If your goal was to pinpoint the soul, it obviously made more sense to experiment on the living than on the dead. The simplest plan of action would be to systematically scramble, excise, or otherwise disable the likely structures and watch to see if the lights went out. And this, more or less, is what got done. Like Descartes, most scientists had zeroed in on the brain. (From early on, observations of personality changes caused by head injuries suggested a link between brain and self.) Galen was one of the earliest of the neuro-vivisectors; he experimented with cutting (and getting on) the nerves of his neighbors’ pigs. Based on this work, he decided that the soul was situated in the substance of the brain and not, as Herophilus had maintained, in the ventricles.
Leonardo da Vinci further narrowed it down. In 1996, McGill University professor of neurosurgery Rolando Del Maestro curated an exhibition called “Leonardo da Vinci: The Search for the Soul.” In the materials for the exhibit, Del Maestro describes a 1487 manuscript in which Leonardo made notes about a passage he had read in a book about the Carthaginian War. The passage describes the quickest way to kill an injured elephant: by pounding a stake between the animal’s ears at the top of the spinal column. Intrigued, Leonardo took to pithing frogs in a similar manner. “The frog instantly dies when its spinal medulla is perforated,” Del Maestro quotes Leonardo as having written. “And previously it lived without head, without heart or any interior organs, or intestines or skin. Here, therefore, it appears, lies the foundation of movement and life.” (I think that what he meant is that the skinned, gutted, headless, heartless frogs lived for a little while.)
Only one soul-seeking man of science carried out this sort of cavalier slice-and-see experimentation on a living human being. As the king’s surgeon and the founder of France’s Royal Academy of Surgery, Gigot de La Peyronie could pretty well do what he felt like. In 1741, he published a paper entitled “Observations by Which One Tries to Discover the Part of the Brain Where the Soul Exercises Its Functions.” The subject was a sixteen-year-old boy whose skull had been cracked by a rock. After three days of worsening symptoms, the youth fell unconscious. La Peyronie “opened up his head” and found a suppurating abscess deep down inside the brain, at the corpus callosum. He drained the wound, taking care to measure the runoff, which amounted to “about the volume of a hen’s egg.” As soon as the pus[9] that had weighed upon the corpus callosum was drained, he wrote, the coma lifted. La Peyronie noted that when the cavity had refilled with ooze, the youth fell unconscious again. He reemptied it, and again the boy awoke. The corpus callosum, he reasoned, must be the seat of the soul. Just to be sure, La Peyronie decided to undertake a little experiment. He filled a syringe with saline and injected it directly into the newly drained wound. As predicted, the boy lost consciousness. And was brought back to his senses when La Peyronie pumped the water back out.
La Peyronie found confirmation of his conclusions in three patients who had lost consciousness and died following head injuries and then been found during autopsy to have abscesses in the vicinity of the corpus callosum. One of the abscess pockets, that of a soldier whose horse had kicked him, was here again described as being “of the size and shape of a hen’s egg”—clearly the “bigger-than-a-breadbox” of its day.
Autopsies also enabled La Peyronie to rule out Descartes’s competing claim that the soul hung its hat in the pineal gland. La Peyronie had autopsied patients discovered to be missing the gland entirely or in whom it appeared to have petrified. “Elle ne réside pas dans la glande pinéale,” he declared. I find a certain arrogance suffuses both La Peyronie’s writing and his deeds. If only he could know that today, as regards historic Frenchmen known to Americans, La Peyronie doesn’t hold a flame to Le Petomane,[10] the Moulin Rouge “fartiste,” whom no one should hold a flame to anyway.
La Peyronie was the last of a breed—a lone holdout in the anatomical search for the soul. Most of the early neuroanatomists had come to see that the self was too complex, too multifaceted, to be housed in or operated by a single biological entity. Like the Soviet Union after Gorbachev, the once broad and uniform-seeming soul began to splinter into dozens of smaller republics. Through a combination of unpleasant and often contradictory animal studies—living brains pokered, ablated, and hacked—and autopsy studies that sought to match brain abnormalities with dominant personality features, the men of science began mapping the specialized duties of the brain’s real estate, a project that continues to this day.
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] 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]
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.
9
I was intrigued to learn that the French for “pus”—even among members of eighteenth-century aristocracy—is “
10
I feel it would be wrong to introduce Le Petomane into a manuscript and then abandon him in the very same sentence. I had always thought that the act consisted of popular songs performed on his own wind instrument. But I learned from “The Straight Dope” columnist Cecil Adams that, in fact, Le Petomane, whose real name was Joseph Pujol, could produce only four notes without the aid of an ocarina. This is not to belittle his rectal talents. Pujol could smoke a cigarette down to its butt (or his butt, or both) and blow out candles, as well as expel a fountain of water several feet into the air.
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.
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.