From ‘Bicephalic Monsters’ to ‘Brains of the Insane’: How Anatomists Built Evolutionary Hierarchies

-by Wood Institute travel grantee Trevor Engel*

As a freshman in college who enjoyed collecting dead things—skulls, bones, taxidermy, wet preserved animals, among other things—I always hoped that I would have the chance to visit the Mütter Museum at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. I’ve long been fascinated by death, so the Mütter seemed to be a place I just had to visit. But never did I imagine myself in the College’s Historical Medical Library poring through the original handwritten catalog and countless other nineteenth-century documents, analyzing the language used to describe “monsters,” and investigating how anatomists procured the bodies and body parts of people we might now call “disabled.” What made it possible for me to finally visit the Mütter, however, had nothing to do with my passion for collecting dead animals, but rather the field in which I am specializing: disability history. This relatively new field investigates the experiences of disabled people and also explores “disability” and “the normal” as social, political, and cultural categories in historical context.

My current project, which allowed me to research at the Mütter Museum, explores the interconnections between the science of anatomy, the collection of dead bodies (and in particular disabled bodies), and the emergence of the eugenics movement. Disability studies scholars have explored the historical impacts of freak shows and eugenics on attitudes about people with disabilities in considerable depth, but rarely have they looked at what happened to those “freaks” after death.

Nor have scholars examined the role played by anatomists and anatomical museums in collecting the bodies and body parts of people who had disabilities. The simultaneous mid-nineteenth century emergence of anatomical science, professional medicine, proto-eugenics, and the practice of displaying “freaks” or their body parts after their death has, I propose, played a large role in how the medical field and the broader public talk about disability and treat people with disabilities even today.

The Mütter’s original typescript catalog, begun by curator Guy Hinsdale in 1884, highlights the ways in which anatomists’ language often reduced people to the status of “it” or “other.” The catalog lists every specimen in the museum’s inventory along with names of donors and sometimes other details. It includes thousands of entries ranging from bones, plaster casts, skulls and skeletons, to photographs, preserved fetuses, preserved organs, and nearly any type of anatomical specimen imaginable. The “skull of a negro idiot,” for instance, was noted to have “[a] forehead [that] retreats excessively and the jaws are very prognatious.” This example also illustrates how language and ideas about race, disability, and evolution have long been inextricably linked. Following the human “monsters” recorded in the teratology section the catalog lists mostly animal-monsters, including a pig with an extended proboscis, a bird with three wings, a two-headed chicken and, on the same page, a (human) hermaphrodite.

My favorite part of the catalog was the teratology section which includes a description of a “Bicephalic Monster”—a specific type of conjoined twins. Soon after their birth in Warren County, Ohio, in 1870, these twins became a popular tourist attraction. They received “hundreds” of visitors each day, reportedly maintaining “rare infantile good humor in spite of the somewhat awkward handling.” The Mütter still holds a plaster cast of these children. This entry intrigued me not only because of its vivid description of the twins as having a “cross-like” shape, but also because such individuals had their own Linnaean classification: “order Catadidyma, genus Ischiopagus, and species Ischiopagus Tripus.” The catalog shows that anatomists and teratologists placed these individuals in a completely different order from “homo sapiens.” In other words, these twins, who were born to healthy humans, were not considered human in evolutionary terms.

Anatomists in the transatlantic trade in specimens shared a common rhetoric of the body as commodity. Physicians and other museums supplied lists of items in their collection that they might sell for the right price. These advertisements for “bodily objects” came from places such as Paris, Nürnberg (Germany), Vienna, and New Orleans, as well as the Army Medical Museum in Washington, D.C., with which the Mütter regularly traded specimens. Paris’ Monsieur Vasseur, for instance, supplied 15 items collectively worth $4,150 in August of 1882. Despite doctors’ diverse origins, they used similar language in regard to bodies, referring to them as nothing more than parts or pieces. This undoubtedly reflected anatomists’ training as well as the fact that the horrors and scale of the Civil War fundamentally changed how Americans, at least, viewed dead bodies.

As indicated by the example of the conjoined twins, the science of anatomy has long included disabled people in its “world.” During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, those professionals most closely associated with anatomy often considered people with disabilities largely as tools for advancing medicine. Consequently, some—perhaps many—adherents of anatomical medicine paid little attention to the postmortem wishes of disabled people, or to those of their relatives. For instance, Dr. Francis X. Dercum, the pathologist at the Norristown State Asylum for the Insane in Pennsylvania—the first state asylum to house a pathological laboratory—procured the brains of inmates after they died precisely so that he could submit them to the Mütter. He also authored an article in 1887 in The Medical Times in which he compared fissures in the “epileptic brain” to the fissures in the brains of apes. The Mütter’s curator inserted that article in the catalog just prior to the page listing Dercum’s donations of “brains of epileptics” and “brains of the insane.”

While such comparisons between animals and disabled people might seem shocking now, this kind of evolutionary thinking about people with disabilities—that they were less than human—was widely accepted during the second half of the nineteenth century and lasted well into the twentieth century. By creating, exchanging, using, and publicizing “bodily objects” made out of disabled people, anatomists played a central role in desensitizing the public to the use of such bodies and body parts in medical research. As a result, the “betterment of mankind” has at times surpassed all rights that one had regarding the treatment of one’s own body.

n.b.  This month’s scholarly contribution to Fugitive Leaves comes from the only undergraduate ever to receive a travel grant from the F.C. Wood Institute for the History of Medicine. Trevor Engel’s work during the summer of 2015 is indicative of the level of research that can be done by undergraduate scholars. It is the hope of the Library that more undergraduates take advantage of grant funds such as the Wood Institute in order to further their learning, as well as the history of medicine.

*Trevor Engel is an undergraduate student in History with a minor in Disability Studies at University of Texas at Arlington, Class of 2016.  He received an F.C. Wood Institute Travel Grant from the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in 2015.