Brain and Head Theft, Part 1

First they came for their heads. Then they came for their brains. In this Stuff to Blow Your Mind two-parter, Robert and Joe discuss the weird and fascinating history of head and brain preservation, veneration and theft.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Detective, What do you make of it? Here we have
yet another body, another skull opened up with clinical precision.
What manner of monster are we dealing with here? I
don't believe we're dealing with the monster at all, certainly
not of the brain gobbling ghoul sort sensationalized in the press.
I've studied the ways of ghouls, inspector, and they consume

(00:25):
all hard and soft tissues. But they prefer the brain. Yes, yes,
as does the common zombie or Mexican vitellius. But look
at what we see here. Not only was the brain
and only the brain targeted, but different regions of the
brain have been removed from victim to victim. Not a
monster or even a cannibal, then, but a a brain thief. Indeed,

(00:50):
And look at the profiles of the victims and the
portions of the brain pilfered from each one of them.
The vernicus area and the angular gyrus of the noted
ling list, the Broca's area of the Soliloquist, the best
parts of the best brains. Our murderer is building himself

(01:10):
the perfect brain out of stolen parts. But to what end?
Welcome to stot to blow your mind. The production of
my Heart Radio. Hey, you welcome to stuff to blow
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.

(01:33):
And this is my second take at pronouncing my own name.
I'm glad I got it right this time. Today we're
gonna be talking about our stolen brains, our stolen heads. Uh.
This is a topic that yet again, like another one
we did recently, This started as uh an artifact episode
that I was trying to develop, but then it quickly
became clear to me that this was not a short topic.

(01:54):
This was a huge topic with all kinds of bizarre
tangents and and and dark alleys down which to tread. Uh.
So I'm so excited to to embark on this two
parter about removing and stealing people's heads and people's brains.
That's right, This one just keeps growing and expanding, dragging
in more heads, more brains. That has an insatiable appetite

(02:17):
this topic. Yeah. One of the so one of the
original stories that I was looking at that got me
interested in this was the theft of the Austrian composer
Franz Joseph Haydn's head in the early nineteenth century and
that's a story that that we're going to come back
to at the end of this first episode part one here,

(02:38):
but before that, I think it makes sense to to
back up and look at the removal of heads in
the context where it's probably more familiar to everyone, which
is not in reality but in you know, fiction. Yeah,
and we promised not to spend too long here because
I know some of you might be saying, look, you
guys have Friday's Weird House Cinema episodes. Now you can
pour all of your enthusiasm for horror movies into their

(03:00):
uh and maybe a little less gets used in the
core episodes. But but there's still some important stuff to
touch on here, and I think that the fiction sums
up a lot of what's going on when we think
about these topics. So yeah, brain and head theft are
frequent trokes in horror and science fiction, particularly of the
twentieth century, and a lot of this seems to be

(03:20):
centered in notions and fears concerning identity and the scientific
understanding of the brain is the seat of consciousness, explored
in such thoughtful science fiction films as Tammy and the
t Rex, one of one of the all time great
brain theft movies. Yeah, yeah, uh, there there are various
versions of this, right, you know, because sometimes the brain

(03:41):
is just stolen. Uh. Sometimes it's kept alive. Sometimes the
head is kept alive free of the body of a
you know, jan in the pan situation. Um. Sometimes it's
a human transplant, putting the head of one person under
the body of another, sometimes next to the original head
of the other um you know, the other in in

(04:02):
a way in their own way. Sometimes a kind of
a thoughtful attempt to get at something, you know, culturally,
but other times just kind of this another rumination on
the bizarre idea of what if my head but different body,
What if two heads same body? You know. Uh, there's
just so much about this idea that continues to amaze.
What if my brain in a dinosaur exactly? Not what

(04:23):
if my brain in a robot um, you know, etcetera. Uh. So, yeah,
you'll you'll find so many different versions of this, living
heads and jars, living brains and jars, head transplants between humans,
brain transplants into other human beings, and of course brain
transplants into machines. And there's plenty to talk about here,

(04:44):
even if we're just dealing with consensual brain and or
head transplant. But then what if your head or brain
were stolen? Right, that becomes the extra level of potential horror.
What do you have some mad science maniac were to
plug your brain into the body of a hideous monster
by or a killer robot. Or what if you were
just reduced to nothing but a head bobbing around in

(05:05):
a jar, or even even more limiting, a brain just
shut off in alive inside of some sort of contraption.
H I mean this is explored to some degree in
things we've talked about on the show before. For example,
the the Thought Experiments Lash short story where Am I
by Daniel Dennett, which is all about brains being removed,

(05:26):
and that's ultimately trying to get at the question of
what is the seat of consciousness and is it located
in a place uh, you know, given various you know,
constraints and and and thought experiments about like how brains
could be replicated with machinery. But but also there are
I guess, much less technical explorations of the subject where

(05:46):
it's just kind of like, uh, you know, the Futurama
model where you're just preserving ahead or preserving a brain
to supposedly keep the keep the consciousness alive after the
body dies or after the body is superseded by some
period technology. I think both of us really enjoy um.
The character Kane from RoboCop two a noon in brain

(06:07):
in a jar, uh, powering a mechanized death machine. Yeah,
tom noonan uh. And he's just like pain embodied controlling
a killer robot, which is a brilliant idea. There's even
like a drug insertion because he's he was he's addicted
to some sort of super drug, right. Oh yeah, the
the drug called nuke. Yeah. So Robo Cup two is amazing. Um,

(06:32):
there's a there's actually a really excellent Star Wars tie
in here as well. I mean, you have a lot
of cybernetic stuff going on in Star Wars, but you
have this one creature. I don't know if you remember it, Joe,
because it kind of just walks around in the background
briefly in Return of the Jedi. But it looks like
a mechanical spider. And then it has this glass looking

