Cranioklepty (22 page)

The hospital board spent a long time considering the request and then sent back its reply. Its decision was unanimous: absolutely not. After a “prolonged and careful consideration of all the circumstances pertaining to the request,” the board gave the following reasons:

That as there is no legal title to, or property in, any such relic, so there can be no question that this and all other specimens in the Hospital Museum belong inalienably to the Governors. That no instance is known of such a claim for restitution having been made after nearly half a century on any museum, and were the Governors to yield to this request they might be unable to resist similar claims. That the presence in a museum of such a relic, reverently preserved and protected, cannot be viewed as merely an object of idle curiosity; rather it will usefully serve to direct attention to, and remind visitors of, the works of the great scholar and physician.
¹⁸⁹

The hospital board's response sums up the status of Browne's skull at the dawn of a new century. The board provided no real reason for keeping the skull other than some rather pathetic legal quibbling and a claim that its usefulness lay in its ability to remind people of Browne. But the board members saw no legal reason to give it back, so this thin rationale carried the day. And thus the skull hung in a state of limbo, somehow still valuable even as it had lost its scientific usefulness.

T
HUS REBUFFED, PELHAM
Burn took the issue back to the vestry, who decided by a vote of eight to six to let the matter rest.

And that would have seemed to be the end of it—at least as far as the skull was concerned, though there were other loose ends surrounding Browne and the “desecration of 1840.” There was still the question of the missing coffin plate, the one with the inscription about turning lead to gold that had been broken in half in 1840. It had been missing for decades.

Charles Williams took it upon himself to try to locate it. No one had been able to figure out when it had disappeared, or where, but Williams knew where to start: Robert Fitch, the same Fitch who had reported on the skull when it had first been discovered. Fitch was now ninety-one years old but still an active member of the church. And, as everyone knew, he still had some rubbings he had done of the plaque. Williams thought he might have a lead on where the plaque had ended up.

When the good doctor asked him about it, Fitch was terse. The old man stated only that he had returned it to George Potter, the sexton at the time, who had probably locked it away in some church chest somewhere. Williams returned to Burn, and the two of them decided to search the church premises in an effort to find it. But nothing came of the search.

It was another fruitless attempt to right the injustice done to Browne, or so Burn thought of the search, though this story would end more quickly than his dispute with the board. Two years later Fitch died, leaving his papers and effects behind in his church office. As the church staff was cleaning out his massive desk, they found a hidden compartment behind a false wall in the
back of a drawer. Inside they found the two halves of Browne's broken coffin plate.

Fitch had warned Skull George not to take the head, but he'd had no qualms about keeping the coffin plate for himself, even going so far as to devise a means to keep it hidden and secret. Later commentators would note that Fitch's “antiquarian zeal” had perhaps made him unsuitable for church office; it was, at any rate, just one more indignity that Sir Thomas Browne was made to suffer in his afterlife.

T
HE YEAR 1896
saw another edition of Browne's works, edited by William Alexander Greenhill. Charles Williams, who was gradually becoming the authority on the Norwich doctor's head, provided a craniometric reading at the request of Greenhill, who wanted “to make the account more complete by giving the measurements of that great man's skull.” Regarding the fracas with Reverend Burn and the church, Williams commented only that the skull “has recently been claimed by the vicar of St. Peter Mancroft, but unsuccessfully,” before noting that the skull “is in a state of excellent preservation.”
¹⁹⁰

“The forehead is remarkably low and depressed,” he went on, “the head is unusually long, the back part exhibiting a
singular appearance of depth and capaciousness.” Browne's “low, depressed forehead” had once been scandalous, as had Beethoven's—now Williams passed over it without comment.

A few years later another campaign was mounted to have the skull returned. This time the campaign occurred in the court of public opinion. One writer commented in
Notes and Queries
that “a movement was on foot for the return of Sir Thos. Browne's skull to its original resting place” and that it had always seemed to the writer that “this step should have been taken long ago by its present custodians, and I very much hope that a record of its reinterment will soon appear in the pages of ‘N & Q.'”
¹⁹¹
Another writer published an editorial in the
Times
of London arguing that “now is the proper time, late though it be, to undo the sad act of vandalism” that was responsible for this “tragical abomination” by hands that had “knav'd” away the skull so many years earlier.
¹⁹²
By now the “tragical abomination” line was becoming somewhat of a cliché, with commentators endlessly citing it either as a reason to have Browne's head returned or as an ironic prediction that made Browne's current predicament almost noble.

On the other hand, there were some who weren't exactly sure that Sir Thomas would have found it such a tragical abomination; one James Hooper, also writing in
Notes and Queries
, suggested that Browne, were he to be consulted on the matter, might well have sided with the hospital board, of which he had been a member
in life, rather than with the church that purported to be acting in his interests.
¹⁹³

Hooper had a point. In Browne's time there had been no contradiction between being a man of science and a man of religion. They provided different means to the same goal: understanding the works of God. But by the turn of the twentieth century, of course, these pursuits were completely separate. There were fewer and fewer men like Hyrtl and Rokitansky, who were able to inhabit both spheres independently. Had Browne been born in the nineteenth century, which half of his mind would have won out: his zeal for scientific inquiry or his spiritual longing?

