The Aboriginal Australian Brain in the Scientic Imagination, c.

18201880
Paul Turnbull

For much of its history, Australian settler society envisaged material and moral progress as dependent on safeguarding the biological integrity and potential of an evolutionarily advanced white social body (McGregor 1997; Bashford 1998; Anderson 2002; Lake and Reynolds 2008). What is more the concept of race and belief in the fundamentality of cultivating and protecting white evolutionary vigour gained much of its existential concreteness through Aboriginal people being perceived as victims of racial degeneration. As Warwick Anderson has shown, scientists and doctors located in both southern urban and northern tropical Australia between 1880 and 1930 intervened prominently in contemporary debates on immigration policy, settler health in the tropics, national hygiene and child health; and by their interventions they infused hopes and fears for the future of White Australia with ideas and arguments about the evolutionary fate of the native Australian race (Anderson 2002). One could say, much as Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have observed of the practice of natural science in seventeenth century England, that in Australian settler society solutions to the problem of knowledge . . . [were] solutions to the problem of social order (Shapin and Schaffer 1985: 15). As Sander L. Gilman observes (2006), many scholars since the early 1970s have draw attention to how in obvious, and also in more subtle ways, the cultural suasiveness of race was underpinned by scientic investigation of the body in the half-century or so after 1860. In the Australian context, the work of Butcher (1994; 2002),
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Glover (1998), Anderson (2002) and MacDonald (2005) has provided new insights into the connections between racialist perceptions of Aboriginality and what metropolitan and locally based scientists active between 1860 and the early 1930s believed they had discovered about the evolutionary history and psychology of Indigenous Australians. This essay aims to add to our understanding of the contribution of science to the naturalisation of race, particularly in Australian settler society, by mapping what anatomists during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made of the morphology of the Aboriginal brain. Within the connes of this essay it is impossible to deal satisfactorily with how this knowledge-making in various different yet interconnected contexts was susceptible to external inuences, ranging from widely shared cultural assumptions to the personal idiosyncrasies of individual scientists. Even so, the work of historians on various aspects of biomedical research over the past four centuries offers persuasive grounds for attempting to do so. It alerts us to how personal attributes deemed essential in researchers of the Aboriginal brain were not only attributes formed within particular cultural geographies, but also resources with which matters of fact were produced (Schaffer, 1994; also Barnes and Shapin 1979; Shapin, 1994). In assessing how affective entanglements of personal and scientic aspirations inuenced research on the Aboriginal brain, it seems likely there is much more to be said about these human remains having a sensory presence, capable of stimulating complex, imaginative communion by racial scientists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with what they took to be material traces of humankinds evolutionary history. Historians of racial thought in Australia have generally assumed that in scientic hands, the bodily remains of Aboriginal people were transformed into objects sheared of human attributes and qualities. However, as is evidenced by the intellectual practices and ndings of several anatomists discussed in this essay, studying the Aboriginal brain could license imaginative reconstruction of Europeans and Aboriginal peoples shared deep past. My hope in this essay is to go some way towards showing that there is a quite complex history yet to tell about the research on the morphology of the Aboriginal brain and what this work contributed to racialised perceptions of Aboriginality within, and, importantly, beyond scientic circles. Today we can see that race has no reality in biology. It is impossible to categorise geographically located populations into races on the basis of any meaningful genetic

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similarities. There are populations with high frequencies of co-variant skin colour and hair type; but there is immense genetic variation between individuals in these populations, and moreover, as much variation amongst Europeans as there is between Europeans and Africans. Even so, there is arguably much to be gained in investigating the social construction of racial science as I attempt to do in this essay by rst focusing on explicating the goals of investigators of the Aboriginal brain as they themselves saw them evolving through their uses of evidence and modes of reasoning and argument. Doing so arguably offers the prospect of our understanding with greater clarity how the facticity of the Aboriginal brain was socially constructed. It also seems a useful way to contribute to our efforts to understand what inuence this research had on the construal of the biological and psychic dimensions of Aboriginality within settler culture, and on the development of policies for governing Indigenous peoples.

Racial Phrenology
The history of scientic interest in the Aboriginal brain began with the question being asked, in European scientic and wider intellectual circles of the mid-1820s whether life, over many successive generations in the Australian environment, had caused the continents indigenous peoples to exhibit morphological peculiarities of the brain endowing them with racially peculiar cognitive traits. The stimulus for asking this question was phrenology. In the 1820s, the idea that varietal differences between human populations extended to variations in psychology was nothing new. The credibility given the Galenic theory of humours for over a millennium had well entrenched the notion in European intellectual history that the behaviour of all animate beings was determined by the relative inuence of qualitatively different humours within the bodily economy. What was new in the early nineteenth century was the Austrian anatomist Franz-Joseph Galls psychological science, which was grounded in the premise that the brain was not only the material substrate of mind, but actually a matrix of discrete organs, each of which was the source of a particular faculty of intellect or emotion. As well known, Galls science of organology, or phrenology, as it was known by the mid-1820s due to its championing by Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, the anatomists sometime protege, further postulated that the outer shape of the skull accurately reected the relative volume of each organ and thus the strength of its corresponding mental faculty. The skull could thus be mapped to produce a detailed psychological prole of its owner.

