Cranioklepty (26 page)

Osler had first visited Browne's skull in 1873. To be in the presence of his idol stirred him deeply; as he wrote to a friend, “Say what people will about pictures, emblems, relics & the like, they have been and ever will be the most delightful & I think reasonable means of raising the thoughts to higher and holier hopes.”
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In 1902 Osler had donated a glass case to hold the skull of his idol, the base of which was inscribed with the Norwich doctor's thoughts on the body and death: “At my death I mean to take a total adieu of the world, not caring for a monument, history or epitaph, not so much as the bare memory of my name to be found anywhere but in the universal register of God.”

But only a few years later Osler had changed his mind about the fate of Browne's bones. In an address on Browne in 1906, he noted that the “tender sympathy with the poor relics of humanity which Browne expresses so beautifully . . . has not been meted out to his own.” Osler began to use his fame to influence the hospital board, asking it to reconsider its 1893 decision in response to Pelham Burn.

That year the board agreed unanimously that the skull, should eventually be returned, provided that members of the board were present when the grave was opened and that the skull
would not be displayed by the church as a “relic” before it went back into the ground. In retrospect, these do not seem particularly complicated conditions, but the negotiations between the hospital and church over Browne's skull would take another sixteen years. Osler (who sometimes published under the pseudonym “Egerton Yorrick Davis”) died in 1919, with the repatriation of Browne still unresolved, the actual reinterment taking place finally in 1922.

As with other notable skulls, there was a rush to take some final measurements of Browne's. Sir Anthony Keith was asked to take measurements of the skull, supervise the making of casts, and determine its authenticity. A prominent anthropologist, Sir Anthony had lately become something of a one-man jury when it came to cranial mysteries. Around the same time he had been asked to identify the remains of a small skeleton found buried in a shallow grave in Rosherville Gardens. It was originally thought to have been that of a chimpanzee or other primate, but when Keith pronounced the remains to be human, an inquiry was launched on “suspicion that here was evidence of some dark crime of bygone years.” Only by chance was the matter mentioned to one of Keith's colleagues, who suddenly recalled a display in the gardens some seventy years earlier that had included a Peruvian mummy.
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Keith had been the director of the Hunterian Museum at the
Royal College of Surgeons since 1894, but his reputation had been greatly enhanced in the previous ten years as the result of a series of events that became known as the “Piltdown Affair.”
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A
RCHAEOLOGY AND PALEONTOLOGY
had changed fundamentally. The notion of a single Great Flood, as described in Genesis, had long given way to a slowly forming picture of epochs and eras, Ice Ages and extinctions, rising out of gravel beds and bits of bone. As the fossil record began to yield its story, the missing links that would establish the evolution of apes to humans became of crucial importance. Hominoid remains such as the Neanderthal
Pithecanthropus erectus
(“Java Man”) had begun to appear in the previous decades, but it was not yet clear whether they were the direct ancestors of
Homo sapiens
or if both races had descended from an as yet undetermined common ancestor. The meaning of these bones remained tantalizingly elusive; they were what Sir Arthur Keith called the pieces of a “ruined bridge” that “connected the kingdom of man with the rest of the animal world.”
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In 1912 the lawyer and amateur geologist Charles Dawson found a fossil that seemed to shed light on the question. Discovered in Piltdown, England, the find consisted of multiple fragments of a hominoid skull—notably, the jaw pieces resembled
those of an ape while the brain case was almost as large as that of a human. Given the genus name
Eoanthropus
(“man of the dawn”), the Piltdown skull changed how anthropologists had come to view human evolution.

First, though, the skull had to be put together. Only large fragments of the cranial case and some smaller jaw fragments were extant, so Dawson's friend Arthur Woodward, the keeper of geology at the British Museum, put together a complete reconstruction of what the head might have looked like. There was nothing unusual in this—complete specimens were rarely found—but it did mean that one had to reconstruct the skull based on these fragments and that some amount of imagination was involved. The front of the jaw was missing, so Woodward had to extrapolate from ape anatomy, building a jutting mandible and pronounced lower canines.

In December 1912 Sir Arthur Keith and a dozen other scientists gathered to discuss the Piltdown skull and argue over its significance. While Woodward was cautious about the meaning of the find, Keith led a contingency of scientists who believed the elusive common ancestor to both human and Neanderthal had been found. Claiming that Dawson and Woodward were not aware of the significance of what they had uncovered, Keith took issue with Woodward's reconstruction of the skull fragments. He proposed another version of the Piltdown remains, one in which the brain case was significantly larger and the jaw closer to that of modern humans. The missing link that scientists the world over had been searching for, he believed, had been found in England.

This was the other major reason the Piltdown Man was important. In these years before World War I, nationalism was at its height and anthropology had its own share of chauvinistic rivalries. Various countries were vying for the claim to be the cradle of civilization. In 1907 the so-called Heidelburg Man became a coveted trophy for Germany, and a few years later the paleontologist Florentino Ameghino had claimed that humanity's earliest ancestors were to be found in his home country of Argentina. Anthropologists had gone from asserting that their respective cultures were the height of civilization to bragging that they held the birth of civilization.

Battles continued to rage between Keith and others over Piltdown for a decade. To settle the question of the skull's reconstruction, Keith's colleagues broke a skull into pieces and challenged him to reconstruct it, which he was able to do flawlessly. As the debate attracted worldwide attention, Keith's fame continued to rise, and when it was announced that he would investigate the head of Sir Thomas Browne, it was big news indeed.