(06:54):
container or sphere hanging underneath it, and inside there's fluid
and what appears to be a brain of some sort.
I don't think I made the brain connection when I
watched for Turning the Jedi as a kid, but just
looked like a big mechanical spider. I think the brain
things explored more in I don't know what you call it,
the the supplementary Star Wars universe material, the encyclopedias and

(07:15):
all that. Yeah, I remember reading. I think there's a
whole story about them entales from Java's Palace, or at
least it's a story that concerns them to some degree.
But we are told in in other forms that this
these are the remains of the Bomar monks. Um. And
I'm just gonna read this quick passage from Wikipedia. UM.
It says this follows quote. The Bomer Order, which consisted

(07:38):
of Bomar monks, was a religious order that believed in
isolating themselves from all physical sensation to enhance the power
of their minds. To that aim, in enlightened monks had
their brains transplanted into nutrient filled jars. Whenever they wanted
to move, those bottled brains used spider like droid walkers.
I can just imagine the purer hierarchy. It's like, oh,

(08:01):
you're you're gonna walk around in your spider today instead
of just sitting there and a jar doing nothing. Okay, Well,
I mean sometimes you have to have your nutrient fluid
switched out, right. I'm guessing there's like win me one
machine in job As Palace that does that, and you've
gotta get there early. I mean, I guess if you're
addicted to the pleasures of the flesh. So that's just
that's just a brief glance at some of the many,

(08:23):
many variations of this you'll find in sci fi and
horror because we can't get enough of it, because at
the heart of it, there are so there are several
different um you know, enigmas and conundrums and paradoxes that
that emerge, you know, because it's dealing with what we
are and who we are and just sort of that
some of the mysteries that that seem to revolve around

(08:47):
are are fleshly self and some of the more supernatural
ideas about what we are, and of course some of
the you know, the mysteries of consciousness itself. Yeah, and
that's the true when when you get into mysteries, one
of the great things to wonder is um as far
as consciousness and its relationship to different types of tissue,

(09:07):
in the body, nervous system, tissue in the brain versus
other parts of the body. You always kind of wonder, um,
what did ancient people know, you know, or what did
they suspect before we had modern neuroscience and anatomy and uh,
and there is something interesting you can observe. Is not
necessarily going to be theft, like we're talking about it
in a lot of our examples, though in some cases

(09:28):
it probably is. But there are interesting cases you can
observe from the ancient world and from ancient religion where
sometimes the head or the brain were treated differently than
some other parts of the body were, which indicated at
least something some interesting belief. Yeah, yeah, this is this
gets really fascinating. Now. First of all, we should stress

(09:50):
that we modern humans are probably just mostly focused on
the idea of the brain being the seat of the
mind and the self, because we also paradoxically carry along
other ideas with us. You know, there's so many just
parts of our language and just the way think about
ourselves that we may talk talk about feeling something with
our heart, and when we do that, we may on

(10:12):
some level position our our our center of being and
position our mind in the middle of our torso uh
my gut feeling, yeah, yeah, your gut feeling, etcetera. And
you can take this even further, of course, getting into
various um uh you know, supernatural and religious ideas about
say various chakras and energy points in the body, um,

(10:37):
you know, and the and we can carry this around
with us and also carry around a science more or
less scientific understanding of the brain, um, you know, and
we can we can believe in both. We can we
can you know, dip out of both steamer trays as
it suits us. Yeah, obviously people do. I mean like that,
a lot of people probably believe in some type of
supernatural mind in one way or another. But then also

(11:00):
like you would consult a neurologist if you needed to,
right and and you know, I'm I'm always a kind
of two minds on all of this because on one hand,
you know, we we the brain is is the the
the author of of all these ideas, you know, I mean,
it is the center of our being. And we see that,
um you know, and that that bears out anytime there's

(11:21):
a brain injury, etcetera. But then also we're not just
the brain. We're also the body, and while you know,
you might be stretching it to say that you're you know,
you're thinking something or feeling something with your heart in
the same way that you would with your mind. You know,
there is this um we are more than just the brain,
we are this entire organism. Yeah, that's something that I

(11:44):
think is often overlooked in these like so the Beaumar
monks or whatever, the brain in a jar with a
spider body, and you think like, well, that's just pure
mental existence, you know, as if you you'll just live
forever in this mechanical set up and you can have
your your pure mind continue young to do whatever it does,
meditation or whatever. But I think that might be really

(12:04):
underappreciating how much your mental life would be changed if
you were only your brain and did not have the
rest of your body for the brain to interact with. Yeah,
that's why General Grievous got to bring his guts with him,
you know. Yeah, he's not just a brain. He's also
eyeballs and guts in there so well, I mean, and
there's even literal feedback. I mean, in some ways, the

(12:25):
brain is influenced, for example, by hormones that are secreted
by organs in other parts of the body. Absolutely, uh.
In thinking about what ancient people's thought, though, it's it's
impossible to get into this discussion without, of course touching
on the ancient Egyptians, because, as in many of you
are probably already thinking about, they famously removed and discarded

(12:46):
the brain, dering and balming, while taking great care to
store various other organs economic jars. Yet at the same time,
the ancient Egyptians are responsible for the oldest written record
using the word brain. I mean, it wasn't brain. You
know obviously that it was the higheroglyphics for brain aren't known.
We see it in a sevent BC text that was

(13:09):
in turn apparently based on texts that go back to
about three thousand BC. Uh. This is the so called
Edwin Smith's Surgical Papyrus, named for the American Egyptologists who
discovered it. Okay, so we're looking at it now. The
the hieroglyphic word form that meant the brain. The oregan
it's like a bird, and then something that looks maybe

(13:29):
like a feather or a knife, and then like a
hook shaped thing, and then what looks like maybe a
b or a fly. Yeah, yeah, I guess the hook.
I have no idea, but the hook thing is very suggestive,
of course, uh, not being entirely sure what this this
these hieroglyphics um individually, these parts of it mean because
of where we think about the hook that is used
to carefully remove the brain um tissue during embalming um,