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Importantly, as Steve Shapin has pointed out, phrenology did not arise out of clinical investigation of the brain. Neither Gall nor Spurzheim sought to assess the effects of surgical interference on cerebral structures in living animals. They pioneered a social psychology, the truth claims of which were based on its practitioners belief that they had identied particular cerebral organs as the source of specic faculties of emotion or intellect through statistically correlating the observed behaviour of their subjects with commonalities in the shape of specic parts of the outer surface of the skull (Shapin 1979). What is more, as Andrew Bank has observed, phrenology was fundamentally a science of race that gave the concept of biologically ingrained differences in mental powers between more or less endogamous populations a new and pernicious existential concrescence (Bank 1996: 389). Gall, for example, maintained that one of the most compelling conrmations of the truth of his cerebral science was its positively correlating the relative size of the organs comprising the brain of sub-Saharan Africans with the wealth of reportage by scientic travellers and colonists since medieval times of these peoples being not only intellectually inferior to Europeans, but also characteristically given to unpredictable, highly volatile expressions of emotion (for example, Gall 1994). Skulls of Aboriginal Australians rst started to come into the hands of British phrenologists around 1820 (Turnbull 2001: 1213). The number of skulls acquired between 1820 and the late 1840s, by which time interest in the science had begun to decline, was small probably no more than twenty. Nonetheless, these remains were regarded as conrming with remarkable clarity the truth of phrenology. They were read as consistently disclosing the existence of relatively voluminous organs in the mid and hind regions of the brain, in which phrenology located the sources of instinctual cognitive functions and basic emotions. What is more, the organs in the frontal parts of the brain, the sites in phrenologys cerebral cartography of higher intellectual operations and powers of moral judgement, were judged to be remarkably small in volume and thus of weak behavioural inuence (for example, Anon. 1825). Generally, phrenological analyses of the Aboriginal brain emphasised the biologically ingrained nature of Aboriginal peoples mental inferiority in relation to other racial types. To most followers of the science, the organic conguration of their brain condemned Aboriginal people to being such miserable representatives of humanity, that it would puzzle a party of naturalists to decide, to which they are most nearly allied, the genus Homo, or the genus Simia

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(Caldwell 1839). Even so, phrenology did not necessarily amount to biological determinism. Gall and many subsequent practitioners of the science encountered and refuted accusations of propagating materialism. They maintained that the concept of cerebral localisation did not necessarily deny the immateriality of mind, and thus the existence of the soul (Cooter, 1984: 401; Van Whye 2002: 26). Several phrenological commentators on Aboriginal psychology were consequently of the view that some of the native Australian race, at least, might achieve a greater measure of cerebral self-knowledge and moral improvement under European stewardship. If so, they might be incorporated within colonial society, thereby giving their offspring the opportunity to gain further mental improvement through careful selection of reproductive partners. George Mackenzie, a leading gure in the Edinburgh Phrenology Society, for example, found in the shape of one Australian skull he acquired for the societys museum signs of a mind as much gifted with attributes of bravery and leadership as those celebrated of ancient highland chieftains (Mackenzie 1820: 235). As in Scotland, so in New South Wales, the savage might be capable of enjoying a higher level of civilisation.

Racial Anthropologists and Humanitarian Pessimism

Phrenology had lost much of its credibility in scientic and middle class intellectual circles by the 1840s; but its core concept of cerebral location continued to have many adherents, regardless of how accurate they thought Gall and Spurzheims cerebral cartographies were. In this way the science continued to inuence how Aboriginal cognition was understood, notably by its contribution to the development of an innatist, polygenist anthropology that was to conceptualise Aboriginal people as destined to suffer racial extinction in an unequal contest with settlers seen as belonging to Anglo-Saxon and Celtic strains of a mentally superior Caucasian race. Two inuential crafters of this new biologically determinist anthropology well illustrate its connections with phrenology: Samuel George Morton (17991851) and Joseph Barnard Davis (180181). Morton, who by his death in 1851 had achieved an international reputation on the basis of his craniometric reconstructions of Native American and ancient Egyptian racial genealogies, encountered phrenology when studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh in the early 1820s, where the science was the subject of much debate, in large part due to the activism of George Combe and other leading

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members of the Edinburgh Phrenology Society (Smithers 2009: 546). Joseph Barnard Davis, who saw himself as building on Mortons work, also became interested in phrenology in the early 1820s, while studying under Joshua Brookes, who at that time was one of Londons most successful private anatomy teachers and supporters of the science (Kell 2011). Morton and Davis sought to challenge the orthodoxy in AngloAmerican medico-scientic circles as to the nature and causes of varietal diversity within the human species that prevailed until Darwins theory of evolution by speciation rapidly gained widespread assent, notably amongst younger scientists, through the 1860s. This orthodoxy was essentially the environmentalist explanation of variation rened by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the celebrated Go ttingen anatomist, through the last third of the eighteenth century. As Timothy Lenoir and others have shown (Lenoir 1980; Mayr 2010), Blumenbach believed life was sustained by a subtle and non-material animating, developmental force that was subject to agonistic interplay with forces external to the bodily economy, or substances entering bodily systems from the external environment. Modication of this life-giving force he believed caused structural and functional variations. In the human species, the result had been environmentally induced diversication originating from a common ancestral stock, originating with two divinely created beings, into ve distinctive varieties that respectively became the dominant form humanity assumed in Europe, Eastern Asia, Africa, the Americas, and southeast Asia and the Pacic. The emergence of these ve races, moreover, was construed as a process of degenerative variation from the perfection of the rst man and woman. What is more, providence, working through natural laws, had determined the peoples of Europe remained closest to the form of this ancestral pair (Bendyshe 1865). Morton was convinced by the mid-1830s that living organisms originating in different parts of the Earth had distinctive variants of this life force. He conceded that environmentally induced variations could occur in living organisms. However, he maintained that human vitality was so little susceptible to variation, and appeared responsible for such pronounced racial differences in bodily form and cognitive powers, that it was more likely that Blumenbachs varietal types were in fact biologically distinctive species. Davis similarly believed by the late 1830s that neither environmental factors or human agency were capable of causing much if any intergenerational change in the relative volume and thus power of particular regions of the brain to determine behavioural traits. He concurred with Morton that this