A
S IT HAPPENED
,
Keith didn't have the time to carry out the investigation himself, so it fell instead to Miss Miriam Tildesley. Like Tandler with Haydn and Hultkrantz with Swedenborg, Tildesley made extensive, detailed comparisons of known portraits and other extant data relevant to Browne. The skull's authenticity was much clearer because it had had fewer owners, but again Tildesley relied primarily on written documents and testimony—ultimately
the provenance of the skull was nothing more than the collected stories of Robert Fitch, Skull George Potter, and Charles Williams.

Tildesley also weighed in one last time on the question of Browne's forehead. Since it was very nearly undeniable that this low-sloped head had belonged to Browne, she offered two possible explanations to resolve the discrepancy. First, she noted that phrenologists had connected the forebrain to concentration and discrimination and suggested that “Sir Thomas Browne is undoubtedly a characteristic writer who has charmed many generations of English readers; but after all do his writings suggest great powers of concentration or discrimination? . . . We should rather anticipate that the sense of rhythm, the appreciation of sound and music, the artistic rather than the logical side of mind would be markedly developed in him. Hence it is possibly not reasonable to demand that Sir Thomas Browne must have been ‘high browed.'”

The other solution of the problem she offered was “to take the results of this memoir as confirming earlier investigations which indicate that there is very little correlation between the shape of the head or indeed of the brain cavity and the mentality of the individual. . . . The present investigation seems to indicate that the skull of another man of genius can depart from general mediocrity in a few isolated characters, and in some of these reach a form which current opinion describes as a ‘low type' of skull.”

Unsurprisingly, she noted that this second possibility was “to us the more reasonable one” and concluded that “Sir Thomas
Browne's skull supports the conclusion that the correlation of superficial head and brain characters with mentality is so low as to provide no basis for any prognosis of value.”
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I
T WAS COMMONLY
accepted that Tildesley had proved that the skull was indeed Browne's. When Keith got around to presenting his own findings on Browne two years later, the question he asked—in a speech that bore the oddly anachronistic title “Phrenological Studies of the Skull and Brain Cast of Sir Thomas Browne of Norwich”—was whether one might learn anything else from it beyond merely its provenance.

Keith had been attracted to phrenology as a child and had felt that “Nature had dealt rather meanly by myself as regards to size and form of head.” By the time Keith entered college he had all but abandoned Gall's science, but he argued that nonetheless phrenology might one day be salvageable. He cited human evolution, with its attendant growth in cranial capacity, as well as the localization of brain functions as indications that someday, “when our knowledge of the human nervous system is perfected, it will be possible by a mere inspection of a brain to assess the mental potentialities of its owner. This is the ultimate goal of a scientific phrenologist.”
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In many ways Keith's program maps onto much of current psychology and neuroscience, though no one would be
so gauche as to use the term “phrenology” anymore. “The goal the phrenologist has in mind is a knowledge which will make it possible for him to examine the head of a living child, by sight, touch, and X-ray transillumination, and to thus form an accurate estimate of the development of its brain as a whole and of its various parts, and from this knowledge of the brain infer the abilities of the child.”
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Drawing of Sir Thomas Browne's skull, by Sir Arthur Keith.

But it was a dream whose time had not yet come. “It was my
ambition,” Keith wrote in what had become a well-worn metaphor, particularly since Williams's photo of Browne on his books, “to make the skull of Sir Thomas Browne a text from which I might preach a sermon concerning the forces which mould the skull and brain into their several forms, and to illustrate the methods I had devised to measure and elucidate the nature of the forces which are involved.”
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Instead his appraisal was notably lacking in anything like a conclusion. After meticulously comparing Browne's skull and its measurements to those of Robert the Bruce, Jonathan Swift, and Robert Burns, Keith's report ended on a flat, anticlimactic note: “Even if I had dealt fully with all of these matters, we should not, in our present knowledge of the brain, have been any nearer to an explanation of the peculiar abilities of the author of
Religio Medici.
”
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So the text of Browne's skull was to remain undeciphered, leaving us with only his books.

B
ROWNE'S HEAD WAS
already back in the ground by the time Keith delivered his lecture. Whether or not his repatriation had any influence on the Society of the Friends of Music in Vienna is hard to say. But not long after Browne's return to earth, talks began about bringing Haydn home to Eisenstadt. Though Tandler had proven in 1909 that the authentic head of Haydn was with the
Society for the Friends of Music and not in his tomb in Eisenstadt, it wasn't until 1932 that there was serious discussion about its repatriation. The society agreed to the transfer, ready to relinquish this most valuable relic, but as negotiations got under way the municipal authorities of the city of Vienna lodged a protest, claiming that the city had a legal right to the skull that trumped Prince Esterhazy's claim. Their reasoning was that the city had a clear title to the head, regardless of how Rosenbaum and Peter had come into possession of it, because Rosenbaum and Peter had willed it to the society, which was ultimately a function of Vienna.

It would seem to be a repetition of the same legal battle that had kept Browne's head out of his tomb for so long. But this dispute was quickly overtaken by other matters—as the 1930s rushed headlong forward, Vienna and the rest of Europe were quickly engulfed in matters much larger than the disposition of a composer's skull.

A
S
W
ORLD
W
AR
II unfolded, it became clear that much of Europe's vast cultural and artistic heritage was at risk, from centuries-old monasteries to irreplaceable paintings and sculpture. At least Haydn's head, locked in the society's archives, appeared to be safe. The same could not be said of Beethoven's skull fragments. Thomas Browne's endless saga suggested the dire predicament of a skull in the hands of despotic museum curators, but the story of Beethoven's fragments suggested the even
more tenuous nature of those precious relics that were not protected by some kind of museum.