(13:54):
which was a delicate procedure because you had to do
it apparently as well without you had to take care
not to damage the facial features during the removal. And
and one thing that's important to realize here is that
the Egyptians didn't necessarily think the brain was garbage or anything,
but it was one of the first organs to go foul.
Part of their practice was to first remove the organs

(14:16):
that decayed rapidly, and this certainly included the brain. This
is going to tie directly into an account from the
early nineteenth century that we're going to talk about later
in the episode, about a very prominent and fascinating case
of head theft. All right, UM, just briefly some other
tidbits about our history of understanding the brain. In the

(14:37):
fourth century BC, Aristotle considered the brain to be a
secondary organ that cooled the heart, a place where the
spirit could circulate. The heart was the center of thought,
though now in the second century, ce Galen concluded that
the brain was the seat of the animal soul uh,
one of three souls in the body. But this was

(14:57):
based in part on his observations of the efects of
brain injuries on mental activity. So again, even if you
even if you you you were really clinging to some
idea that uh, that thought and being is tied up
in the torso you know, after a while, it becomes
clear that when things happen to the head um, it
can it can drastically affect how we think and how

(15:19):
we uh we process. Yeah, that seems like that would
have probably been one of the earliest ways that people
could deduce the important role of the brain. Not just
because you could make the argument that sometimes it's somehow
kind of feels like thought is taking place in the head.
Obviously it didn't always feel like that to everybody. Some
people must have thought it felt like it was happening
somewhere else. But but yeah, you noticed that you hit

(15:40):
somebody in the head. It is much more likely to
have a complex and profound effects on how they think
and how they feel. Than hitting them in any other
part of the body. Yeah, it's interesting. How again, it's
an unavoidable in our language. Right, So we talked about
like putting our thinking cap on, and you know, we're
just so many times like we're thinking really hard. We

(16:00):
might do something involving our head, we might touch our head.
But if you were living in a culture that was
more based in an idea that would that thinking was
based in the chest, would you put your I don't know,
you're you're thinking brazier on? Would you would you sort
of like hold your chest a little bit as you
as you think? I don't know. Yeah, And I also

(16:20):
wonder what are the limits to that? Like is is
that is it possible that if you just had the
right cultural ideas fed into you as you were growing up,
that it would literally feel to you like you were
thinking with your feet or thinking with your knees or something,
or is there a sort of limited range of where
it can feel like thinking is happening. I don't know.
This is fascinating. I hadn't really thought about all this before.

(16:42):
But maybe there's some papers out there that get into
it that would it would be interesting to read about. Yeah,
but any your right. From here, we gradually built up
an improved understanding of how the brain function, though much
remained unknown for a considerable amount of time, leading to
what I've seen referred to as a quote cultural anatomy
of the brain pane that doesn't necessarily match up with

(17:02):
the neurological reality. Yeah, that's interesting, Thank you, Thank you.
Now there's one example from ancient history I guess actually
this would be prehistory, uh, of how heads were treated
in a way that was somewhat different than how the
rest of the body was treated. And this comes from

(17:25):
the ancient Neolithic or Chalcolithic Neolithic settlement known as Chattel
hu Yok from Turkey. That's a place in southern Turkey
that was thousands of years BC. Did did you have
the date on that? Um? I I read that it
thrived back in seven thousand BC. Yeah, I mean it
was around for a while, but I think that was

(17:46):
like the period of its the height of its population
and power, and so it's one of the earliest large
human settlements that we have evidence of sustained habitation at.
There were all of these houses that were a sort
of built right next to each other. They were built
up and you would enter them through the roof. It
was like a grid of sort of cubicle houses. You'd

(18:07):
go in through the roof, and there are these living
spaces that archaeologists can still explore today. And it's fascinating
to try to put together the culture of the people
who lived at Chattahoyuk because one of the things observed
there is sometimes, uh, sometimes there would be mortuary practices
that would involve apparently incorporating the dead bodies of friends

(18:31):
and family members into like the furniture, just into stuff
inside the house where the people were living, so the
body of a dead relative might be buried underneath the
bed where you sleep. But one of the other really
interesting things sometimes observed there is the removal of heads
from dead bodies I presumably family members, where the head

(18:54):
would be taken off and uh and then covered in
some kind of plaster and just like kept in the house. Yeah,
it's it's really fascinating because in this we we get into,
you know, you sort of have to strip away sort
of your modern funerary customs and ideas about what is
what is proper to do with the with the body
of the deceased, etcetera. And you if you try and

(19:17):
sort of put yourself in this this different mindset and imagine, like,
how do we relate to the bodies that no longer
have life in them? You know what what is the
what is the skull of the dead? Uh? Now that
they have you know that, now that the individual has
passed on, you know, you you get into this sort
of like base area. Then you you can build up

(19:38):
from there and imagine how some of these these customs
could have taken root. Yeah, and it it definitely signals
like how variable and culturally determined our feelings about the
treatment of dead bodies are. Because I think now and
it's probably very somewhat to culture even today, but in
most of the cultures were familiar with like if you
were to take Grandma's dead body and like cut her

(19:59):
head off and cover it with plaster and put it
on a desk, that would widely be seen as like
disrespectful in some way, But here it's the exact opposite.
It seems to suggest that this is a way of
revering the dead, and in some way it has some
kind of religious significance or ritual use. Yeah, Like nowadays
you sat down and you watch the Texas chainsaw mask

(20:20):
you and you say this is not right, this family
of texts and cannibals are are are not being respectful
to the dead. But you can make a case for
most of the things they're doing and say, no, they're
being very respectful. Um to to a to a to
a point. I'm only going to defend the sawyers so much.
But um but but now there's a lot to consider, like,