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morphological stability pointed to racial distinctions being of primordial origin and indicative of humanity being separately created species. Even so, both men regarded it as premature to say what psychological or wider social implications humanity having polygenetic origins and thus distinctive trajectories of biological development might have. Quite possibly Morton agreed with Charles Caldwell a fellow Philadelphian medical practitioner, active phrenologist and apologist for slavery, who held that phrenology conrmed the typical African brain to be such that no
amount of training can elevate them as a people, to the proud and enviable pitch of self-government. In Africa they suffer a more fearful slavery than in the United States. Here they obey civilised; there savage masters But to close this subject Society must consist of the serving and the served. (Caldwell, 1839)

Davis in turn appears to have been not unsympathetic to the aggressive racialism espoused by Robert Knox, James Hunt and other British critics of abolitionism (Davis 1868). However, Morton and Davis regarded it as necessary that science focus on determining the true extent and nature of racial diversity amongst the peoples of the Earth. And this they saw as best achieved by taking up Blumenbachs project of using skull morphology to reconstruct the genealogies of human racial types as extensively and systematically as circumstances allowed (Davis 1867: v-viii). Blumenbach, as is also well known, empirically underpinned his explanation of human diversity by comparative measurements of varietally typical skulls. However, his environmentalism led him to see the plasticity of the skull to be such that there was only limited time in which to realise the potential of craniometry to reconstruct the history of racial diversication in the human species. European colonial ambitions were rapidly increasing the volume of intercontinental ows of goods, ideas and people. The material conditions of life were fast changing, as were the possibilities in respect of reproductive partners in what had long been varietally distinctive populations. It seemed only a matter of decades before the dissolution of the archaic racial distinctions between peoples inhabiting different continents occurred. If the value of the skull in reconstructing humanitys deep past was to be realised, it was vital to procure as many authentically representative skulls of different nations and tribes as quickly possible. Morton and Davis similarly feared colonialism would accelerate exogamous reproduction causing the signicance of racial lineages to

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be lost. Even so, this did not deter them from devoting much of the time they could spare from medical practice to collecting racial crania and reconstructing lines of descent within the human genus. In 1839 Morton published what was then the most extensive comparative study of human crania, Crania Americana, tracing the emergence of varietal diversity amongst the indigenous peoples of North, Central and South America. Davis began systematically collecting crania in the late 1840s, privately building a collection eventually rivalling those of Europes premiere scientic institutions. However, lacking institutional backing comparable to what Morton enjoyed from Philadelphias Academy of Natural Sciences, he did not publish his rst major work, a large-scale craniometric survey of ancient British crania, until the mid-1860s (Davis and Thurnam, 1865). Morton concurred with Blumenbach that craniometric investigation of Native American skulls suggested a common ancestry. It seemed to him that this ancestral type had gradually diversied into at least twenty-two morphologically distinctive families. Even so, tellingly, he believed, the essential shape of the skull conrmed the existence of a a singular harmony between the mental character of the Indian, and his cranial developments as explained by Phrenology (Morton 1839: 312). Davis likewise agreed that human diversity was, as Blumenbach reasoned, largely a matter of modications occurring within ve or six distinctive racial types historically segregated by geographical distance. However, Morton and Davis were convinced that these ancestral types could not have similarly arisen through the play of environmental factors or human agency. Davis began the preface of the second of his two great craniometric works, Thesaurus Craniorum (1867) by declaring that he had long doubted the unity of human origins (Davis 1867: v). Morton, writing some twenty-eight years earlier in Crania Americana, was more circumspect, suggesting that diversication within each of Blumenbachs ve ancestral races was not incompatible with these archaic types having been adapted from the beginning to its peculiar destination (Morton 1839: 6). Moreover, in the mid-1840s, Morton published a comparative study of ancient Egyptian and African skulls that clearly left readers to infer the primordial nature of African inferiority (Morton 1844). And four years before he died in 1851, Morton took up the question of whether humanity was one or several species, suggesting that Blumenbachs ve varietal types of man could well be ancestrally separate species. By craniometric research, Morton and Davis sought empirically to validate a biologically determinist history of the human genus. Within

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this account of the origins and innately inscribed differences between races, Aboriginal people were seen as cognitively incapable of living other than by hunting and foraging. Morton procured eleven Australian crania between 1845 and 1849, half from Charles Nicholson (1808103), a prominent New South Wales surgeon, pastoralist and politician (Meigs 1857: 967). The shape of these crania he saw as identical to those of Africans in his collection in all but the facial bones, which suggested a brain of less intellectual functionality that explained, as Morton observed, the pugnacious and irascible character of the Australian savages (Morton 1845: 292). Within this phrenologically derived polygenist natural history, Australian colonisation appeared as essentially a tragic yet inevitable saga of racial struggle and supersession, destined to conclude with the extinction of the continents native races. However, it was not the only explanatory framework predisposing European scientists and intellectuals to regard Aboriginal people as a race physiologically incapable of much intellectual improvement. By the 1830s Blumenbachs monogenetic environmentalist explanation of racial diversity appeared to many of its adherents to have been mistaken in allowing for the possibility that the degenerative effects on indigenous cognition of living in the Australian environment by hunting and foraging was reversible. This shift away from believing that racial differences were unstable and mutable owed much to Georges Cuvier (17691832), the highly inuential French comparative anatomist. Cuvier was scathingly dismissive of Galls scheme of cerebral localisation and its subsequent renements (Outram 1984: 1303). Even so, he likewise believed that the brain was the material basis of the mind, and that there was a direct relationship between intelligence and the size of the brain. Cuvier grouped and described the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa in his highly inuential Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles de quadrupe `des (1812) as the most degraded of human races, whose form approaches most closely that of brutes (1812: 105). Several scholars have drawn attention to this verdict and the anatomists concluding, on dissecting in early 1816 the body of Saartje Bartmann, a Khoisan woman popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, that Bartmanns head and other bodily structures exhibited ape-like features (Sharpley-Whiting 1999: 2732; Willis 2010). It is hard to under-estimate the signicance of Cuviers dissection of Bartmann and its reportage in the conceptual evolution of racial science. It was not his describing her body as having morphological similarities to those of chimpanzees and Orangutans. He made it clear

