Mary Roach - Six Feet Over

Of all the brain’s early cartographers, none was quite so thorough as Viennese physician Franz Joseph Gall. Gall claimed to have located twenty-seven distinct “organs” of the human brain, each corresponding to a specific trait or faculty. By all accounts a gifted physician and anatomist, Gall succeeded in pinpointing the brain’s language center and that of our memory for words. His other “organs” were rather more questionable. For instance: The Organ of Poetical Talent. The Organ of Metaphysics. And, my personal favorite: The Organ for the Instinct for Property-Owning and Stocking Up on Food. Gall’s organs landed him in hot water with the church, which labeled him a heretic for teaching that man had multiple souls, a charge Gall denied.

Gall was led astray in part by his unconventional methodology. The swift decomposition of brains precluded their lengthy study, so Gall took to examining skulls, both of the living and the dead. He reasoned that if an organ of the brain was particularly well developed, it would put pressure upon the cranium and raise a bump that could be seen or felt through the hair. (Phrenology—a mass-market popularization of his theories—had the masses feeling each other’s heads and galling Gall for decades to follow.) Gall amassed a collection of 221 skulls, which traveled with him on his lecture circuit, exasperating porters and alarming nosy bellhops. He also owned, at last count, 102 plaster casts of human heads, many of which he’d made himself. The heads were casts of people he met in his travels whose character seemed obviously dominated by one or two strong traits and whose skull bore a bulge in the appropriate spot: evidence for his theories. Skull #5491, for instance, belonged to a Mr. Weilamann, the director of a portable hydrogen gas generator [11] In looking up “portable hydrogen gas generator” on Google, I came across a study called “Detection of Flatus Using a Portable Hydrogen Gas Analyzer,” apparently a novel use of the device. The author taped the machine’s sampling tube to twenty postoperative gastrointestinal patients’ buttocks in an effort to detect farts, a happy sign that their plumbing was back in action. Hydrogen is the main component of flatus; you and I are, in essence, hydrogen gas generators of a less portable variety. company, and showed a notable bump over the Organ for Mechanical Sense, Construction, and Architecture.

Gall was quite devoted to his collection. To track down examples of the Organ of the Penchant for Murder and Carnivorousness, for instance, he took to wandering through prisons, looking for murderers with ridges above the ears. Lunatic asylums were another fruitful stop for Gall and his plaster craft. The catalogue of Gall’s collection contains dozens of items like #5494: “Copy in plaster of the skull of a total idiot.” [12] The terms “idiot” and “lunatic” were acceptable diagnostic terms in England up until 1959. “Imbecile” and “feeble-minded person” were, likewise, listed as official categories in the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. England has always lagged a bit behind in discarding outdated terms for the disadvantaged. (When I was there in 1980, it was still possible to shop for used clothing at the local Spastic Shop.) That is, compared to the United States, where it takes, oh, about twenty-five minutes for a diagnostic euphemism to become a conversational faux pas.

For the Organ of Poetical Talent, Gall resorted to fondling marble busts of the great poets. As evidence for the location of the Organ of Belief in the Existence of God, he cites a series of Raphael paintings in which Christ appears to have a noticeable rise at the crest of his cranium, as though Satan had bopped him over the head with his trident. Had Gall gone potty? Possibly. Here is his evidence for the Organ of the Instinct of Propagation. He knew of a young clockmaker who, when he “ejaculated by onanism,” would lose consciousness for an instant and suffer convulsive movements of the head and a violent pain in the back of the neck. “The idea couldn’t escape me,” writes Gall in Sur les fonctions du cerveau , “that there must be a connection between the functions of physical love and the cerebral parts in the nape of the neck.” Then again, perhaps there is a connection between violent convulsive head movements and neck pain.

As further evidence for the Organ of the Instinct of Propagation, Gall cites a young widow who admitted that since childhood she had felt “strong desires that were impossible to resist” and during these moments the nape of her neck burned. Gall describes placing his hand on her young widowly nape during one of these burning-desire episodes and discovering “a very considerable rounded prominence,” possibly one of several going on in the room.

Item #19.216 of the Gall collection is the skull of Franz Joseph Gall. Gall disciple N. J. Ottin notes that “on the occiput, the tendency toward sex was very marked.”

From Gall’s day onward, the soul began to drift away from the provinces of anatomy and neurology and off into airier domains: religion, philosophy, parapsychology. The men of medicine were through with the soul—with one terrifically odd exception.

IT WAS A pretty place to die. The mansion on Blue Hill Avenue was the showpiece of the Dorchester, Massachusetts, estate known as Grove Hall. Four stories tall, with a porticoed porch and cliques of indolent shade trees, the mansion had been home to T. K. Jones, a wealthy merchant in the China trade. In 1864, it was bought by a physician-cum-faith-healer named Charles Cullis, who turned it into the Consumptives’ Home—a charitable operation for late-stage tuberculosis (a.k.a. consumption) patients. With the discovery of antibiotics sixty years off, prayer was as useful a treatment as any then on offer. TB patients were routinely packed off to sanitariums, ostensibly to partake of rest “cures,” but mainly to keep them from spreading the disease.

Had you been visiting the Consumptives’ Home in April 1901, you might have been witness to a curious undertaking. A plump, meek-looking man of thirty-four, wearing wire-frame glasses and not as much hair as he once did, was stooped over the platform of an ornate Fairbanks scale, customizing the device with wooden supports and what appeared to be an army-style cot. The scale was an oversized commercial model, for weighing silk—no doubt a holdover from Jones’s mercantile days.

Clearly something unorthodox was afoot. Though weight loss was a universal undertaking at the Consumptives’ Home, no one needed a commercial scale to track it.

The man with the hammer was Duncan Macdougall, a respected surgeon and physician who lived in a mansion of his own, in nearby Haverhill. Macdougall was acquainted with the Consumptives’ Home attending physician, but he himself was not on staff. Nor was he treating any of the patients, or even praying for them. Quite the opposite; Macdougall was literally—perhaps even a little eagerly—waiting for them to die.

For the preceding four years of his life, Duncan Macdougall had been hatching a plan to prove the existence of the human soul. If, as most religions held, people leave their bodies behind at death and persist in the form of a soul, then mustn’t this soul occupy space? “It is unthinkable,” wrote Macdougall, “that personality and consciousness can be attributes of that which does not occupy space.” And if they occupy space, he reasoned, they must have weight. “The question arose in my mind: Why not weigh a man at the very moment of death?” If the beam moved, and the body lost even a fraction of an ounce, he theorized, that loss might represent the soul’s departure.