Cranioklepty (12 page)

As
Leaves of Grass
grew both in stature and in size, so did the
bumps on Whitman's head. His phrenological chart was reprinted in subsequent editions, but Whitman felt free to edit it, and he increased the size of several of the bumps from the original measurements given by Lorenzo. By this point, of course, Whitman had become
the
American poet, and he saw himself as one of the few capable of speaking on the country's behalf. And the America that he spoke for was a phrenological one, as he wrote in “By Blue Ontario's Shore”:

Who are you indeed who would talk or sing to America? Have you studied out the land, its idioms and men? Have you learn'd the physiology, phrenology, politics, geography, pride, freedom, friendship of the land? its substratums and objects?

T
HIS WASN'T TO
say, of course, that phrenology was without its detractors. Oliver Wendell Holmes lampooned the Fowlers in his newspaper column “The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table,” where he described a trip to the offices of “Professors Bumpus and Crane,” pillorying in particular phrenology's reputation for neologisms with his own string of nonsense words. “Feels of thorax and arm, and nuzzles round among muscles. . . . Mild champooing of head now commences. Extraordinary revelations! Cupidiphilous, 6! Hymeniphilous, 6+!, Paedipilous, 5! Deipniphilous, 6! Gelasmiphilous, 6! Musikiphilous, 5! Uraniphilous, 5! Glossiphilous, 8!! and so on. Meant for a linguist.—Invaluable
information. Will invest in grammars and dictionaries immediately.—I have nothing against the grand total of my phrenological endowments.”
¹⁰⁵

Perhaps most famously, Mark Twain conducted his own phrenological experiment, paying for a reading first as an ordinary, unpresuming citizen. “Fowler received me with indifference,” Twain later recalled, “fingered my head in an uninterested way, and named and estimated my qualities in a bored and monotonous voice. He said I possessed amazing courage, and abnormal spirit of daring, a pluck, a stern will, a fearlessness that were without limit.” The inordinate courage that Fowler found in Twain was negated, though, by a bump on the other side of his head, which Fowler identified as “caution”: “This hump was so tall, so mountainous, that it reduced my courage-bump to a mere hillock by comparison, although the courage bump had been so prominent up to that time—according to his description of it— that it ought to have been a capable thing to hang my hat on; but it amounted to nothing, now in the presence of that Matterhorn which he called my Caution.” This caution bump, Fowler explained to Twain, was why he hadn't been able to amount to much in life. Some time later the author returned, this time introducing himself as Mark Twain and wearing his now trademark white suit. The difference, as could be expected, was quite startling: “Once more he made a striking discovery—the cavity was gone, and in its place was a Mount Everest—figuratively speaking—
31,000 feet high, the loftiest bump of humor he had ever encountered in his life-long experience!”
¹⁰⁶

But it was Ambrose Bierce who perhaps put it most eloquently and succinctly in his
The Devil's Dictionary
: “Phrenology: n. The science of picking the pocket through the scalp. It consists of locating and exploiting the organ that one is a dupe with.”
¹⁰⁷

The Fowlers took it all in stride. Phrenologists had always viewed this resistance to their creed as a badge of pride, proof that bump reading was so revolutionary that the institutions of science were unready for it. One was either predisposed to find truth in it or not. “Self-made or never made” was the Fowlers' favorite motto, and it could apply not just to their brand of reform and self-betterment but also to one's own view of phrenology—either you believed in it or you didn't. But in that dark decade leading up to the American Civil War, and in the bleak years that followed it, there were a lot of anxious souls looking for comfort, and for twenty-five cents one could be reassured not only of one's innate goodness and intelligence but also of one's capacity to better the world. It seemed a small price to pay.

P
HRENOLOGY WAS A
science for an uncertain time, and perhaps no one exemplified this better than the phrenologist and
revolutionary Gustav von Struve. The young Struve had come to Mannheim in Baden, Germany, to practice law, but his ambitions quickly grew. He began actively to promote both phrenology and radical reform, which he saw as inextricably linked.

Ever since Gall's expulsion from Vienna, German-speaking countries had lagged behind the rest of Europe when it came to phrenology. For Struve, this rejection accounted for Germany's lack of progress and why it still lay captive to oppressive religious and aristocratic regimes. He set out to remedy the problem, co-founding the German-language
Phrenological Journal
and advocating tirelessly for the New Science. Combe recognized the value of his contributions in his own
A System of Phrenology
, and the Fowlers regularly translated excerpts of his work in their own journal. His colleague Alexander Herzen claimed that Struve was so devoted to phrenology that he deliberately chose a wife who lacked a “passion” bump.
¹⁰⁸

Struve's own passion was for political and social reform. He argued for vegetarianism and temperance, against capital punishment. He set aside a portion of every day to meditate on the great secular heroes of revolution, from Washington and Lafayette to Rousseau and Robespierre. Contemporaries described Struve as having a face that “showed the moral rigidity of the fanatic . . . with uncombed beard and untroubled eyes,” but he was sincere
in his desire for reform, and in 1847 he dropped the aristocratic “von” from his name in solidarity with the common man.

Gustav Struve.