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that he regarded these similarities as signifying nothing beyond conrming that humans and other primates shared the same general plan of organisation in nature. Men and apes, he maintained, had fundamental anatomical and physiological differences that rendered it nonsensical to suggest that human varietal types exhibiting seemingly ape-like features were anything other than variants of a common ancestral human form. Rather, what was inuential within and beyond scientic circles was that post-mortem investigation of Bartmann conrmed Cuvier in the belief that populations within the human species could vary markedly in brain volume, the size of the sensory organs and thus cognitive abilities notably when the variations in question enhanced the ability of groups to live and reproduce in challenging environmental conditions, such as those prevailing in the tropics and arctic regions. Indeed, Bartmanns body was seen as proving that variation had proved to be a cruel law in the case of Africans, and their descendant races (Cuvier 1817: 273), among which the anatomist classed the peoples of mainland Australia and Tasmania. Reduction in cranial volume he believed to have doomed these peoples to eternal inferiority (Cuvier 1864: 2212). This in turn explained, he observed, why among these races intelligence has nowhere risen to the point of reaching a regular form of government or the least appearance of sustained knowledge, has nowhere preserved either annals or traditions (Cuvier and Rudwick 1997: 246). Cuviers arguments in favour of the susceptibility of cognition to degenerative variation inuenced several of the most inuential exponents of monogenetic environmentalism. For example, Alexander Monro, Professor of Anatomy and Surgery at the University of Edinburgh between 1808 and 1846, was critical of phrenology, and had no time for the sciences attributing the alleged inability of Aboriginal people to rise above the life of the chase to the conguration of the organs making up their brains. However, when lecturing on variation in the human species he used skulls and postcranial remains to illustrate the degeneration of the native Australian race, reifying their supposed intellectual inferiority in the minds of his students by theatrically demonstrating that living in the Australian environment had increased bone thickness reducing the internal volume of the cranial cavity and thus the size of the Aboriginal brain (Monro 1825: 2, 226). What is more, he was indistinguishable from Gall and Spurzheim in his positively correlating what he saw as morphologically peculiar about the Aboriginal brain with colonial reportage on Indigenous Australian life-ways and culture.

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Monro believed progressive environmentally induced decrease in brain volume explained why colonial ofcials and travellers should have consistently reported since the beginning of British colonisation in 1788 that the Crowns new antipodean subjects had neither houses nor clothing; were totally ignorant of agriculture, and did not practice in any one of the arts of civil life (1825: 2, 226). Indeed, Monro held that Australian environmental conditions not only ultimately explained Aboriginal resistance to integration within the developing agrarian economies of the continents new settler colonies, but also were the cause of degeneration that colonial reportage appeared to conrm was incapable of arrest or reversal. Many among the several generations of students Monro taught over four decades pursued medical careers that led to them settling in or visiting the Australian colonies (Conrad 1995: 455). The extent to which these surgeons and physicians contributed to settler perceptions of Aboriginal cognitive inferiority is an intriguing but not easily answerable question. What we can say is that of the numerous accounts of settler life and travels in the Australian colonies published in the second third of the nineteenth century, a remarkable number were written by medically trained men, and generally represented Aboriginal people as the victims of environmentally induced cognitive degeneration. We also nd that James Cowles Prichard (17861848), the most inuential authority on the nature and causes of variation amongst the peoples of the Earth within British metropolitan and colonial intellectual circles between 1810 and 1860, was also ambivalent about whether Aboriginal people were capable of improvement. Prichard was a physician and pioneer ethnologist who by the mid-1830s was widely acclaimed throughout Europe for his empirically detailed investigations of human physical and cultural diversity. He was a devout Anglican and vocal critic of slavery who lobbied the imperial government to prevent the violent exploitation of indigenous land by pastoralists in British settler colonies (Augstein 1999: 144; Alexander 2010: 1202). As a Christian humanitarian he held that no essential nor wholly irreversible psychic differences separated the most well-educated European from the most degraded being cloaked in the human form (Anon. 1848: 461). Even the rudest savage he maintained, possessed albeit in enervated forms the same principles of action, and [. . .] same internal nature [. . .] as are recognised in other divisions of mankind. And by concerted missionary endeavour they could eventually be brought to enjoy all the blessings of civilisation (Prichard 1836: 184).

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As a scientist, however, Prichard found himself convinced by Cuviers anatomical investigations that in man the capacity to reason and to make moral judgements as best could be judged by behavioural observation were consistently proportional to the size of the brain. And different racial types exhibited inequalities in cranial volume, it logically followed, as Cuvier argued, that varietal diversity within the human species had led to racial differences in intellect. As Prichard was to concede,
there is nothing more probable than the supposition, that the average parts of perfection in the development of the brain as of other parts of the system, differs in different nations with the diversities of climate and other elements of the external condition, and with the degrees of social culture. (Prichard 1836: 216)

Prichard did not waiver in believing that missionary endeavour would mentally improve the Aboriginal race. However, from the outset of his researches he found it impossible not to agree with Cuvier that, on scientic grounds, the inescapable conclusion was that in the African race and its descendant types there had come to be a greater provision [. . .] in the conrmation of the head for the perfection of the senses, and less proportionally for the evolution of the intellectual organ, than in Europeans (Prichard 1973: 53). Concurring with Cuvier that strengths and weaknesses in mental function were determined by brain size thus left him open to being interpreted by his many readers as sharing the anatomists biological pessimism.

