Summary

Chapter 5 focuses on the head, beginning with attempts to study this body part in the late 18th century. During the French Revolution, people wondered how long the head remained conscious after it was severed from the body. In the 18th century, alleged scientists studied the head in disciplines known as phrenology and craniometry, which both sought to prove the supremacy of white, male Europeans. In craniometry, the more widely accepted of the two, scientists measured the volume, shape, and structure of the head and correlated these measurements to intelligence and the subject’s likelihood to commit a crime, among others. Bryson tells the story of Barnard Davis, an English doctor who had a fetish for studying aboriginal people and who engaged in grave robbing to amass the world’s largest skull collection at 1,540 skulls. Davis, like others of his time, sought to...