Unsuspecting Souls. Barry Sanders
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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.
Through his superhuman powers of deduction, Holmes plays the pure scientist, discarding everything superfluous to arrive at the rock-bottom, basic truth. At certain moments, when Holmes finds himself stumped by a crime, he reaches a heightened awareness—actually, just the sort of state that the chemists were after—by using his favorite seven-percent solution, cocaine. Under the influence, or high, Holmes, following the