The Aboriginal Brain after Darwin

Until the 1860s, medico-scientic ideas and arguments about racial differences in cognition drew upon matters of fact derived by an investigative framework that was essentially a social psychology. Correlations were drawn, either between what were assumed on the basis of colonial reportage and other discourses to be racially distinctive cognitive attributes and behavioural traits, and the relative volume of specic parts of the brain, or alternatively between the overall size of the brain and mental powers. What is most obvious today about this science is its social construction in what, more often than not, was the absence of its principal object of inquiry. Whether racial differences in cognition were attributed to the human genus comprising separately originating species, each with its own physiological peculiarities, or humanity was seen as originating from one ancestral type that had been subject to variation by environmental

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forces, human agency, or the combined effects of both phenomena, it was not clinical scrutiny of the brain, but comparative appraisal of the inner and outer surface of the skull that were the source of the sciences veracity. This was to change from the early 1860s. At the beginning of the decade, many medico-scientic researchers were openly sceptical of cerebral localisation, due to its continuing basis in Gall and Spurzheims correlative methodology the use of which, among other things, consigned the faculty of language to the frontal lobes of the brain. However, Gall had his supporters, among the most active of whom was the French physician, Jean-Baptiste Boulliard (17961881). From the mid-1820s, Boulliard sought to conrm the accuracy of Galls mapping of mental functions by post-mortem of the brain for pathology in cases of mental disfunction. By mid-century, Boulliard had found what he took to be clear evidence of damage to the frontal lobes in over a hundred cases of speech loss (Harrington 1991: 207). Boulliards anatomically-based ndings persuaded few of his peers to reconsider whether they had been unduly sceptical of Galls psychology. However, in the early 1860s his student, Paul Broca, stimulated widespread medico-scientic interest in localisation on likewise reporting that post-mortem examination of the brains of patients suffering loss of speech revealed the existence of lesions in the frontal lobes. Moreover, his ndings secured many new converts to localisation, despite clinical investigation of brains by sceptical peers nding no connection between speech loss and brain damage. Historians have explained Brocas suasiveness as owing much to the combination of his rhetorical talents and the inuence of positivism and anti-clericalism within the Parisian scientic and wider intellectual circles in which he moved (Harrington 1991: 208; Hecht 2003: 578). But regardless of how personal style and wider social concerns contributed to the positive reception his ndings gained, Broca was regarded as offering convincing clinical proof of localisation that was to inspire research which by the mid-1870s had disclosed that various motor functions were controlled by specic parts of the cortex (Fritsch and Hitzig 1870; Wernicke 1874; Harrington 1990: 2568). By the mid-1870s, the concept of cerebral location had also been imbued with new meaning by the inuence of post-Darwinian ideas and arguments about human evolutionary history. How medicoscientic researchers construed evolutionary processes differed and, often, was at odds with what Darwin appears to have argued. Moreover, especially in French and German-speaking anatomical and anthropological communities, Darwins account of evolutionary

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speciation was subject to radical conceptual revision, or rejected, either in favour of evolutionary schema grounded in older transmutationist explanations of organic diversity, or the idea that species were incapable of all but trivial variation in form (Bowler 1992; Zimmerman 2002). Even so, two things seem clear. Firstly, cerebral localisation was no longer understood in terms of the position and strength of specic mental faculties as having remained essentially unchanged since the origination of the brain in deep time. The brain was now understood as analogous to the Earths geology. It too possessed a primitive core over which various layers then strata of greater structural complexity had been laid down over tens of thousands of years by physical, chemical, and biological processes. Much like the geologist, the anatomist dissecting the brain would see in its stratigraphy the record of humanitys evolutionary history. Secondly, just as the surface of the Earth was seen as continuingly inuenced by the processes at its core, human cognition was inuenced by the brains oldest and simplest functions. Accordingly, the age old theme of conict between reason and the passions was imagined as an agonistic struggle between instinctual drives generated by the lowest, most primitive structures of the brain, and intellectual powers arising from its most recently evolved regions (Harrington 1991: 213). In the context of this history the value of the Aboriginal brain was presumed to be its simplicity or lowness in evolutionary terms. It was regarded as providing a unique window into the deep past of humanity and the biological changes occurring with the species evolutionary development. Indeed, it was assumed that lengthy isolation in the Australian environment had resulted in Aboriginal people experiencing evolutionary stasis, leaving them similar in terms of physical and mental development to the earliest known prehistoric inhabitants of Europe. George Rolleston (182981), a prote ge of Thomas Henry Huxley, was among the earliest and the most active researchers in seeking to procure non-European brains to investigate their evolutionary signicance (Turnbull 2008: 223). One initial stimuli of his interest was the celebrated debate between Richard Owen and Huxley, at the 1860 meeting in Oxford of the British Advancement of Science, over the hippocampus in the human brain compared to the brains of higher apes. The hippocampus, or hippocampal formation, is a structure belonging to the forebrain and innermost fold of the temporal lobe. Owen, as is well known, had argued that the gorilla brain had more in common with that of monkey and apes than that of

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man. Huxley argued that the highest monkey and human brains differed less than the brains of the highest and lowest monkeys. In 1862, Rolleston lectured at the Royal Institution on afnities and differences in the brain of men and other animals. As the Lancet reported, he showed that the anatomy of the brain of the ape does not furnish us with those differentiating characteristics which have been supposed to have put it into a position of marked inferiority with man (Anon. 1862). Even so, Rolleston did not share Huxleys materialism, believing that the true relation of mans body to his soul, to the world in which he lives, and to the Governor of it, can never be fully elucidated either by physiological or psychological researches, nor yet by both combined (Rolleston 1884: xxxvii). Rolleston sought to obtain brains from different human racial types in order to discover whether differences in cognition might be attributable to racially specic features of cerebral morphology. However, he was limited to what specimens could be secured on his behalf by colleagues and past pupils able to perform autopsies on seamen of non-European ancestry dying in British ports. These did not include any of the small number of Aboriginal Australian men working in Britains imperial maritime economy. The situation was summed up well by George Busk, the Darwinian paleontologist; when addressing Londons Ethnological Society in 1861 he lamented that
the Anthropologist at home is compelled to rely for the materials of his studies upon such fragmentary portions of the body as can be easily obtained and transported [. . .] A Gorilla or a Chimpanzee can be caught and sent alive to the Zoological Gardens, or killed and forwarded in a cask of rum to the British Museum, but loud would be the outcry were similar attempts made to promote the study of Anthropology. (Busk 1861: 3489)

