Unsuspecting Souls Read online

  Braid called his regimen neuro-hypnotism, which he shortened, in 1843, to hypnotism. The popular press called it “nervous sleep” or “magnetic sleep,” a quasi-coma in which people found themselves unusually susceptible to suggestions. No matter the name, Braid, with his new field of hypnotism, or Braidism, as the press came to call it, declared that he had found the philosopher’s stone—the pluck of life—the seat of liveliness itself. And, at the drop of a three-shilling ticket, Braid would most happily prove, through his onstage manipulations, that he could turn a fully animated, waking life off and on in even the most defensive, disbelieving person. Capitalizing on the period’s emphasis on the gaze—in cinema, in the new museums, in photo galleries—Braid would begin each of his performances with the line, “Look into my eyes.”

  Braid’s method migrated to America, in the late 1840s, through a flamboyant character named Andrew Jackson Davis, known during his lifetime as the John the Baptist of modern spiritualism. Davis had the ability, he claimed, to enter at will into a state of higher consciousness, what he called a “superior state,” lifting him far beyond ordinary clairvoyance. From that rarefied position, he said, he could see the secrets that so many scientists were looking for and failing to find. For instance, the human body became transparent to him, allowing him to view each organ and, most dramatically, those organs with direct access to the source of life. That’s why, without being told the illness beforehand, he could bring patients not just back to health, he wrote, but to extended life. Davis bore witness to the entire process of death and the soul’s voyage to the hereafter, a place that, with the help of a bit of Braidism, he claimed, he had entered many times. And while he could not bring other people to his own superior state, he could, through the use of Braid’s techniques, place them in a trance, allowing them to enjoy, even momentarily, a somewhat higher level of spiritual awareness, and a taste, brief though it was, of eternal life.

  But some social philosophers in the period believed that if wakefulness could be disembedded from daily experience, enhanced through various opiate derivatives, muffled through anesthesia, or suspended through hypnotic power, then it did not serve well as the fundament of the human condition. It behaved more like an accessory to something else, something much more thoroughly basic and unshakable. With wakefulness as the defining element, people could easily go through life as transparencies—as ghosts. They might just as well feel that they did not exist, except in those moments of peak emotions—profound euphoria or deep depression. In short, drugs worked at just too ethereal a level for some professionals, the experience just too evanescent in the turbulence of the nineteenth century, to serve such a vital role. Scientists demanded something more perdurable, perhaps even tangible, by which to define human existence. They went off in different directions to find the bedrock, the fundamental.

  As with many advances and inventions, this next one also came about quite by accident, but it fit perfectly into the period’s desire to define human essence. A worker in a chemistry laboratory in England, J.E. Purkyne, thought he had found that foundational correlative when he picked up a glass slide one day in 1823 and noticed that he had left behind an indelible, precise impression of the patterns on the ends of his fingers. After some rather simple experimenting, he had to conclude, much to his own amazement, that everybody possessed a unique system of identification within easy reach—at the tips of their fingers. While a person might alter his or her behavior, or even personality traits, or fake being hypnotized, prints persisted absolutely unaltered, over a person’s entire lifetime.

  Even before the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Herbert Spencer, the English philosopher responsible for the phrase “survival of the fittest,” posited a theory that the growing human sciences later tagged “social Darwinism.” His idea fit tightly into the period’s belief in the inferiority of those people with darker skin. Spencer argued that those with a decided lack of social and moral development—criminals—were nothing more than “savages,” an inborn state, which included the poor, the laboring class, the Irish, women of lower class, and of course blacks. One could spot their internal deficiencies by distinctive outward signs. To ensure the smooth functioning of upper-crust white society, authorities needed to describe, type, classify, and, most important of all, keep these dangerous people under close supervision and observation. To keep its population safe, the state should have to produce a taxonomy of deviants.

  Key social changes were underway to place great emphasis on the criminal. The revolution in production created a new bourgeois appreciation of property, bringing with it a wide range of new punishable offenses along with punishments of greater severity. Carlo Ginzburg, in a brilliant essay about crime and punishment in the nineteenth century, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,” makes the following observation:Class struggle was increasingly brought within the range of criminality, and at the same time a new prison system was built up, based on longer sentences of imprisonment. But prison produces criminals. In France the number of recidivists was rising steadily after 1870, and toward the end of the century was about half of all cases brought to trial. The problem of identifying old offenders, which developed in these years, was the bridgehead of a more or less conscious project to keep a complete and general check on the whole of society.

  A novelist like Dickens could thus identify all kinds of brutes in his books strictly by their appearances. “Low brow” and “high brow” referred to people’s foreheads—those who looked like Neanderthals or those who looked like intellectuals, as if such a thing were even possible—as they occupied either a lower or higher class. People came into the nineteenth-century world, then, born as criminals, an innate and irreversible fault of character and personality. Anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, ethnographers—all the emerging sciences devoted their attention to identifying and categorizing the antisocial element in society.

