Cranioklepty (25 page)

In the preceding pages I have already pointed out the difficulty, not to say impossibility, of arriving, in a question of this sort, at an absolutely infallible result in a positive direction. To prove that a given cranium cannot be that of a specified person may at times be a relatively easy task, while the demonstration of the true identity of a skull must be, almost without exception, limited to a calculation of probabilities, a proving that there exist no invalidating reasons, and a collecting of a number of arguments, each of which by itself has only a rather modest value as proof, but
all of which, when taken together, by their number and unanimity, carry conviction to the mind.

This was the best that could be hoped for when it came to the authenticating of a disputed head. But for Hultkrantz it was enough—by way of conclusion he pronounced that the skull “which now lies in Emanuel Swedenborg's coffin may, with the greatest degree of probability, be regarded as genuine.”
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T
HIS ENTIRE UNDERTAKING
had been brought about by William Rutherford's letters, and Hultkrantz had felt obliged to address him; he didn't conclude that Rutherford's recollection was wrong, per se—it may very well have been the case that an antiquarian had told Rutherford he had Swedenborg's skull and may even have believed it himself. But based on the apparent authenticity of the skull now in Sweden, it appeared “much more probable,” Hultkrantz concluded, “that the grave-digger had deluded the old antiquary into buying a false skull.”
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Hultkrantz's paper was delivered as part of the jubilee celebration surrounding the unveiling of Swedenborg's granite sarcophagus and was extremely well received by the Royal Academy of Sciences. Thus the matter seemed to be closed.

In London, members of the Swedenborg Society, perhaps out of a desire for closure, still felt a need to resolve Rutherford's claims. His account seemed so far-fetched, so full of half remembrances and gaps, that it was dubious in the extreme. But in February 1909 a representative of the society sought him out, just to be sure they had gotten the whole story and could dispel any nagging doubts. Rutherford was delighted that someone was finally taking an interest in his tale. As his letter had promised, he was all too willing to assist when the occasion arose, and he offered to track down the “very veracious old gentleman,” a herbalist and antiquarian, who had claimed to have the skull and see what he could find out. Rutherford spent the spring and part of the summer in pursuit of the skull. The antiquarian had long since died, but Rutherford was able to track down his children. Although most of these leads turned out to be dead ends, he did succeed finally in finding one descendant who knew what had happened to the old man's skull collection and who gave Rutherford the name of the inheritor of the skulls.

Shortly thereafter Rutherford sent a letter to the Swedenborg Society. He had found the antiquarian's collection, he wrote, and while the labels identifying each individual skull had long been lost, he believed he knew which one had been Swedenborg's. Because it was a particularly noteworthy skull, it had been kept in good condition, and besides, someone had pricked a number of dots into the bone that spelled out the letters “E. S'Borg.”

Rutherford's tale was becoming increasingly bizarre, but perhaps he was actually on to something. In August another
representative of the Swedenborg Society came to Rutherford to see the skull he had uncovered. In the meantime, though, Rutherford had moved—since supposedly discovering the skull he had been institutionalized in an insane asylum. It's not clear what Rutherford suffered from, only that he was described as having a “periodical mental disease” and was at times “almost completely normal.”
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Regardless, his mental condition did not bode well for his tale. Unsure what to make of this, the Swedenborg Society representative asked to see the skull, but Rutherford didn't have it, and he refused, under any condition, to divulge the name of the gentleman who did have it or to reveal his location. He instead told the representative that if he wanted to see the skull Rutherford would have to travel with him to London, in the company of two wardens, and locate it himself. Exasperated, the Swedenborgian consulted Rutherford's physician as to his condition. The doctor found the whole thing dubious; he doubted there even was a skull and thought that Rutherford's strategy was only to get himself freed from the asylum.

The story turned out to have been a complete waste of time. In high-profile murder cases, there are always false confessions by those seeking publicity and attention, and Rutherford's story appeared to be something similar—Swedenborg's was by then a high enough profile that it was only a matter of time before a crazy like Rutherford tried to write himself into the philosopher's story.

The matter thus seemingly resolved, the Swedenborg Society followed the example of the Royal Academy of Science in moving on. But Rutherford, motivated by whatever unknown reason, did not. Eventually released from the asylum, he returned to London and once more tracked down the skull. In October 1911 he sent another letter, claiming that he now had the skull and inquiring again whether Hultkrantz or anyone else would be interested in analyzing it.

Patiently Hultkrantz responded, noting that since there was now at least an actual skull, it was “most correct to probe quite without bias the import of Mr. R.'s suggestion and its actual basis.”
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He agreed to take a look at the skull Rutherford possessed, but Rutherford refused to send it, perhaps fearing that Hultkrantz would not return it. Instead he sent a lengthy written description of the skull. There was nothing Hultkrantz could do with just a description of a specimen he had never seen, so Rutherford agreed to send tracings and some photographs. These were hardly sufficient either. Finally Rutherford sent a cast of the skull, but under no conditions would he send the thing itself. Hultkrantz would just have to make do with the documentation and the cast.

Hultkrantz's second monograph, “Additional Note on the Mortal Remains of Emanuel Swedenborg,” is a good deal shorter than the first, reflecting his increasing impatience with the sometimes insane “Mr. R.” Rutherford offered two indications that
might aid Hultkrantz in identifying the skull. First, there was a scar on the right temple “that might have been caused by a sabre or cutlass and that should form a mark of identification if it could be proved that he had received such in his lifetime.”
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And second, there were the pinpricks, the dots that spelled out “E. S'borg.”