Over the previous half-century, efforts had been made by Europeanbased anatomists to obtain whole heads of Aboriginal people, but with little success. The difculty in large part was that generally indigenous bodies deemed of scientic interest because of their racial integrity were only encountered by colonially based surgeons and naturalists in an advanced state of decomposition. As the Sydney-based anatomist James Froude Flashman was to observe in 1908,
Even in Australia it is exceedingly difcult to obtain specimens of these brains, the Aboriginals who die near towns being seldom Pure Bloods, and the difculty of getting the brains of those who die in the far North, or in the interior, where the race maintains its full characteristics, is

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almost insuperable, owing to great distances, and to the absence from those regions of scientists who take an interest in the matter. (Flashman 1908: 4)

Even the few specimens that were acquired a short time after death proved difcult to preserve, resulting in the investigation of brain morphology being restricted to few and often imperfectly preserved specimens. One notable exception, however, was the work of Nikolai Mikluho-Maclay (184688), the Russian explorer, naturalist and ethnographer. Visiting Brisbane in 1880 he was able to enlist the help of the trustees of the Queensland Museum to secure the brains of four men, of Aboriginal, Melanesian, Philippine and Chinese ancestry, immediately after they were hung for rape in Brisbane gaol between May and August 1880 (Mikluho-Maclay 1882: 174; also Webster 1984: 2402). Settlers knew the Aboriginal man, a Gubi Gubi man named Ubelah, as the outlaw Johnny Campbell. Mikluho-Maclay witnessed his execution, immediately after which he was allowed to dissect and photograph his brain. The following day he injected Ubelahs corpse with an arsenic-rich preserving uid newly devised in German anatomical circles, before submerging the body in a variant of this uid he had developed with the advice of R. H. Staiger, the secretary of the Queensland Museum and previously the colonys analytical chemist. Mikluho-Maclay had to spend two months ensuring the body was well preserved, before judging it safe to have it shipped to Rudolf Virchow in Berlin, in the hope, Mikluho-Maclay wrote, that this consignment will add a few facts to our knowledge of the Comparative Anatomy of the Races of mankind (1881: 578). Besides Ubelahs brain, Mikluho-Maclay was able to dissect three more before returning to Russia in 1887. He found that in two of these four brains the central sulcus the fold in the cerebral cortex of the vertebrate brain, separating the parietal lobe from the frontal lobe, and the primary motor cortex from the primary somatosensory cortex opened into the lateral sulcus, which divides the frontal lobe and parietal lobe above from the temporal lobe below. He did not comment on the implications of this nding beyond suggesting that the opening of the central into the lateral sulcus would likely be found more frequently in the Aboriginal race than in Europeans. This was fairly typical of Mikluho-Maclay in that in his published writings he rarely ventured hypotheses on the basis of his observations; although in this case his neglect of the natural history of the Aboriginal race may have been inuenced by his having compared to other contemporary scientists an uncharacteristically high opinion of the intellectual

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powers of the indigenous peoples with whom he interacted in Australian and Melanesia, and of whose treatment under colonialism he was openly critical. By the late 1880s, British metropolitan anatomists were better able to secure Aboriginal brains. This was due to the development of interest in evolutionary anatomy within the universities of Sydney and Adelaide, and also the patronage they could offer colonially located medico-scientic researchers. William Turner, Professor of Anatomy at Edinburgh University from 1863 to 1916, acquired brains, other soft tissue structures and skulls from Sydney University anatomy professors James T. Wilson (18611945) and Thomas Anderson Stuart (18561920). Both studied under Turner (Smith 2006), who also acquired heads and soft tissue specimens from William Ramsay Smith, Adelaides city coroner at the turn of the century (MacDonald 2010: 2027). Adelaide proved the most fruitful source of material due to the anthropological interests of several leading gures within its medical school, established in 1885. The most generous was Edward Charles Stirling (18481919), Professor of Physiology from 1885 until his death. Stirling was also Director of the South Australian Museum between 1884 and 1912, during which time he actively encouraged the acquisition of skulls and skeletons of Aboriginal people, and studied what he believed were their evolutionarily signicant traits. Stirling had studied with Alexander Macalister (18441919), who became the University of Cambridges rst full-time Professor of Anatomy in 1883. Macalister gave Darwinism qualied support, believing, as had George Rolleston, in the existence of an immaterial soul. He believed in what he termed mixed evolution, meaning by this that the brain was the seat of involuntary and instinctual processes that had evolved through natural selection, but was also the seat of higher cognitive functions, which evolution could not explain. Stirling possibly shared Macalisters belief in mixed evolution. Certainly, he shared his conviction that human evolutionary history would only be accurately reconstructed by work in the dissecting room, the eld, the zoological garden and the laboratory. He thus provided Macalister with skulls suggestive of afnities between Aboriginal Australians and Neanderthal, and together with Archibald Watson, Adelaides rst Professor of Anatomy, he sent him some six to eight complete heads of Aboriginal people during the thirty-nine years Macalister held the Cambridge chair. The number of brains British and continental European anatomists acquired from local scientists was still few, in total

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probably no more than a dozen. Even so, those that were secured assumed great signicance as the raw material, so to speak out, out of which the evolutionary primitivity of Aboriginal psychology was constructed, and which from the late 1880s was to stand largely unchallenged in medico-scientic circles until the 1950s.

