Cranioklepty (19 page)

Morton's findings, published in his
Crania Americana
(1839) and
Crania Aegyptiaca
(1844), were enormously influential in appearing to demonstrate, by means of his system, that there was a clear hierarchy in brain size between different peoples. At the top of his scheme was the European, followed by the American Indian, and then the African, just one short step above the ape. Morton's findings seemed to show, through the cold, objective truth of math and statistics, that the European brain was conclusively larger than that of other ethnic groups.

But there are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics. In his book
The Mismeasure of Man
, Stephen Jay Gould cited the numerous methodological errors that Morton made in his calculations. For one, he failed to account for differences in sex and body size when calculating brain volume. He tended to include small-bodied Incas in his American Indian sample so as to bring down that average but excluded small-bodied Hindus from his Caucasian sample so as to keep that number higher. His a priori assumptions repeatedly led him to false conclusions— demonstrably false from his own data. On top of this, Morton made elementary computational and methodological errors, all of which coincidentally favored his preexisting beliefs and assumptions.

Skulls from Samuel George Morton's
Crania Aegyptiaca

And yet, Gould concluded, “through all this juggling, I detect no sign of fraud or conscious manipulation. Morton made no attempt to cover his tracks and I must presume that he was unaware he had left them. He explained all his procedures and published all his raw data. All I can discern is an a priori conviction about racial ranking so powerful that it directed his tabulations along preestablished lines.” This in and of itself might not be so lamentable, Gould noted, if Morton hadn't been “widely hailed as the
objectivist of his age, the man who would rescue American science from the mire of unsupported speculation.”
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As Rokitansky was developing pathological anatomy into a major field of modern medicine, Morton was working to provide an empirical basis for racism, giving it a scientific justification and laying out a flawed methodological roadmap for others to follow. Morton adapted to the scientific climate that was blossoming around him—one that relied on direct measurement—and used it erroneously to confirm a long-held belief in racial difference and hierarchy. As with phrenology, at the heart of this scientific field was the skull, which once again came to be the locus of classification.

But there was a crucial difference between the way phrenology and craniometry treated the skull. The phrenologist looked to the skull to find a hidden map of the character and the history of its owner, laid out in physical form just as a seismograph records an earthquake. Craniometrists like Morton were looking for something grander: the history not of an individual but of the entire human race. Each skull, they believed, was a fragment of a grand epic that stretched back to Adam and Eve. One needed only to collect enough fragments to discern the larger picture.

And in this sense they were right: Modern anthropology, now purged of the legacy of racial superiority, still relies on the skulls of our ancestors, and of the different tribes of the world, to fill in the story of human creation and evolution. But what Morton
failed to understand was that even his massive collection—a thousand skulls—was infinitesimal within hundreds of millions of human lives. And as is the case when one has such a small portion of the puzzle, those fragments could be assembled as the basis of many projected pictures.

Morton didn't live long enough to see the Civil War or the emancipation of those who had been kept in bondage in no small part because of the racist science he helped to pioneer. But his legacy continued well after his death, and it struck a chord in European scientists looking for conclusive evidence that they lay at the pinnacle of human development.

With so much invested in a proof of European intellectual superiority, the heads of those great men whose creativity had defined an age—men like Browne—would seem particularly important. If Morton's theories were to hold up, it seemed necessary to prove that just as Europeans had bigger brains than their African or Indian counterparts, European geniuses must have even bigger brains than regular Europeans.

Across the Atlantic, in Paris, a landmark dispute took place with the goal of settling this very question.

T
HE AVERAGE
E
UROPEAN
brain was said to weigh around 1,400 grams. Numerous examples had been found of great artists and thinkers who had heavier brains—the brain of Georges Cuvier, the naturalist who had bought Gall's skull collection, had been recorded as weighing an astonishing 1,830 grams. The
Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev's brain weighed a mighty 2,012 grams, and Lord Byron's brain had been placed somewhere between 1,800 grams and a massive 2,238 grams. The question of whether there was a reliable correlation between genius and large brain size was one that consumed two famous craniometrists in the middle of the nineteenth century—the battle between Paul Broca and Louis Pierre Gratiolet would go down in history as a landmark in the evolution of scientific thinking.
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Paul Broca was a French anatomist and anthropologist—and Morton's most ardent and capable follower. Broca, who had founded the Anthropological Society of Paris in 1859, refined many of Morton's methodologies while keeping the aim much the same. After Morton's death it was Broca who assumed the mantle of spokesman for craniometry and defended it vociferously against the few scientists who dared to assert that there was no measurable difference in brain size between Europeans and Africans. Friedrich Tiedemann published one such critique, and Broca's response was savage. He thoroughly denounced the German doctor, conclusively demonstrating that Tiedemann had made systematic errors in his calculations and thus invalidating his findings. Of course Morton had made the exact same kinds of misstep, albeit in the other direction, but Broca, who had extensively
reviewed Morton's work, did not see fit to comment on Morton's irregularities.

An even more radical threat was to come in a theory advocated by Louis Pierre Gratiolet, a rival anatomist whose claim to fame lay in understanding the different hemispheres of the brain and identifying its four lobes. Gratiolet went so far as to argue that brain size simply bears no correlation to intelligence whatsoever, effectively declaring that the whole project of craniometry was fallacious.