(20:44):
you know, what happens to the body when it dies?
Wand or what do we do to the body when
it dies? And how we approach these different views of death,
like they have a huge impact on not only how
we we treat the bodies of the dead, but then
also like how we think about death itself. Yeah, and
so we're gonna be focusing in these episodes on some

(21:04):
cases of brains and heads being taken off of bodies
um or or being stolen in one way or another
without the consent of the person involved. But there we
should at least know that there are plenty of cases
where heads are removed, brains are removed and this was
according to the wishes of the person from whose body

(21:26):
they're being taken, right, Yeah, so a few I think
mostly if not completely, consentually preserved brains, worth mentioning, uh,
one of one of the big ones that that probably
a lot of people were thinking of is is Broken's brain. Um.
And one of the reasons, of course, is that Carl
Sagan has a whole book titled Broker's Brain, because one

(21:48):
of the essays in it deals with it specifically. And
I'll get back to that in just a second. But
Paul Broco lived through eighteen eighty. He was a French
surgeon and neurologist who played a major role in the
mid nineteen in mid nineteenth century medicine, and was the
founder of modern brain surgery. He also supported some extremely
prejudiced ideas, but his work with the brain itself was

(22:11):
expressed it was it was extremely important. As such, he
worked a lot with human brains, and many of the
preserved brains that he worked with can still be found
at the Pierre and Marie Curry University in Paris, and
that potentially includes Brocco's own brain. The museum has apparently

(22:31):
denied that it can be found there, but there are
accounts that say that his brain ended up on a
shelf alongside the others and Carl Sagan in the book
Brokeer's Brain. In the the the chapter or essay dealing
with this, he discusses holding the jar and that allegedly
contained it, saying, quote, it was Broca himself whose brain
I was cradling, who had established the macab collection I

(22:54):
had been contemplating, and from their second goes on to
question just how much of who Coroco was is still
in there? You know, is the physical brain in the jar?
Is that him? Is this some remnant of him? It's
it's a wonderful, wonderful section of the book that you
should you should read, but it's um uh, probably one

(23:15):
of the more famous preserved or allegedly preserved brains. Yeah,
and yeah, that raises really interesting questions, like in a way,
is it possible even to think about the person as
an object or as a person something more like a process? Yeah,
and then also like the whole seeming mystery about whether
there's there's an actual, uh specimen that is broke his brain,

(23:38):
it does also bring up the question, you know, once
the brain is removed, how do you tell whose it was?
Especially when you're dealing with an old brain like this,
you know, it's not like you can just hook it up,
fire it up and see what memories are in there, etcetera. Right,
But of course, so there's a question about this one.
But there are examples of people who were just like, yep,
you know, you use my brain, do something with it. Yeah.

(23:58):
Charles Babbage is a great exam pull of this, who
have through eight seventy one, the father of the computer,
as he's sometimes known, he donated his brain to science
and today you can see it, uh in two halfs,
one side of it at London Science Museum and the
other at the Hunterian Museum in the Royal College of Surgeons.

(24:19):
Wait a minute, did a Lovelace also have her brain
preserved or just Babbage? It would be great if you
could see him. I did not run across her brain,
but I guess it would be great to see him
side by side I hooked up to the same computer.
It's it's interesting how um it is presented into how
I mean, there's so much, so many directions you could

(24:39):
go there with that, right, um, but yeah, you go
to one place to see one hemisphere and the other
to see the other hemisphere. Um. I wonder if I
mean when you look at those hemispheres, do you, is
there a feeling like this is wrong. They should be reunited,
the brain should be It's okay to preserve a brain
and display it, but it should be displayed as a whole,
complete piece. But I don't know, maybe not now as

(25:01):
far as famous people go, quote, quite a few athletes
have pledged their brain to science and an effort to
better understand concussions, you know. And then a lot of
people just in general donate their bodies and or their
organs to science. Um, and so a lot of brain
study continues in this in this manner, by the way,
by most all accounts, and certainly all accounts that matter,

(25:23):
we should point out that Walt Disney did not have
his body, brain, or head frozen following his death. Oh
that's a popular myth, and it is, yeah, and I
think I was reading about Apparently it's largely based on
the fact that he was interested in the topic at
some point and and in general was known to be
interested in in in scientific topics, and therefore it just

(25:44):
kind of carried away, like what you know about Disney.
You're like, oh, well, it seems like something he would do.
He did it. It's just like, oh, he's weird. Enough.
So I guess if we're in in the modern era
for for now and talking about brains that were actually
straight up stolen. Probably the most famous brain theft uh
in the modern world, happened to the body of Albert Einstein,

(26:07):
And I guess we'll maybe come back and talk about
that more later as we go on. But he is
by no means the only one I want to back
up and tell a story from the early eighteen hundreds
about the famous composer Joseph Haydn uh. And so a
couple of sources I was looking at here. One is
a book by Francis Larson published called Severed, A History

(26:31):
of Heads Lost and Heads Found. And the part of
this that I was reading is just wonderful, So I
might have to go back and read this entire book
at some point, um. But the other is just a
biography of Hayden called Hayden A Creative Life in Music
by Carl Geyringer and Irene gey Ringer from University of
California Press in nineteen two. And so just a brief

(26:52):
background on on Franz Joseph Hayden, also just known as
Joseph Hayden. He was a renowned classical composer from Austria
who lived from seventeen thirty two until eighteen o nine.
It was very influential. I think he was sort of
a mentor figure to some other later composers like Mozart.
And probably the fact that most people know about him today,

(27:14):
or at least the one that I remember from school,
is that he was the composer of what's known as
the Surprise Symphony. It's a composition that is very kind
of dreamy and sleepy and then has the sudden extremely
loud chords that will almost like make you pee yourself,
like they will wake you up if you are falling
asleep at the at the on orchestra night. I wonder