Mario Vargas Llosa, in his 1984 novel
The War at the End of the World
, would reincarnate this archetype of the revolutionary phrenologist and put him in South America. An amalgamation of Struve and Combe, Llosa's character, a Scotsman who takes the name Galileo Gall, comes to Brazil to foment revolution: “As other children grew up listening to fairy stories, he had grown up hearing that property is the origin of all social evils and that the poor will succeed in shattering the chains of exploitation and obscurantism
only through the use of violence.” Inextricable from this revolutionary fervor is a fervor for phrenology:

Whereas for other followers of Gall's, this science was scarcely more than the belief that intellect, instinct, and feelings are organs located in the cerebral cortex and can be palpated and measured, for Galileo's father this discipline meant the death of religion, the empirical foundation of materialism, the proof that the mind was not what philosophical mumbo jumbo made it out to be, something imponderable and impalpable, but on the contrary a dimension of the body, like the senses, and hence equally capable of being studied and treated clinically.
¹⁰⁹

Galileo Gall thus operates from a simple precept: “Revolution will free society of its afflictions, while science will free the individual of his.”

Something very similar was at work in the mind of Struve: a desire for a violent overthrow of oppressive regimes, which could in turn allow the democratic and progressive principles of phrenology to flourish. He was not alone in his democratic zeal: In 1848 democratic revolutions broke out all over Europe, starting in France and quickly engulfing the entire continent. The year Marx and Engels published
The Communist Manifesto
, all of Europe
was ready for change, and men like Struve saw their chance. On March 31 of that year, German reformers gathered in a “Pre-Parliament” to discuss the establishment of a free, united German republic. During the discussion Struve read his fifteen-point plan to end the “subjugation, stultification, and bleeding dry of the people,” which included the abolition of the standing army, all aristocratic privileges, and any connection between church and state and their replacement with laws that were based on “the spirit of our age,” including phrenology.

The Pre-Parliament rejected Struve and his radical coalition in favor of a more moderate approach, and so the radicals decided to bring about emancipation by force. They raised a small army to march on the capital of Baden, but when they met the government's forces in the Black Forest they were severely routed, and Struve and the others were imprisoned. Freed the following year, the undaunted phrenologist once again joined another failed uprising against the government—one in which, it should be noted, his “passionless” wife fought with unmatched tenacity.

In Baden and elsewhere, these popular uprisings were brutally suppressed. In Vienna, for example, when dissidents took control of the center of the city, the royal response was swift and bloody, and the army savagely bombed the entire city. Among the casualties was the imperial zoological collection, which was hit by an errant cannonball, caught fire, and burned to the ground. Lost in the fire was the stuffed body of Angelo Soliman, who finally found his rest in the tumult of such an extraordinary time.

In such a climate, rare or significant skulls continued to be quite valuable. The “New York Golgotha” that was the Fowlers' storefront was filled with a wide variety of skulls, representing “saint . . . savage, and . . . sage,” and (the
Phrenological Journal
reported) all “are represented in the mute eloquence of a thousand crania arranged and labeled among the walls of the building.” The Fowlers were always looking to increase their collection: Any time a hanging was announced, they dispatched an agent to “attend the execution and take a cast of his head.” They took anything, including alligator and deer skulls. But despite this plethora of crania, the skulls of the famous and the highly intelligent continued to elude the Fowlers. In 1854 the
Phrenological Journal
complained, “We have a very large collection of the skulls of murderers, who have been executed, and of soldiers killed on battle-fields, also of Indians, Africans, Egyptians, Chinese, and Cannibals, but we have only a few from the higher class of minds, such as Reformers, Statesmen,
Scholars, & c. Of these we have hundreds of casts, and busts from living heads, but not their skulls.” In an era of hands-on, empirical science, busts and casts were simply not enough. “What a treasure it would be,” the editorial concluded, “if some plan could be devised, by which these leading ‘types' could be preserved as specimens, for scientific purposes.”
¹¹⁰

The phrenologists were not alone in this desire. As anatomical study came to be recognized as increasingly important in the preservation of life, an active campaign was mounted by burial reformers to change people's attitudes about what should be done with their bodies after death and to destigmatize dissection. If anyone, it was the scientists and burial reformers who would have to lead by example. A nameless French scholar in 1829 had delivered a lecture to the British Forum on the virtues of dissection, which concluded with a reading of his will, wherein he stipulated that his body should first be dissected, and then his skin tanned and made into a leather chair. In addition, his bones should be cleaned so that the head could go to the London Phrenological Society and the smaller bones could be made into “knife-handles, pin-cases, small boxes, buttons, etc.”
¹¹¹

More famously, the Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham left his body to science, stuffed and arranged in what he called his “Auto-icon,” the description of which he detailed in his will: a wooden box with a glass front in which his body could be seated
in a chair “usually occupied by me when living in the attitude in which I am sitting when engaged in thought.” Bentham went so far as to stipulate that he be dressed “in one of the suits of black occasionally worn by me” and that he be made to hold his beloved walking stick, nicknamed “Dapple.” His head was replaced with a wax replica (the original having been badly treated during the autopsy), and the “Auto-icon” was acquired in 1850 by University College London, which put it on display. For the 100th and 150th anniversaries of the college, the Auto-icon was wheeled into the meeting of the College Council, and when the roll was called, Bentham was listed as “present, but not voting” (though the college maintains that it is a myth the stuffed corpse has ever cast the deciding vote in the event of a tie).