Relics of the Oldest Type of Mankind

Macalister was a key gure in the racial construction of Aboriginal psychology. He encouraged his most talented students to see the Aboriginal brain as presenting a remarkable opportunity to determine what biological differences separated the brain of an educated, moral [i.e. European] man [. . .] from that of the sensual animal-like savage. This was how Humphrey Davy Rolleston, one of Macalisters most talented students, represented the scientic value of the Aboriginal brain before a meeting of Londons Anthropological Institute in late 1887 (Rolleston 1888: 32). In the paper he read on that occasion he reported having found on dissecting a brain obtained for Macalister by Archibald Watson, from a man dying of peritonitis in the Adelaide Hospital that the evolutionary simplicity of this brain compared to the typical European brain was clearly evident, notably in the left frontal convolution (wherein Broca had located the power of speech) appearing defective. This, Rolleston declared, was particularly interesting, given what he and most of his audience at that time assumed was the primitive nature of Aboriginal languages (Rolleston 1888: 35). Wynfrid Duckworth (18701956), who studied under Macalister and Rolleston, drew similar conclusions on investigating through the rst decade of the twentieth century Aboriginal brains sent to Cambridge by Stirling and Watson. Morphologically they appeared to him to exhibit features that were very rare in the white races of mankind, but at the same time normal in the ape tribes (Duckworth 1907: 69). Duckworth took care to stress that to the trained eye Aboriginal brains were at once clearly distinguishable from the most highly developed simian brain in various ways. Even so, he was to conclude on the basis of various resemblances in these mature brains to microcephalic and foetal European specimens that, in evolutionary terms, the Australian brain stood between those of the higher Simiidae on the one hand, and those of the most highly-developed Hominidae on the other (1908: 282). As such it seemed to Duckworth that cognitively the Aboriginal race were at a stage next in advance to that of Pithecanthropus erectus (1908: 282).

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Despite locally based anatomists seemingly having greater opportunities than their metropolitan peers to secure brains, there was no systematic attempt to build on or challenge these metropolitan ndings. What Australian-based research there was between the turn of the century and the First World War was largely undertaken by one man, James Froude Flashman (18701917), a Sydney graduate and the rst director of the pathological laboratory established by the New South Wales Government in 1900 to investigate changes occurring in the brains of the mentally ill. Flashmans interest in brain morphology was probably rst sparked by Grafton Elliot Smith (18711937), with whom he became a close friend when they were undergraduates together at Sydney University. After Elliot Smith completed a scholarship under Macalister at Cambridge in 1900, he was appointed Professor of Anatomy at the Cairo Medical School, where he established an international reputation in comparative neuroanatomy and anthropology (Elkin and Mackintosh 1974). Cairo provided Elliot Smith the opportunity to investigate ancient mummied brains, which though desiccated and shrunken were sufciently preserved to compare with modern brains of various peoples. Flashman was inspired to investigate the evolutionary development of the Aboriginal brain by Elliot Smiths research and time spent in Cambridge during a year long study tour in 1903. On his return to Sydney he lobbied the New South Wales government unashamedly appealing to national pride. The failure to capitalise on location and consequent opportunities to research indigenous brain morphology, he reported, was looked on as a slur upon Australian science in metropolitan medico-scientic circles (Flashman 1903b: 79). Should the governments pathological laboratory be resourced to amass and investigate large series of foetal and immature Aboriginal brains, Flashman believed it would allow locally-based researchers to generate knowledge of the greatest benet to mankind concerning the nature and evolutionary development of localised brain functions. Possibly the history of scientic interest in the indigenous brain would have been different had Flashman not died in 1917 while serving with the Australian Army Medical Corps in France. At any rate, little research has been done up to the present day, either in Australia or overseas; and what has been done was by a handful of anatomists active from the turn of the twentieth century to the late 1930s exploiting unforeseen opportunities resulting from the death of Aboriginal people in hospitals and insane asylums. With the coming of the Second World War, the investigation of Aboriginal brain

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morphology ceased until the mid-1980s, when health infrastructure and forensic technologies enabled the acquisition of brains by autopsies on Aboriginal people in remote regions. As to the ndings of this meagre body of research, what is most noticeable is the emergence of differing opinion on the question of the place of Aboriginal people in nature. Failing to convince the New South Wales government to support the study of the Aboriginal brain, Flashman was restricted to personally investigating what few were obtained by Wilson and Anderson Stuart, when Sydney Universitys medical school acquired corpses of men and women of Aboriginal ancestry for anatomy teaching from either New South Wales prisons and asylums, or paststudents now medical ofcers acting as coroners in regional districts. Among the Aboriginal brains he received this way was that of Jimmy Governor, the son of a white labourer and an Aboriginal woman, hung for murder in January 1901 (and whom Thomas Keneally made the subject of his 1972 novel, The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith). In investigating these specimens, Flashman sought to contribute to the mapping of evolutionary development done by Elliot Smith using ancient Egyptian brains (Flashman 1903a: 24). What he found in doing so appeared to verify what Macalister and Cambridge anatomists had seen in the Australian brain underdevelopment of various structures in the parietal and occipital regions conrming the low status of the Aboriginal race on humanitys phylogenic tree. Subsequent researchers of the Aboriginal brain likewise focused on mapping its supposedly primitive form. However, opinions diverged as to where Aboriginal people stood in terms of human evolutionary history. In 19047, the Heidelberg anatomist Hermann Klaatsch (18631917) travelled Australia investigating the ancestry of Aboriginal people. Whereas Flashman agreed with Elliot-Smith and other leading British anatomists of the early twentieth century that modern human sapiens had emerged in Europe, Klaatsch formed the view on examining Australian cranial collections, encountering Aboriginal people in Northern Queensland and studying prehistoric bones in European museums, that the Aboriginal race probably originated in Australia. It seemed to him quite possible that a nal transition from some pithecoid ancestral form to the human genus had occurred when the continent was part of a larger landmass (Klaatsch 1908: 160). This would explain, Klaatsch reasoned, why darker skinned races encircled the Indian Ocean. Anatomists who subsequently studied the morphology of the Aboriginal brain ignored Klaatschs hypothesis. Also, by the late 1920s