(27:37):
if we can play some some public domain selections of
Hyden music while I'm telling the story of how his
head was hacked off and stolen. Okay, So the story
of Hyden around the time of his death, especially as

(27:59):
told in the I Ringer book, here is what I'm
starting with. So for a long time, Hayden was the
court musician of a Hungarian noble family called the ester
Hasy family. So I guess you can imagine something kind
of like if you've seen the movie Amadeus, you know
the roles Salieri plays in the Austrian Emperor's court in
that movie. He's the the court composer, the court musician,

(28:22):
kind of there to to do musical work for and
flatter this rich family, except, of course, this would not
have been the emperor. This was just one particular noble house,
the ester Hazy line, and Hayden died in eighteen o nine.
He died in Vienna, I think actually while Vienna was
being occupied by Napoleon's troops, so there was a war

(28:42):
zone situation happening, uh, and his body was not taken
back to this uh, this remote castle where the ester
Hazy family lived, because I think I think it had
something to do with the war situations. Why he was
kept in Vienna near where his house or apartment was,
and he was buried in a local cemetery known as
the hun Storm Cemetery. And that same year the prince

(29:07):
of the ester Hassie line, I think it was Nicolaus
ester Hasie, he put in an application to have Hayden's
body dug up from the cemetery and transferred to Eisenstadt,
which was the seat of the ester Hazie house. And
permission for the disinterment was granted, but ester Hazi never
actually did it. He got permission, but then he just

(29:29):
kind of forgot about it, and Hayden stayed there. Hayden's
tomb stayed as it was. But finally, in eighteen twenty,
Ester Hazy, to quote from the Gey Wringer book quote,
was reminded of his obligations by Adolphus Frederick, Duke of Cambridge.
This distinguished visitor observed after attending a galla performance of

(29:50):
the Creation, which was an oratorio of Hayden's given in
his honor at Eisenstadt. Quote, how fortunate was the man
who employed this Hayden in his lifetime him and now
possesses his mortal remains, Which that moment, I'm just imagining that.
Like Prince ester Hazzy must have been like, oh yeah, yeah, that.

(30:12):
But apparently he did not correct his guest though. Immediately
after this he gave orders to have the body exhumed
from the cemetery in Vienna and brought over to Eisenstat
and re entombed at a church there near the castle.
The church was called berg Kircha, which was where Hayden
had often performed some of the masses that he wrote

(30:33):
for the ester Hazy family. Uh So the order goes through,
and but then the guy Ringers right quote. When the
coffin was open for identification, the horrified officials found no
head on the body, but only the wig. And this
seems especially bad because, like it would be harder for
Esther Hassey at this point to pretend that he just

(30:55):
had Hayden's body where it was supposed to be all along.
It kind of reminds me that situation where like somebody
gives you a gift, like an appliance that you don't
really want, and you never opened and they keep asking
you if you like it. You're like, yeah, we use
it all the time. It's great. And then they're going
to come over to your house and you're like, hey,
let's use that blender whatever it was. And then you
finally open it and discover that it's missing a piece

(31:17):
or it's broken or something. But so obviously Prince ester
Hassy was not amused that Hayden's head had been stolen.
He was really mad, and he made inquiries about the
missing head, and soon the mystery was solved. It turned
out it was sort of an inside job. The culprits
who stole the head were Hayden's friend, apparently not a

(31:39):
super close friend, but they knew each other, a friend
of Hyden's named Joseph Carl Rosenbaum who had been employed
by the Ester Hassey family, and then another guy named
Johann Napomuk Peter who was the administrator of a penitentiary
somewhere in Austria. So why would these guys, including a

(31:59):
former end of Haydn's, dig up his grave, steal his head,
and then cover everything back up. Well, the answer is
that they were amateur phrenologists. And I'll come back to
the subject in more detail in in a few minutes,
And I guess throughout a couple of both of these episodes,
But the short explanation of what's going on here is
that they were devotees of the then popular pseudo science

(32:22):
of phrenology, and they were fans of its leading proponent
at this time and place, the German anatomist friends Joseph Gall,
who lived seventeen fifty eight eight. And yes, I did
also notice that friends Joseph Gall has the same first
and middle name is Hayden. I don't know if there's
any reason for that. Maybe a bunch of boys were

(32:44):
named after a king or something at this time. I
don't know if you have any insights on the on
the friends Joseph's. Maybe it's just a total coincidence. Yeah,
I'm not sure. Off the top of my head, I
don't know any I don't know any friends Joseph's. But
so they these two guys, Rosenbaum and Peter, wanted Hayden's
head because they wanted to conduct a pseudo scientific dissection

(33:06):
of the skull to determine its characteristics according to phrenological theory,
to see if you could read his musical genius in
the shape of his skull. So I'll come back to
that aspect in a bit. But together these guys bribed
a grave digger in the Vienna cemetery to dig up
Hyden a few days after his funeral, hack off his

(33:29):
head and deliver it to them quote to protect it
from desecration. Um. So, according to to Larsen, the grave
digger did this. It was a few nights after the burial.
He chopped off the head, wrapped it up in some rags,
and then handed it off to Rosenbaum. And Rosenbaum had
a carriage waiting nearby. He was on the way taking

(33:50):
the head to the carriage, but he was so curious
to see it that he peeled back the rags uh
to take a peek. But this was June, and Hayden
had been dead for while at this point, and the
body was already beginning to rot. And apparently Rosenbaum was
so overwhelmed by the sight and the smell that he
just vomited in the cemetery, but then got right back

(34:11):
to business. So he got into the carriage, went straight
to Vienna Hospital, where the skull was de fleshed and
the brain was removed from its casing. And Rosenbaum described
the scene later in his own writing. This is quoted
in Larsen quote. The site made a lifelong impression on me.
The dissection lasted for one hour. The brain, which was

