Memento Mori

by

Nicki Leone

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rims at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?
     –Hamlet Act V, Scene I

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.
     –Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary


When Hamlet muses upon the skull of his old jester in a very odd and rather disturbingly forensic scene in the play (A tanner, lectures the gravedigger, will last longer in the ground than other kinds of corpses because “his hide is so tanned with his trade, that he will keep out water a great while; and your water is a sore decayer of your whoreson dead body”) he is commenting about the inevitability of death, its great equalizing effect. The things of this earth are but fleeting, our triumphs and our disasters all come to this—a piles of bones in the earth.

About two hundred years after theater audiences first contemplated, with Hamlet, the ephemeral nature of men’s lives on earth, another man was looking at the skull of another friend, and thinking something quite different. Unlike Yorick, who had lain in the ground some three and twenty years, this skull was but a week buried, and thus not just a skull, but a head. “The sight made a life-long impression on me,” wrote the observer, a Viennese accountant named Carl Joseph Rosenbaum. 

One imagines that it would. Rosenbaum was standing in what passed for a morgue at the Vienna General Hospital, observing as medical professionals cleaned the skull of its hair, flesh, and decaying organs. “The dissection lasted for one hour,” he wrote later in his diary, “the brain, which was of large proportions, stank the most terribly of all.” The head, which he had bribed a local sexton to pilfer from its grave, belonged to his very great friend, the composer Joseph Haydn.

Exactly how it came about that a well-to-do and educated gentleman could arrange to rob the grave of a recently deceased good friend of such notable fame and watch with perfect moral justification (if not perfect physical equanimity) as the remains of his friend’s face, skin, hair, eyes, and brain were stripped away to leave only white bone—this is the question that starts off Colin Dickey’s eccentric and only mildly morbid book Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius.

A series of “case studies,” if you will, of the fates of various famous skulls, Dickey’s book attempts not only to reconstruct the motives and histories of these macabre thefts, but also to place them in a cultural context. Haydn died in 1809, literally dropping dead from exhaustion as Napoleon’s army marched into and occupied Vienna. It was a tumultuous time, and not just for the Viennese or the French. The rationalism and “enlightenment” of the eighteenth century was being overtaken by the romanticism of the nineteenth. The world, which men had begun to realize was governed by certain physical laws and therefore “knowable,” was at the same time revealed to be ever more complex and diverse than had ever been suspected. Fossils of gigantic creatures were dug out of the limestone cliffs in England. Explorers were hacking their way into the blank spaces on the maps and bringing back the most amazing stories and specimens. For perhaps the first time, the disciplines of science and philosophy had more to say about the place of man on earth than did religion. It was an exciting, and uncomfortable, era to live in.

The theft of Hadyn’s skull in 1809 marked the early days of a rising popular interest in phrenology—the notion that a person’s character can be determined from the shape of his skull. The theory was espoused first by a Viennese doctor named Franz Joseph Gall (who was later exiled for his dangerous and heretical theories) and popularized by his student, Johann Spurzheim. It was Spurzheim who coined the term “phrenology,” from the Greek phrenos meaning “mind.” 

The idea that the shape of a skull can indicate whether a person was—as an example—inclined towards immorality, or chastity, is of course laughed at today. But the idea that the mind—the faculty of reason and the seat of a man’s intellect and personality—everything that differentiates him from lower animals—might be located in a specific organ (the brain) and not in the indeterminate, intangible “soul” was a radically new notion for nineteenth century science. Brains and skulls could be studied and measured. Souls cannot.

Thus, when Rosenbaum had Haydn secretly dug up and his head removed, he was acting as an amateur scientist, interested in preserving for posterity his friend’s incredible genius. Haydn’s music might offer a fleeting glimpse of his greatness for the space of a performance, but his skull would stand as permanent, eternal testimony.

Cranioklepty (Dickey seems to have invented the word) follows the sad and bizarre histories of several famous men’s skulls—Haydn, Beethoven, Sir Thomas Browne, and Swedenborg among others—and in the process traces the evolution of phrenology from its inception as a scientific discipline interested in understanding the human mind, through its popularization in art and literature, and its eventual discredit as science became more methodical and empirical, and drifted away from metaphysical questions such as finding the physical organs responsible for intangible, immeasurable traits like “virtue” or “humor.” And while the author offers plenty of strange and bizarre stories about the obsessions of the nineteenth century—especially its obsession with death—it is this other story, of an era’s search for what it means to be human, that elevates Dickey’s from a chronicle of the macabre into something more poignant and indelible. 

Rosenbaum stole Hadyn’s skull in the middle of a war. In his diary he records the casualties of battle: “. . . two to three die each day, because of the shortage of food and because so many people are cooped together in each house.” But only a few days later his diaries is full of plans for the case he is having constructed to house Haydn’s skull, and complaints about the scarcity of taffeta. “It is during moments like these,” writes Dickey, “that it becomes most clear that there are two kinds of death. There is Death, the immortal and symbolic figure embodied in the skull, and then there is the other, messy death that was happening all around Rosenbaum, the death that came with the waste of battle, a dismembering and decapitating death, a death of putrification and unbearable smells. What Rosenbaum struggled with, even at his most audacious, was that alchemical transformation from one kind of death to the other, a transformation that required more than just quicklime.”

Rosenbaum gives up grave robbing once he has Haydn’s skull safely ensconced. But the mania for skulls did not abate for years. Stories of the nineteenth century’s preoccupation with death abound; who has not heard, for example, of the specially constructed coffins complete with windows and affixed with bell-pulls as a safeguard against being buried alive? The opposite fear was also true—the mania for collecting skulls and procuring corpses for study reached such a fever-pitch that people were afraid for their remains, and in 1818 an Englishman won great fame for patenting a coffin that was supposedly proof against “resurrectionists.” 

Cranioklepty documents the craze as it transformed from a kind of “cult of relics” driven by the desire to touch genius, into a more scientific discipline, a subgenre of comparative anatomy.  And it ends with the most famous (and distasteful) story of alleged skull-stealing; the apocryphal story of Prescott Bush (great-grandfather to our previous president) breaking into Geronimo’s tomb to steal the skull that would give the “Skull and Bones Society” at Yale University its name. From a search for the physical manifestation of genius, for the seat of the soul, it has come to this—the skull is now nothing more than a trophy, a dare, for undisciplined schoolboys. 

Or perhaps not. When the composer Tchaikovsky died in 1982, he left his skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company in the hopes that it could be used for Yorick whenever Hamlet was performed. In 2008, it did in fact appear in a production, but for only one performance. It had to be replaced once news circulated, because the sight of the skull distracted the audience from the actual performance of the play. Carl Joseph Rosenbaum would understand.

Books mentioned in this column:
Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius by Colin Dickey (Unbridled Books, 2009)


Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.