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it had become clear from research on large series of well-preserved brains of other largely endogamous populations that what had been said about the evolutionary status of the Aboriginal brain rested shakily on few, often imperfectly preserved specimens. Even so, this did not stop Herbert Henry Woollard (18891939) and Joseph Shellshear (18851958), the two most active investigators prior to the Second World War, positing where Aboriginal people stood in the evolutionary history of the humanity. What is more, they differed markedly in where they placed them. Having investigated a large sample of Chinese brains while anatomy professor at Hong Kong University between 1923 and 1936, Shellshear readily acknowledged the problem of working with few specimens, arguing, however, that supplementing investigation of the brain with endocranial casts consistently disclosed within the Aboriginal brain a grouping of primitive features, evidence of ill-lling and a lack of development in the higher association areas (Shellshear 1939: 343). By the mid-1930s, Shellshear was of the view that the Aboriginal brain differed from that of every other kind of modern man in being similar in its ill-development to that inferred by examining endocranial casts of Homo rhodesiensis, a robust fossil hominid discovered in 1921 in what was then northern Rhodesia, which were generally thought to have clear Neanderthal characteristics. It seemed to Shellshear that morphologically Aboriginal people conrmed Arthur Keith (18661956) and Elliot Smiths belief that human evolution had taken more developmental paths than late nineteenth-century investigators assumed, with the result that various evolutionary lines were becoming extinct. Aboriginal people were the descendants of one of the weaker lines now unable to adapt to European life-ways (1939: 34; see also Shellshear 1937). By contrast, Herbert Henry Woollard (18891939) found that three excellently preserved brains he explored when anatomy professor at Adelaide University in the late 1920s differed signicantly from those described by Duckworth some twenty years earlier courtesy of his predecessors, Stirling and Watson (Woollard 1929). So much so that Woollard thought Duckworth had been mistaken in supposing that various structural resemblances in the Aboriginal brain to microcephalic and foetal European brains pointed to the Australian race being at an evolutionary stage just above that of Pithecanthropus. This and applying anthropometric techniques newly developed by the Dutch neuroanatomist, C. U. Arie ns Kappers (18771946), and the British biostatistician Geoffrey Morant (1890 1979), led Woollard to conclude that the Aboriginal brain had no

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special afnity with any known fossil type (Woollard 1929: 223). The key differences were rather its being smaller apart from the occipital area enabling visual processing and very much longer than was typically seen in Europeans. Moreover, brains he obtained in the early 1930s of an Aboriginal mother and new born infant dying in childbirth conrmed in his view that from birth to adulthood the Aboriginal brain developed less in the parietal and frontal regions than that of Europeans (Woollard 1931). Woollard still thought, however, that Aboriginal people were not so fated by evolution to be separated by profound psychological differences from white Australians. They were not living fossils. Inuenced by contemporary anthropology and psychology, he thought the complexity of Aboriginal social organisation equal to that of late Paleolithic Europeans. He was also amongst the many scientists of the interwar years who were critical of public attitudes and government policies towards Aboriginal people. Nonetheless, as with Shellshear he believed the Aboriginal brain was at an evolutionary stage where the neural basis for symbolic formulation beyond vision was still relatively undeveloped. Drawing upon contemporary psychological research and himself experimenting with techniques for intelligence testing amongst a limited number of pure-blooded Aboriginal children and young adults, Woollard was led provisionally to suggest that average Aboriginal intelligence was equivalent to the level of mental performance of [. . .] our own least efcient performers (Woollard 1931: 234).

The Legacies of Colonialism, and Science?

With the coming of the Second World War, research on the morphology of the Aboriginal brain ceased. It was not to resume in any signicant way until the mid-1980s, when a team of German neuroanatomists at the Hanover Medical School undertook two quantitative comparative studies of Aboriginal brains. In the rst study they measured and compared the whole brain and various brain regions of eight Aboriginal men, acquired by the Neuropathology Department of the Royal Perth Hospital, with eleven brains classied as Caucasian in origin from the University of Hamburgs Institute of Forensic Medicine (Klekamp et al. 1987). The Aboriginal brains were obtained via autopsies on men from northwestern Australia who were living in the vicinity of Carnarvon or in the mining town of Kalgoorie. As with the Caucasian sample, the men had all died in circumstances deemed to warrant forensic investigation. In a second, related study,

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the brains of just over fty men, women and children from remote settlements in the Kimberley Region were compared with a similarly gendered number of European brains acquired by the Royal Perth Hospital (Klekamp et al. 1989; 1991). The ndings of the Hamburg neurologists were little different from earlier investigators of the Aboriginal brain. They found that compared to the Caucasian brains at their disposal, the brains of these eight men were smaller as a whole, and in terms of the relative volumes of the cerebrum, cerebellum, cerebral cortex and hippocampus. The researchers also found signicant differences between the Aboriginal and Caucasian brains in the percentage of cerebral cortex for the frontal and parietal-temporal-occipital cortex the areas of the brain receiving and interpreting auditory, visual, and somatosensory stimuli. In the Aboriginal brains, the striate cortex covered more of the lateral surface of the occipital lobe. The frontal portion of the cerebral cortex appeared larger than in Caucasian brains. Where they differed was in what they made of these ndings. It seemed to these investigators that the relatively large size and peculiarities of the visual cortex in the Australian brains might be the result of evolutionary adaptation over successive generations to hunting and gathering in the Australian environment. However, the Hamburg team did not subscribe to the racial typology underpinning the work of earlier anatomists. Equally they were conscious of examining brains, the examination of which yielded disturbing evidence of the effects of colonialism in northwestern Australia. Despite having signicant numbers of well-preserved brains, the researchers were unable to reach any denitive conclusions beyond noting the physiological effects on these brains of poor nutrition, especially the rst six months of life. This begs the question what contribution the study of the morphology of the brain over the previous 160 or so years made to the material and psychic legacies of colonialism that Aboriginal people of the northwest and many other parts of Australia continue to struggle to overcome.
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