(34:32):
of large proportions, stank the most terribly of all. I
endured it to the end. And that's what I was
thinking of when you mentioned earlier that the brain, according
to the Egyptians, at least you know, was one of
the earliest parts of the body to spoil and smell bad,
which might have had something to do with the process
for its early removal. Yeah, well I've I've read this
other places as well. In fact, tomorrow's episode of The

(34:55):
Artifact will touch on how quickly a brain will rot. Well,
apparently Rosenbaumb noticed like he could, despite the fact that
they had a whole head there. He was like, the
brain was the worst. But anyway, at the Vienna hospital
here the skin muscle in the brain were burned in
the furnace, and then the skull was soaked in lime
to clean the bones so it could be measured for

(35:17):
the phrenology purposes. And this soaking would take a while,
So while that was going on, Rosenbaum went back home
and he and Peter at some point designed a case
with which to hold the skull the guy Ringers right quote.
Peter had a black wooden box made with a golden
lyre at the top and glass windows in it. The

(35:38):
skull was placed on a white silk cushion trimmed with black,
which reminds me very much of some of the displays
I've seen of supposedly incorruptible saints bodies and the relics
of saints and old Catholic and Orthodox museums or not
museums cathedrals. Yeah, they didn't just stick it on the
table and put a candle on top of it or

(35:59):
let a raven perch on it. You know, they did
it upright. Yeah, you get a nice glass box. But
this one here has a golden lyre. And Larson actually
has a very wonderful passage about this that I wanted
to quote. She calls attention to the fact that this
box was ornamented with a golden liar, and she asks
if this might have been intended as a reference to
the Greek god Orpheus. So here I'm quoting from larsen

(36:21):
whose music carried him safely into the underworld to save
his wife Eurydicy. Rosenbaum's own dark and earthy mission had
been driven by his passion for music and his admiration
of Haydn as a composer. He too, had retrieved his
love from the rod of the nether world. If the
liar did refer to Orpheus, there may have been other

(36:42):
symbolic residences at work as well. In one version of
the myth, Orpheus lost his own head when his body
was ripped apart and thrown into the sea by the
women of Thrace, and Macedonia. Later, Orpheus's head was found
floating in the river Mela's, fresh and vigorous and still
singing mournfully. The place where it was buried became a

(37:03):
shrine and an oracle for pilgrims. And that is interesting
to me because within the special box, Hydn's severed head
would become kind of like a shrine within Rosenbaum's house.
It's so weird to to to think about this in
terms of patrons and artists, you know, um, like like
what if what I have today on Patreon or or

(37:25):
some sort of a kickstarter like that was a tier level,
Like if you support me, then you can cut off
my head when I'm dead and run off with my skull,
or you will be you will be tasked with keeping
my body and protecting it. That sort of thing. The
Platinum Club membership. Yeah yeah, but to a certain extence,
like at least a metaphorical level. Um, you know, a

(37:46):
lot of this does kind of weirdly match up with
some of our attitudes about celebrity you know, and celebrities
and creators you know, and how we how we treat
them and uh regard them after their death, you know,
like literally turning turning their their their deaths into and
sometimes their places of burial into the holy shrines, and

(38:08):
like you're invoking this whole pseudo scientific field to come
up with a physical explanation for their supposedly superhuman genius. Um. Anyway,
so to come back to the story, years go by,
we already narrated the intervening events, remember, so princester Hazy
at some point he's reminded like, oh, yeah, Hyden's body,

(38:31):
Oh I need yeah, that should be here. Uh So,
so back to the investigation, because they discovered no head,
only a wig in the in the coffin, and um,
so they had Hyden's body moved to the castle at Eisenstock,
where the Prince wanted it. But the Prince was furious
because there was no head, and he had them investigate,

(38:53):
and eventually, somehow it was figured out that Peter and
Rosenbaum had been you know, the ones implicated here, that
they would have been the people who took the head.
And so the police went to interrogate Peter, who said
that he had given the head to Rosenbaum, and then
the investigators went to Rosenbaum's house and they searched for
the skull, but they didn't find it. Quote since Rosenbaum's wife,

(39:16):
the opera singer Teresa Gossman, hid the skull in her
straw mattress and lay down on the bed. And then
to to finish up the story, the guy ringers right. Quote.
The prince now tried bribery, and his emissary promised Rosenbaum
a large sum if he would deliver the skull, whereupon
the skull of an old man was handed to the

(39:37):
prince and buried with Hyden's body. Uh not unnaturally, Prince
Princess Okay, so fake skull handed off for a bribe.
Not unnaturally, Prince esther Hazy did not keep his promise
of a reward, But neither had the wary ex secretary
acted honestly since he had not delivered the right skull.

(39:57):
So it's a double double cross. But I wonder if
they both leave happy with that. You know, it's like,
all right, I've got a skull can literally somebody's skull.
It might not have the right kind of musical genius bump,
but uh, yeah, somebody's skull is in there. And but
the guy did not get his money. Uh. And then
finally they say on his deathbed, Rosenbaum gave Hyden Skull

(40:19):
to his collaborator, to Peter and quote made him promise
to leave it in his will to the Museum of
guessel Shoft dear music Freund in Vienna, the owner of
a great number of valuable Hyden relics. So Hyden Skull
stayed there from until nineteen fifty four, and then eventually
there was a there was a mausoleum built in berg

(40:41):
Church all that that church in uh in Nissenstock where
the body was supposed to be. Eventually it was in
nineteen fifty four that the skull was finally reunited with
the rest of the body. But I think at least
for a while, maybe maybe permanently after that, but at
least for a while there were two skulls in the
grave because they also had the original fake decoy skull

(41:02):
that had been interred with the body and the wig.
He had a friendly roommate, right exactly, thank you, thank you.
But this brings me back to to the pseudoscience underlying

