From The Book of Lists #3 by Amy Wallace and David Wallechinsky.
Illustrations by Laura Park.
GEORGE FREDERICK COOKE’S SKULL
Even though Irish-born actor Cooke has been dead for over 170 years, he still gets steady work. Cooke’s skull is owned by the Thomas Jefferson University Medical School library in Philadelphia, which lends it out to theatrical groups as a prop.
PAUL BROCA’S BRAIN
In one of the less frequented corners of the Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Man) in Paris are numerous bottles containing human brains. Some belonged to intellectuals, others to criminals. But perhaps the most distinguished of the specimens is that of Broca, a 19th-century physician and anthropologist who was the father of modern brain surgery.
ALBERT EINSTEIN’S BRAIN
What might have been the greatest brain of the 20th century was not buried with the body that housed it. Einstein asked that after his death his brain be removed for study. And when the great physicist died in 1955, this was done. The brain—which was neither larger nor heavier than the norm—was photographed, sectioned, and sent around the country to be studied by specialists. Some of the largest specimens are in Wichita, Kansas.
GALILEO’S FINGER
The great astronomer died in 1642, but his body wasn’t interred in its final resting place until 1737. During that final transfer to the Church of Santa Croce in Florence, an aristocratic admirer cut off three of Galileo’s fingers as keepsakes. Two now belong to an Italian doctor, but the third—a middle finger—sits in Florence’s Museum of the History of Science pointing skyward.
JOSEPH HAYDN’S HEAD
The Austrian composer died in 1809. Soon after his burial, a prison warden who was an amateur phrenologist—a person who tries to correlate head bumps with character traits—hired grave robbers to steal the head. The warden examined the skull, then gave it to an acquaintance, and a remarkable 145-year-long odyssey began. The theft of the skull was discovered in 1820, when the family of Haydn’s patron had the body disinterred. Eventually they got a skull back, but it wasn’t Haydn’s. The real item was passed from one owner to another, some of them individuals, others organizations. Finally, it found a home in a glass case at Vienna’s Society of Friends of Music. In 1932, the descendants of Haydn’s patrons once again tried to get it back. But WWII and then the cold war intervened—the body was in Austria’s Soviet quarter, but the skull in the international zone. It wasn’t until 1954 that body and skull were finally reunited.
CHARLES LOWELL’S PELVIC BONES
Lowell, of Lubec, Maine, fractured his pelvis in a fall from a horse in 1821. The pelvis was treated by Dr. Micajah Hawkes. Lowell walked on it too soon, and it didn’t heal well. Lowell blamed the physician and sued. After three highly publicized trials, the judge threw the case out of court. Lowell, however, apparently couldn’t forget it. His will directed that after his death, which occurred in 1858, a postmortem examination be made. It showed that Lowell had been wrong. The celebrated pelvic bones were preserved in a Boston anatomical museum while the rest of the body was buried in Maine.
TO BE CONTINUED:
THE PEOPLE'S LISTS | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