In a meeting held on June 6, 1961, which would go down in the annals of craniometry as one of the study's most famous days, Gratiolet attempted to disprove the prevailing hypothesis that skull size could be a useful metric for intelligence. He reviewed the data on the brain of the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and concluded, “This is not an enormous brain; this is not an exceptional weight.” The same was true of the famous mineralogist Johann Hausman. Most famously, Gratiolet set out to challenge the notion that Georges Cuvier's brain had been exceptionally large. But this time, in true theatrical fashion (and lacking the zoologist's actual skull), Gratiolet brandished Cuvier's hat. He had taken it to the most renowned hatter in Paris, M. Puriau, who had told him that it was a large hat (21.8 by 16 centimeters), to be sure, but not exceptionally so—Puriau estimated that 30 percent of his customers bought hats of that size. Furthermore, Gratiolet reasoned, Cuvier was known for his “extremely abundant mass of hair,” which could—could it not?—account for a larger hat size. “The measurements that I have just pointed out,” he said,
“seem to prove rather obviously that if the skull of Cuvier had a considerable size, this size is not absolutely exceptional and unique.”
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For Broca, this conclusion was intolerable. Tiedemann may have been blinded by his preconceived notions that all races are innately equal, but at least he had understood the fundamental importance of the skull in science. Gratiolet wanted to end the skull's supremacy altogether. Broca began his riposte to Gratiolet by stating the obvious: If there is really no correlation between head size and intelligence, then “the study of the brains of human races would lose most of its interest and utility.”
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What Gratiolet was proposing, Broca pointed out, was not just a differing opinion but an attack on the foundation of an entire branch of science. If one were really to take his ludicrous ideas seriously, Broca went on, whole careers, perhaps even lives, would be ruined: “The great importance of craniology has struck anthropologists with such force that many among us have neglected the other parts of our science in order to devote ourselves almost exclusively to the study of skulls.” It was a noble goal, central to science, and far more important than Gratiolet's nonsensical conclusions about a hat. Broca concluded by noting that with “such data, we hoped to find some information relevant to the intellectual value of the various human races.”
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As an object, the skull had maintained a religious and symbolic weight since the earliest days of humanity: It was the image of death par excellence, the most singular relic of one's mortal remains. It was the sole bone amid a pile of such bones that could definitively identify remains as belonging to a human. But what Broca's comments reinforce is how quickly it had also become the preeminent object of scientific discourse and inquiry. In less than one hundred years the skull had become the founding and central document of not just phrenology and craniometry but psychology and anthropology, criminology and psychiatry. For that matter, it was essential to the programs of slavery and segregation, colonialism and imperialism, patriarchy and misogyny. Next to perhaps the Bible itself, the human skull was
the
inalienable proof of the unchallenged suitability of the white male for dominion over the entire world.

The early 1870s marked a number of important changes for Rokitansky and for Hyrtl, for Paul Broca back in Paris, for the Norwich surgeon Charles Williams—but nothing, as it turned out, lay in store for the head that had once produced the
Religio Medici.

In Vienna, long-awaited reforms were under way: Since 1848 Rokitansky had been considered an intellectual leader, and his revolutionary scientific approach seemed to mirror the age. Accordingly, he pushed for educational reforms at all levels of Austrian medicine. He argued that the medical establishment should be severed from its long-standing ties to the emperor and the aristocracy, and that the church should likewise be excluded. He finally achieved these reforms in 1872–1873, effectively liberating medical practice from its centuries-old dependence on aristocratic privilege.

It wasn't that Rokitansky was immune to the same Romanticism that burned in Hyrtl and Seligmann. While his professional
goal had always been (in one historian's words) to “arouse German medicine from its natural-philosophical dream,” his personal philosophy was more nuanced.
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He had come of age reading Kant (as had been required for medical school when he was a student), and he had never lost that part of his personality that friends referred to as his “poetical side” and he himself called “that bent towards speculation.” For the most part he had been able to keep a line of separation between his empirical studies and his personal faith, though in the English preface to Rokitansky's manual, the editor noted that it had been necessary to abridge “somewhat the author's general introduction, partly because, totally unlike the general tendency of the work, it is of too ‘transcendental' a character to suit the English language or to harmonize with English ideas; but more particularly because it is interwoven with a train of speculative reasoning upon the relation between power and matter, which might, in this country, very possibly give rise to misinterpretation and rebuke.”
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Rokitansky's colleague Joseph Hyrtl, meanwhile, had retired out of sight. While he had enjoyed early fame with his
Handbook of Topographic Anatomy
, his life had been filled with more disappointments than Rokitansky's. A long-running and bitter feud with a rival anatomist had cost him dearly in prestige; he had been on the faculty at the University of Vienna for thirty years, yet was never appointed dean. “Disturbed and disappointed,” he had
written in 1869, “I withdrew into my professional work, spent my life between my workroom and my lecture hall, became taciturn and therefore disliked by my colleagues, as I still am.” In a city where anatomy was given such prominence, the virtuoso Hyrtl, whose preparations were sought the world over, was never given an adequate workspace either at the hospital or at the university. Since 1854 he had worked out of a building that had been built as a stable and had previously been used as a rifle factory. “Slowly,” he wrote, “I also learned to put up with these conditions. Only he who knows how and where anatomy is attended to here, will be able to understand how difficult it was for me to bear these conditions.”
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