(41:23):
uh this, this head theft mission here. Why did Rosenbaum
and Peter steel the head again? They were enthusiastic amateur
phrenologists they were students of the German anatomist friends Joseph Gall,
who again he's credited with pioneering the now discredited field
of phrenology. Now, Gall apparently made some legitimate contributions to

(41:45):
the development of neuroscience and neuro anatomy, but I think
whatever these legitimate contributions where they are now overshadowed in
his legacy by the association with phrenology, which is just
one of the most awful and rightfully infamous pseudosciences in
human history. And we can explain more about phrenology across
this couple of episodes, but the short version is that

(42:06):
phrenologists incorrectly believed that you could make accurate inferences about
human mental traits like uh like personality traits, moral characteristics,
and intellectual aptitudes by measuring the shape and the contours
of people's skulls, particularly bumps on the skull. So if

(42:27):
there's a bump in a certain place right near the
top of your head, that might show that you have
a special propensity for veneration, maybe you'd be a good
candidate for the clergy. But if there's a pronounced ridge
over the top of your ear, that is a swelling
of the organ of destructiveness, and you will surely become
a violent criminal, etcetera. And I think you can pair

(42:48):
phrenology along with what's known as physiognomy. More broadly, physiognomy
is the belief that you can accurately assess a person's
mental characteristics by looking at their outward appearance. Often, physiogo
to me, would focus on the face. You'd see these
charts of like, oh, somebody has a face like this,
it means that they're they're very sanguine and uh and
and they're you know, prone to laughter and to gluttony.

(43:10):
And somebody has a face like this, and there, you know,
without a doubt a murderer. Uh. And So phrenology and
that kind of thing they led to all kinds of
horribly misguided applications and pseudo scientific criminology supposed scientific justifications
for racism and ethnic prejudice, for gender prejudice and so forth.
And it's weird because phrenology, like if you explain it today,

(43:33):
it's one of those things that sounds so stupid on
its face. It's hard to see how people ever believed it.
But phrenology was hugely influential, especially in the first half
of the eighteen hundreds. Uh, though it was, it should
be said, it was not like everybody believed it at
the time. It was subjected to fierce scientific criticism even
during its heyday, But that doesn't mean it did not

(43:56):
find very popular applauding audiences. Yeah, like you said, so
much of the time it ends up being this way
of saying those horrible things you think when you look
at certain people's skulls and faces, those feelings are backed
up by scientific principles, and here they are, and and
and that. You know, you can see why that would

(44:17):
be enough to hook people who wanted to believe these things.
Oh yeah, it's great to tell people like that. You know,
you can have a scientific justification for whatever you gut
feeling you get when you look at somebody like, oh,
this guy he has the you know, the the pointy
top of the head of a genius, or you know
this late Yeah, my wife won't do what I tell

(44:38):
her because there's something wrong with the shape of her skull,
and science proves it. Now, the tragedy of phrenology is
started with some premises that are basically true. Like it
started with the idea that the personality and mental traits
are in large part determined by processes in the brain.
Of course, that's true, we know that today and uh
and with the premise that some brain function and are

(45:00):
especially dependent on localized regions in the brain, so we
also know that's basically true. Like you know, visual processing
depends especially on the visual cortex in the back of
the head. Speech is especially dependent on the area now
known as Broca's area, which is on the left side
of the brain, near the front of the head. Uh.
And these were real discoveries of early neuroscience that there

(45:21):
were regions of the brain that correlated with certain types
of mental activity, though not always as strictly as some
people think. Um. But from these real discoveries was extrapolated
this flawed chain of reasoning that led to chronology, and
according to people like Franz Joseph Gall it would go
something like this. So you'd say the mind is a

(45:41):
product of the brain. You know, apparently true or at
least mostly true. The brain is not a homogeneous mass,
but they're you know, there are different parts of it
that do different things. That's generally true. But then the
next leap is to the size of a localized part
of the brain will be correlated to how powerful it
associated mental faculty is, which is not necessarily true. And

(46:04):
then from there you get to well, you get bumps
on the outside of the skull that will indicate the
size and therefore the strength of the underlying regions of
the brain, which that's pretty much not true. And then
therefore you can make a generalized map of the skull
to find which shapes and bumps and protuberances create which
personality characteristics and aptitudes, which at this point is just

(46:28):
completely wrong. You can just imagine the branch on the
tree here just going growing gradually more crooked for the
further you go. Right, yeah, um, But for a few
decades at least, phrenology again proved extremely popular again, as
it was especially during like the first half of the
nineteenth century. Uh. And there's an interesting section in Lawson's

(46:49):
book where she attributes at least some of the appeal
of phrenology to Franz Joseph Skull's skills at public speaking
and the allure of his lectures. She writes that he
always gave his public addresses with props surrounded by his
personal collections of heads, which he would pick up and
use for demonstration to enraptured audiences. You know, here's the

(47:11):
skull of a man who was consumed in life by vanity.
You can see the bulge corresponding to his organ of conceit.
Or here's the skull of a genius composer observed the
swelling above his organ of music, etcetera. And then Larson
writes quote, when fresh specimens were available, his assistant would
dissect an animal brain or occasionally a human brain in

(47:33):
front of the audience. Galls talks became famous in Vienna
and later throughout Northern Europe, and they were attended by
a wide cross section of the public, from tourists and
tradesmen to ambassadors and academics. The combination of medical terminology
visual aids few members of the public can have seen
a dissection before, and talented oratory was intoxicating. After a lecture,

(47:56):
people queued up to have their own heads read by Gall.
This was science endowed with psychic powers, the scientists who
knew you better than you knew yourself, and all thanks
to the secrets inscribed in the shape of your head.
But but I mean the horrible part being, of course
that it was all just completely wrong. Phrenology had no
empirically verifiable basis, its founding premises were incorrect, and it

(48:20):
could not make accurate predictions about future findings. But it
was popular nonetheless. And it seems like, at least to
some extent, it's popularity had more to do with the
personal flair and charisma of its founding popularizer than with
its empirical merits. And this is something I think about
a lot. I think this is always something to be
really conscious of. It is so so easy to mistake

