sure, although they could conceivably be swept under the rug. But soon enough Broca began to find some even more problematic statistics with regard to certain ethnic groups. The more data he collected, the
more apparent it became—even to someone with a knack for unconscious manipulation of data—that certain “inferior” races had disturbingly large heads. In particular, a number of indigenous peoples—Eskimos, Mongolians, and so on—had an average head size greater than that of Europeans. Broca found himself in the unenviable position of reaching conclusions similar to those of Friedrich Tiedemann, whom he had lambasted decades earlier.

Craniometric Devices, from Paul Topinard's
Anthropology

Craniometry's goal had always been a perfect statistical distribution, with Africans at the low end, indigenous populations of Asia and America slightly above that, and the European male at the top end. But by the early 1870s, Broca could no longer deny that this distribution was a myth.

Still, with his characteristic obtuseness, Broca did not dare admit that other races might be equal in intelligence to whites, as his data and methodology would have demanded. Nor did he abandon craniometry in favor of some other method of proving racial superiority. His attack on Gratiolet had revealed how much of his life he had already invested in the science. And so he did what anyone but a true scientist might have done: He selectively reinterpreted his data so that it would conform to his prejudices: “A table on which races were arranged by order of their cranial capacity would not represent the degrees of their superiority or inferiority, because size represents only one element of the problem. On such a table, Eskimos, Lapps, Malays, Tartars and several other peoples of the Mongolian type would surpass the most civilized people of Europe. A lowly race may therefore have a big brain.”

In other words, the high end of the craniometric distribution was unreliable. But there was no need to dispense with the whole project. “This does not destroy the value of small brain size as a mark of inferiority,” Broca wrote. “The table shows that West African blacks have a cranial capacity about 100 cc less than that of European races. To this figure, we may add the following: Caffirs, Nubians, Tasmanians, Hottentots, Australians. These examples are sufficient to prove that if the volume of the brain does not play a decisive role in the intellectual ranking of races, it nevertheless has a very real importance.”
¹⁷⁵

Under the weight of its own comprehensiveness, Broca's craniometry was becoming ever more convoluted in the quest for the justification of racism.

I
N 1875, THREE
years before his death, Rokitansky entrusted the Haydn skull to his sons, instructing them to turn it over to the Society for the Friends of Music, per Rosenbaum's and Peter's wishes. A year earlier Joseph Hyrtl had put his skulls up for sale. He had been in contact with Thomas Hewson Bache of Philadelphia about them for some time. He had already done an extensive series of preparations for Bache on the organs of hearing, but with the acquisition of the Hyrtl skulls Bache's collection went from being a private collection to what is now the Mütter Museum.

Joseph Hyrtl's collection of eighty-two skulls (meager compared to Morton's but still captivating) now occupies an entire wall of the museum's main gallery. Behind glass, dozens of skulls are arrayed in perfect geometric order, each one accompanied by a three-by-five card that lists nationality, name, and cause of death, with an occasional notation of cranial anomaly:

Moravia
Anton Mikschik, Age 17
Shoemaker's Apprentice
Suicide, because of discovered theft
Magyar (Hungarian) from Transylvania
Ladislaus Pal
Reformist, guerilla, and deserter
Executed by hanging
(bilateral flare of gonial angles)

Russia
Kasimir Ostrowsczynski, Age 30
For crime of grave insubordination, died under the most cruel
scourging

Russia
Andrejew Sokoloff
Skop
i (Russian sect that believes in castration)
Died of self-inflicted removal of testicles
(dual left of supra-orbital formation)

Among these names is that of Francisca Seycora, who died at age nineteen of meningitis in the Vienna General Hospital and who is listed as a “famous Viennese prostitute.” However well known Seycora might have been in her day, her fame was ephemeral—if anything, it was a fame passed from client to client, of which no written record now exists. It was certainly not enough to distinguish her from Mikschik, the distraught shoemaker's apprentice, or Sokoloff, dead from a botched castration. In the end she was just one of many, only another item in Hyrtl's collection.

Mozart's fame, of course, was of a different nature altogether; his skull, held aloft from the rest of the collection, was in a glass case and labeled with a line from Horace. Seycora's bears the inscription “Prominent temporal lines continue onto frontal bones.”

It was an age when sample size and sheer volume meant far more than any single relic and thus an age when Seycora, paradoxically, as one of eighty-two meant more to collectors than did Mozart in his sample size of one. By the second half of the nineteenth century it was already abundantly clear that the heads of great men had no real scientific value. With the decline of phrenology as a viable scientific discipline, the heads of the famous, in their glass cases on velvet cushions, threatened to become once more nothing but elegant, secular relics.

Craniometry, with its averages and distributions, largely rendered the individual skull scientifically useless. But in his retort to Gratiolet, Broca had perhaps inadvertently heralded the end of the skull as the singular object of study altogether. Gratiolet, in his litany of examples, had drawn on the skull of Descartes, which he argued was not exceptionally large. In his response, Broca had commented, almost as an aside, that “the study of a skull, however complete, merely gives an approximate idea of the volume and above all the weight of the brain.”
¹⁷⁶
Lord Byron, if Leigh Hunt was to be believed, was a perfect case in point: Even with the second-heaviest brain ever measured, he still had a small hat, and thus his skull would hardly have been a useful indicator of his intelligence. The skull, in other words, was not always the most reliable metric, even in Broca's mind.