  We have not shaken ourselves free of such base and racist thinking; it operates for some unconsciously, for others more overtly. But it is, nonetheless, part of the essentialist thinking of the period; a good part of that thinking that tried to find the bedrock of, well, everything. Taxonomies ruled the day: Order and definition and category made the world come alive, and made it possible at the same time for those in authority to control it with ease. One of those most basic and wrongheaded essential nineteenth-century categories was race.

  That narrowing of thinking continues through the twentieth century, and on through the twenty-first. The majority of men in prisons today in America are African Americans, the overwhelming majority of those for nonviolent drug offenses—inhaling or ingesting or imbibing some controlled substance. America incarcerates its black adult males at a higher rate per capita than did the South African government during the worst years of apartheid. Sentences turn out to be much harsher for young men of color than for whites who commit the very same crimes.

  Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin, knew the problem only too well, and decided to do something about it. Galton had already expressed his deep-seated fear of the end of the “highly evolved” white race in his first major book, entitled Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences, which he published in 1869. In that book, he made his case that the highest ideal for the white race could be found in the ancient Athenians. The closest to them in his day, he maintained, were the aristocratic British. And he named the enemy that threatened the established order and heredity as the darker, lower, and less moral races.

  He relied on earlier work on fingerprints carried out by the founder of histology, J. E. Purkyne, who, in 1823, distinguished nine types of lines in the hand, with no two individuals possessed of the same exact combinations. Galton turned Purkyne’s discovery into a practical project and began it by sorting fingerprints into eight discrete categories to use as a tool for mass identification. To make his taxonomy practical, Galton proposed that hospitals take the hand- and footprints
of every newborn, thus creating an indispensable record of every citizen’s identity. If someone committed a crime, the authorities could more easily track down the identity of the suspect.

  Near the end of his life, in 1892, Galton finished his project of sorting fingerprints and published his results in a long and dull tome titled, very simply and directly, Finger Prints, in which he laid out, with graphic detail, the eight major patterns—swirls, whorls, curlicues, spirals, and so on—shared by every last person in the entire world. England quickly adopted his method, and other countries, including the United States, soon followed. Carlo Ginzburg, in “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes,” says about Galton’s project, “Thus every human being—as Galton boastfully observed . . .—acquired an identity, was once and for all and beyond all doubt constituted an individual.”

  We reach an incredible crossroad here: a semiotics of the individual based on patterns—or numbers—and not on anything so indeterminate or even as informative and telling as personality. Ginzburg points out that by the end of the nineteenth century, and specifically from 1870 to 1880, “this ‘semiotic’ approach, a paradigm or model based on the interpretation of clues, had become increasingly influential in the field of human sciences.”

  Fingerprints as a unique identifying tool had to compete with an already existing system of identification called bertillonage, named for a clerk at the prefecture of Paris, Alphonse Bertillon. His intense scrutiny of police files had convinced him that no two human beings—not even identical twins—carried the exact same physical features. He worked out a fairly crude classifying system—the base identity of the human being, or as he called it, anthropometry—and thus developed, around 1879, the world’s first codified system for identifying human beings. Bertillon had such faith in his system that, on the basis of an oral description of a criminal, he had an artist sketch what the prefecture called “mug shots,” and used them as wanted posters. Later, he had two photographs taken of the accused, one frontal and the other in profile—the template for booking photographs to this day. Bertillon called these shots portraits parlés (“speaking likenesses”) and kept them filed by measurements of facial features.

  Bertillon became well known in this country when his methods went on display at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. This is the place that so many young women went missing without a trace: This is where they had disappeared in some numbers. Erik Larson opens his book The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America very calmly with an unsettling one-sentence paragraph: “How easy it was to disappear.” And then the next paragraph: “A thousand trains a day entered and left Chicago. Many of these trains brought single young women who had never even seen a city but now hoped to make one of the biggest and toughest their home.” “Vanishment,” Larson goes on to explain, “seemed a huge pastime. There were too many disappearances, in all parts of the city, to investigate properly, and too many forces impeding the detection of patterns.” The Chicago police grew more and more anxious and they adopted Bertillon wholesale the following year, and in 1898 Chicago established the National Bureau of Criminal Identification based on his methodology.

  Two other schemes took a radically different approach to identification and worked at defining human beings at a much more fundamental, more essentialist level. Like Galton’s and Bertillon’s, they also aimed at identifying the most terrifying of the new and growing problems in the nineteenth century, the ultimate destroyer of existing categories, the criminal. In every country police hoped to identify criminals before they committed their antisocial acts. Given the theories of social Darwinism and racial inferiority, scientists had no doubt that they could satisfy the police. Here, social scientists plumbed the most essentialist level imaginable, trying to define what it meant to be not only a human being, but an aberrant human being, at that.