(48:44):
good public speaking for truth. Uh, you know, the the
allure of a weekly supported claim delivered by a charismatic
voice is always present and something to you know, be
conscious of, to like ask yourself if that's happening in
your brain, if you are thinking something is true because
somebody is good at talking and they're saying it. And

(49:06):
I think about digital versions of this today, the digital
versions of the Viennese lecture halls like YouTube, where you know,
I get a feeling that there is a huge undercurrent
of ideological shaping that often takes place on a similar
basis here viewers of things like YouTube and even podcasts.
So we could say, listen to somebody mainly because they're

(49:27):
a compelling speaker. They're captivating to listen to. They you know,
they they're good with words, there's something nice about their voice,
whatever that is, and over time can end up adopting
their beliefs or claims, regardless of whether there's a good
reason for the claims themselves. Yeah, you know what I mean.
It makes me think back to uh, you know Carl
Sagan I mentioned earlier. I mean, Sagan was an individual

(49:48):
who every everything tended to line up for him. You know,
a great scientific mind, an excellent speaker and science communicator.
But you don't have to have every line up with
a person, and many times it does not. You have
plenty of great scientists who are not natural public speakers,
and you have plenty of natural public speakers who do

(50:09):
not have a mind for science or an appreciation for science,
and maybe not interested in in impressing the science like that.
They may use the science in some cases when it
suits them, but that is not their their primary go Well,
I would say one thing that really works against us
here is the tragic disjunction of the fact that one

(50:30):
of the most compelling qualities in a speaker, one of
the things that makes people most fun to listen to
as a speaker is confidence. And yet being a good
communicator of science often requires you to be extremely circumspect
and to repeatedly in tone, you know, communicate doubt and
to repeatedly communicate you know, we're not sure about this,

(50:53):
that you know that these are reasons for thinking so,
but there are reasons against it and all that which
goes exactly against some of the things that makes but
the most fun to just like watch lectures from right right.
And this is true at at various levels in different ways.
It's certainly true at our level because we are we
are not experts in the topics that we discuss, and
therefore we always have to admit this could this could

(51:15):
be wrong, and or this is changing, this could change,
because then we get into the level of just that's
what science is. So you'll encounter, you know, experts in
their field who are also voicing the same level of uncertainty.
And there are times where that is not as convincing
as someone who, uh, you know, who's very sure of themselves,

(51:37):
like the the the yeah. And you know, you can
easily think of various examples of this um you know,
you can see why they You can be drawn into
the siren song of someone who's absolutely seems absolutely certain
about what they're talking about, versus someone who says, well,
we're still figuring it out. All right, Well, you know,
we're almost out of time here. But I want to
share another story of brain theft, and this one comes

(52:00):
to us from two thousand sixteen. I don't know if
you ran across this one, Joe, uh, but the basic
premise here is summed up well in the headline, this
headline from the Daily Mail. My nemesis, are you're gonna
make me click on a Daily Mail article? Uh? Well?
I also I also provided you with or maybe I didn't. Yeah,
I did provide you with another uh report as well

(52:22):
from CBS Pittsburgh your choice. Okay, thirty thousand caveats to
whatever this story is, but I do want to hear it. Okay.
So the Daily Mail headline was burglar stole human brain,
nicknamed it Freddie and used the embombing fluid to get high. Um.
And there were various versions of this this headline that
were that were traded about in So what happened here

(52:46):
is Okay, this is Pennsylvania where Allegedly, a twenty six
year old uh individual was in jail on burglary charges
when his grandma discovered a human brain underneath the porch
in a Walmart path. Okay, allegedly the stolen brain, named
Freddie by the year old individual. Okay, he named it,

(53:09):
He named it. Freddie was being used for its embalming fluid,
which the accused and and a friend used to soak
their marijuana in prior to smoking said marijuana. Oh no,
if that's true, that no, no, no so um. According
First of all, according to CBS Pittsburgh reporting on the incident,

(53:31):
the brain was most likely a stolen teaching specimen. So basically,
go back to the original Frankenstein. That's scene where was
his named. Fritz goes in to steal a brain, and
there are the two brains, there's the normal brain and
the criminal brain, and he accidentally smashes one of the
jars and steals the other one. Basically that scenario um,
except in this case, Uh, I guess Fritz had other

(53:54):
ideas in mind. So to two tips I want to
share for everybody here. First of all, and obviously, do
not steal a human brain. I mean it's it's illegal
in the United States to possess a human brain like this.
It's illegal to own or possess the remains of a
human being other than ashes. Uh. You know, with certain

(54:14):
caveats obviously, if you're like a teaching institution, etcetera. But
for the just a random individual, No, you can't have
a brain. You can't have a skull. Um. So that
means no head, no brain, no skull, none of that.
Second smoking formalde hide laced anything is just a terrible idea.
Do not do it, um. It can result in a

(54:35):
host of issues including brain damage to your brain, not Freddy,
your brain, lung damage, and body tissue destruction. So just
a some bad choices were made here regarding Freddy. Never
smoked Freddy. Yeah, so uh with that, I think we're
gonna close out part one here, but I'm excited to

(54:55):
come back in part two because we're gonna we're gonna
get into other cases of head and brain theft. We're
gonna get into some ancient traditions. We're gonna talk a
little bit about mythology and folklore. Uh, it should be
a really fun time. I can't wait. And then at
the end of the week, are are weird how cinema
selection is also going to concern brains. We have a
really brainloaded week here. I'm so excited, as chop Top

(55:18):
would say, my brain is burning. All right. Well, if
your brain is burning and you would like to listen
to more Stuff to Blow your Mind, check out the
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(55:40):
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As always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or an other, to suggest

(56:00):
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
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(56:21):
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