The war over Browne's bones brought the church of St. Peter Mancroft a good deal of notoriety as the not-quite-last resting place of the Norwich doctor, while among the vestry members themselves, the inability to recover Browne's skull became something of a grim joke. In 1898 the
New York Times
ran a short dispatch on the church's remodel, including a lowering of the floor that was sure to disturb the remains of Browne. The
Times
reporter, oblivious to the generations-old saga, asked Burn if “he did not feel some respect for the last resting place of Sir Thomas Browne,” and Burn replied, somewhat facetiously, “Yes, he is buried there. We shall probably see him again.” The American reporter was incredulous. “The words the rector used were so delightfully comic, this idea of raking up Sir Thomas Browne's bones, that all hands present indulged in a loud and side-splitting
guffaw. Certainly the rector's reply was flippant and in the worst possible taste. Let us hope that the higher English Church authorities will resent any such desecration.”
¹⁹⁴
But what Burn and the others knew, of course, was that when it came to matters like these the church authorities seemed utterly powerless. The only thing one could do, it seemed, was laugh.

I
F
B
ROWNE'S HAD
become the example of a skull that could not get
out
of a museum, back in America the paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope was trying to get his head
into
a museum. Cope had been a pioneering paleontologist who had become embroiled in a legendary battle with his rival Othniel Charles Marsh in the 1860s and '70s.
¹⁹⁵
What had started out as a friendship had quickly turned ugly after Marsh had quietly bribed men working for Cope to send Marsh any fossils they found. As a result the two became bitter enemies, each trying to outdo the other in discovering and naming new prehistoric species—in the process they identified more than 130 of the 287 known species of dinosaur. Things came to a head—literally—when Cope published his findings on a new species of aquatic dinosaur, which he named
Elasmosaurus.
Marsh quickly pointed out that Cope had not discovered anything new—he had just put together the bones of a preexisting species in the reverse order, putting the head at the tip of the tail.

Humiliated, Cope conceded the point, but he hoped to yet get the last laugh. What he and Marsh coveted most, as taxonomists, was the discovery of a “type specimen”—the first appearance of a new species of animal and the fossil by which all future such animals are judged. Cope realized that in paleontologists' zeal to identify type specimens for the hundreds of dinosaurs they had discovered, they had forgotten to name a type specimen for the most central animal of all—
Homo sapiens.
And so in his will Cope directed that his bones be cleaned and prepared for display as the type specimen for the entire human race. But upon his death in 1897, his request was rejected—his bones already in bad decay from syphilis, Cope's skull was deemed unworthy of type status and was ingloriously shelved in an anatomical warehouse in Philadelphia.

B
UT BACK TO
the skull of Sir Thomas. In addition to his craniometric report on that skull, Charles Williams would yet be known for one other contribution to Browne's afterlife. At some point during the skull's tenure at the hospital, Williams took what has since become the iconic photograph of the specimen: in profile, resting atop three of Browne's books. The photo has since displaced even the portraits made of the scholar during his lifetime. When the antiquarian and bibliographer Charles Sayle published an edition of Browne's works in 1804 to commemorate the three hundredth year of his birth, he used Williams's photograph as a frontispiece.

The skull of Sir Thomas Browne.

By placing Browne's head on books, Williams had symbolically moved him out of the pathology museum and back into the library, connecting Browne to the same legacy as Schiller, seventy-five years earlier, when Duke Carl August had placed the writer's head in his personal library. Of all the photographs of skulls taken during this time, Williams's seems the most dignified. Beethoven's skull is ghastly, already cut up and badly mangled. Haydn's leers up out of its ornate cabinet, gothic as any death's-head. But in the Williams photograph Browne's head manages to preserve something like poise. Of fundamental importance
are the copies of the books on which the head rests. Browne's head, emblematic of the secular saint, rests not in the crypt or altar but in the library.

But who is really qualified to interpret what these skulls say? Who can speak on their behalf? Lombroso tried, as did Topinard and Broca and Morton before him, as had Gall and Spurzheim before them. In each case what they asserted were not truths but self-reflective prophecies. The only truth to be found was that no one is in any real position to speak for these skulls—not the living and certainly not their owners. They sit, mute, endless ciphers, and reflect our minds back to ourselves.

N
EARLY THIRTY YEARS
after the iconic photo was taken, Virginia Woolf published a novel about a curious figure named Orlando, who ages a scant thirty years over the course of four centuries, changing from male to female somewhere along the way. Early in the novel Orlando (still a young man at that point) descends into his family's crypt to contemplate the bones of his ancestors: “‘Nothing remains of all these Princes,' Orlando would say, indulging in some pardonable exaggeration of their rank, ‘except one digit,' and he would take a skeleton hand in his and bend the joints this way and that. ‘Whose hand was that?' he went on to ask.” Echoing Hamlet, Orlando contrasts the mortal works of these long-dead men and women with the immortal word of literature, which solidifies his desire to be a writer: “What remained? A skull; a finger,” he muses, turning to the writings of Thomas
Browne, “and Orlando, comparing that achievement with those of his ancestors, cried out that they and their deeds were dust and ashes, but this man and his words were immortal.”
¹⁹⁶

Why did Woolf choose Browne as the figure for immortality? In life Browne had been a quintessential renaissance man: doctor, philosopher, amateur anthropologist, and theologian. Now he was becoming something like Renaissance Man—
Homo Renaissancus—
the archaeological specimen that told the story of an entire age.