  In the first, a German physician named Franz Joseph Gall, working in the first couple of decades of the nineteenth century, believed he could determine character, personality traits, and, most important, criminality, by reading the bumps on a person’s head. As a medical man, Gall engaged in a kind of medical semiotics, making serious declarations about personality, for instance, based on certain telltale signs. Gall held to a fairly complicated theory about human essence. In principle, he argued, the brain functioned as an organ of the mind, and the mind possessed a variety of different mental faculties, each of which represented a different part, or organ, of the brain. The brain consisted of exactly twenty-six separate organs, including the dreaded “murder organ”—more precisely, the Organ of the Penchant for Murder and Carnivorousness. These organs, or areas, raised bumps on the skull in proportion to the strength of a person’s particular mental faculty. Fortunately for society, he allowed, he knew how to find the murder bump, and could do so by the time the poor subject reached puberty. He named his new system phrenology.

  Like Gall, an Italian physician named Cesare Lombroso, the person mentioned by Havelock Ellis earlier in the chapter, resorted to this same sort of medical semiotics. He stands as the first person, really, to articulate the biological foundations of crime. Lombroso, too, believed perhaps even more strongly, and certainly more ardently, than someone like Galton in social Darwinism and genetics to declare that criminals were born and not created out of conditions of poverty and class and color and so on. In 1876, Lombroso published a book titled The Criminal Man, in which he listed a range of physiognomic details that indicated a propensity toward both brutishness and criminality in men. These included large jaws, high cheekbones, handle-shaped ears, fleshy lips, shifty eyes, and, most telling of all, insensitivity to pain. He writes with a style that borders on the pathological:The problem of the nature of the criminal—an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instinct of primitive humanity and the inferior animals. Thus were explained anatomically the enormous jaws, high cheek-bones, prominent superciliary arches, solitary lines in the palms, extreme size of the orbits, hand-shaped or sessile ears found in criminals, savages, and apes, insensibility to pain, extremely acute sight, tattooing, excessive idleness, love of orgies, and the irresistible craving for evil for its own sake, the desire not to only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh, and drink its blood.

  Fingerprinting and bertillonage, phrenology and physiognomy, all those systems of classification, led to moving medical forensics out of the hospital ward and into the offices of new nineteenth-century professionals, detectives. The man credited with that move, Sir Bernard Spilsbury, an Oxford graduate, went to work in October of 1899 for St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School in Paddington, London. As his biographer bluntly says: “Single-handedly he transported forensic medicine from the mortuary to the front page with a series of stunning, real-world successes.”10 In the process, he also developed the role of the expert witness. The staff of St. Mary’s quickly came under Spilsbury’s spell, and saw him as a person possessed of supernatural powers of deduction; they talked about him as if he were Sherlock Holmes come to life. Spilsbury prided himself on solving crimes with the slightest of clues, and preferred working in the field, alone, sifting through the muck for the slightest shred of evidence: “While others preferred the comfort of the predictable laboratory, he clambered across muddy fields, stood knee-deep in icy water, bent his back into howling blizzards, wrinkled his nose over foul-smelling corpses, prepared to travel to any destination and endure any hardship in order to study the fractured detritus of death.”

  What made him perfect for the age is that he needed no body, no corpse, to solve, say, a murder case. At one point he concluded, for instance, that a pool of grey pulpy substance spread over a basement floor had once been a human being. In the way that he could construct the most complex of stories from the simplest of clues, Spilsbury stands as the fore-father of the most celebrated of contemporary pathologists, like Michael Baden, Herbert MacDonell, and Doctor Henry Lee, notably of the O. J. Simpson
trial.

  More than anything, Spilsbury loved to work on the long forgotten and unsolvable—what we today know as cold cases. Ordinary citizens in the nineteenth century followed Spilsbury’s magic in the newspapers the way contemporary audiences watch on evening television the wonders of CSI and Cold Case. As in the nineteenth century, we live in fear—there are crazies out there—and we must have our crimes solved, or at least we have to hear a good story about one, no matter how true, that ends in the resolution of the case. Then, we can breathe a bit easier, walk a little freer.

  As comforting as Spilsbury may have been, it’s hard to imagine besting the well-ordered and logical mind of that quintessential sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, of 221B Baker Street, London. In story after story, Holmes focuses his infallible reasoning abilities on a jumble of evidence in order, as he repeatedly says in solid nineteenth-century fashion, “to get to the bottom of the matter.” Holmes continually amazes his friend, the naïve Doctor Watson, with his ability to solve crimes—CSI redux—and, like Spilsbury, he needs no corpse. Why Holmes, how did you ever come to that conclusion? the doctor asks over and over. To which Holmes answers, using the one word popular with nearly every scientist of the nineteenth century, “Elementary, my dear Watson, elementary.” An essentialist to the core of his very being, Holmes processes all experience, including fingerprints, facial characteristics, and other bits of evidence, as elementary stuff. He cares not a whit about punishment or justice, desiring only to finger the culprit—to identify the perpetrator—and announce to an expectant audience the suddenly obvious truth.