Hultkrantz was unimpressed with both of these: “They were not sufficiently well produced on the photos and the cast to enable us to form a decided opinion as to their nature and origin.” Hultkrantz added that even if the scar was genuine and had not been made postmortem, that would argue
against
the skull being Swedenborg's, since no record of such an injury existed in his journals or biographies. And as Delambre had with Descartes's skull, Hultkrantz found the name written on the skull of no importance at all: “Even if there were a quite distinct, unabridged name instead of the rather dubious ‘tiny dots,' it would be of no consequence since we do not know at all who has written it, at what time, and for what reasons.”
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Without any reliable positive indications of the skull's owner, Hultkrantz turned to the skull itself. Its chief characteristic was that it was scaphocephalic, a pathological deformity that was somewhat rare. The main features were “a ridge-like vertex and (at least in the majority of the cases) a more or less complete fusion of the parietal bones with an alteration of the growth of the
skull, so that it becomes extraordinarily long and narrow, often with an overhanging front and a prolonged back of the head.”
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In other words, this long, narrow skull gave the head a pronounced shape that was not likely to have gone unnoticed or unremarked on by Swedenborg's contemporaries. Hultkrantz thought it extremely doubtful that so prominently deformed a skull could belong to the great philosopher and scientist. Not only would it have been noticed by his contemporaries and commented on somewhere in some document, it was unlikely in the extreme that great creativity or intelligence could flower in such a deformed head.

The “Swansea” skull.

Hultkrantz happened to have access to another scaphocephalic skull from the Anatomical Institute of Uppsala, belonging to a tinsmith who had suffered from dementia and died poor. In addition, a death mask had been made of this individual, owing to the peculiar shape of his head. Based on this cast, Hultkrantz claimed, scaphocephaly indicated an abject physical appearance and a high degree of mental deficiency; thus he felt confident in ruling out the scaphocephalic skull from Rutherford as even remotely likely to have belonged to Swedenborg.

Finally there was a question of gender. When John Flaxman had examined the Swedenborg skull, then in Charles Tulk's phrenological cabinet, he had stated, “Why I should almost take it for a female head, were it not for the peculiar character of the forehead.” Hultkrantz took this as one more piece of corroborating evidence: “Everyone who is acquainted with the sexual differences of human crania must admit that this skull is of a decided masculine type, and that if it in any point at all approaches the female type, it is just in regard to the forehead!”
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Once again it seemed impossible that the skull that had been in Tulk's phrenological cabinet was the same as Rutherford's.

Hultkrantz ended, perhaps now long tired of Rutherford's antics, with a fairly dismissive note: “With regard to the considerable value that a collector of curios may attach to such a rarity as a skull of Emanuel Swedenborg, I should be very much surprised if not more than one ‘genuine' skull of the great mystic
should make its appearance in the future. Still, judging from the present case, it will probably be fairly awkward to find any real proofs countervailing those on which the opinion expressed in my account is based.”
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Hultkrantz had now publicly disproven Rutherford twice, this time in far more detail. He had the weight of science behind him, and Rutherford, in addition to being a sometime lunatic, had only the word of a long-dead antiquarian and some dots that seemed to spell out a name.

H
OWEVER
, R
UTHERFORD, STUBBORN
to the end, refused to concede. Instead he realized only that he could not count on the scientific establishment for support. He took matters into his own hands, publishing a note in the local
East London Observer
titled “A Swedenborg Mystery: The Rival Skulls,” which compared the heads and laid out his admittedly thin reasoning for the importance of the skull in his possession. In response to Hultkrantz's argument about scaphocephaly, one of the editors of the journal feebly noted that there “is absolutely no evidence that this cranial deformity (scaphocephaly) is accompanied with any type of mental or moral development. The two I have known during life were essentially commonplace persons.”
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If he had hoped to draw Hultkrantz back into the dispute
once more, it didn't work. Nothing else was forthcoming from Sweden about Rutherford and his skull. He did, however, manage to convince at least one person, selling it to one William A. Williams on the premise that it was the authentic head of Emanuel Swedenborg. Williams was a phrenologist in the old mold, arguing not just for the relatively uncontroversial localization aspects of Gall's theory, but also for the highly dubious aspects of cranioscopy—not long before buying the head from Rutherford he had argued that “the skull is as much a living tissue as the brain,” and thus that accurate readings of the mind's activities could be traced through the skull.
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Williams was also a student of Swedenborg and understood phrenology as the first science to be developed since the Second Coming that Swedenborg had identified in 1758.

And so the matter might have ended—the true skull in Sweden with the body, Rutherford's diseased head in the possession of a quack phrenologist, and all best left forgotten—if not for a young Swede named Folke Henschen, living in London studying anthropology, who read Rutherford's article in the
East London Observer
and took notice.

By 1922 St. Peter Mancroft had a new vicar, Reverend F. J. Meyrick, and among his named duties he inherited the task of endlessly badgering the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital Museum for the return of a certain skull. But where Pelham Burn had had to rely on appeals to decency and common sense, Meyrick had the help of a medical celebrity. The Canadian physician Sir William Osler had pioneered the practice of residencies for medical students and had helped to establish Johns Hopkins in Baltimore as a preeminent hospital when he had become chief physician in 1889. As a sixteen-year-old theology student at Trinity University in Toronto, Osler had fallen in love with Browne's work—
Religio Medici
was the second book he had ever bought, and it would end up buried with him. It was Browne's book that convinced him to become a doctor; he found it to be “full of counsels of perfection which appeal to
the mind of youth, still plastic and unhardened by contact with the world.”
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