Phrenological legend goes that Walt Whitman’s doctors wasted no time cutting his brain out of his corpse, ready to study the shape, measure the peaks and troughs, count the dints, find the fount of genius. Then they dropped it on the laboratory floor. “Careless handling,” we’re told, resulted in “the loss of the brain.” It was “broken to bits.” Some failure of coordination while rotating the wet specimen, while casting its hemispheres in rubber. Some neuroanatomical car crash. Possibly they dropped the brain on the way to the jar. Brains in jars!—think Frankenstein, think Hilary Putnam’s late 20th century take on Descartes’ evil demon—those brains in vats, envatted brains kept alive through perfusion, through blood substitution, hooked up to computers, believing they’re walking. Or maybe the doctors dropped both the brain and the jar—imagine spattered cerebellum, shattered glass, the white matter sprayed on the stone—unless they’d already started preservation, the brain formaldehyde-hardened, yellow-gray. When it fell, did it bounce? Reading Brian Burrell’s account of the autopsy has you half-believing in a secret syndicate of vanished and recordless 19th-century craniological societies. You’re ready to accuse a long-dead lab assistant of conspiring to kidnap Whitman’s temporal lobe.
Whitman, while alive, fell in and out of love with phrenology. In 1849 he had his skull bumps read to determine his personality characteristics and printed the (impressive!) results in an edition of Leaves of Grass. Later, he removed the chart, as well as any poetic use of phrenology celebrating his own physicality or the physicality of America itself. Blame “the crippling strokes,” Burnell writes, “the betrayal of his perfect body by his perfect brain.” Blame the Civil War—the deadliest conflict, before or since, in American history. Blame, even, the fast, putrid rotting of America which Whitman confronted even before the war: The New York City of the 1840s and 50s stank. “Everything from trash and manure to cholera and pneumonia threatened to bring the city ‘to the verge of anarchy and collapse,’” Maria Farland writes. As he picked up and put down race science, as he published edition after edition of Leaves, he wavered on whether death should be dreaded or embraced. Whitman never pretended not to waver. The contradictions kept him alive.
It was the nursework that killed him. In 1870, Whitman sliced open his thumb while caring for a patient’s gangrenous wound; thus began the twenty-one-year illness which his critical care physician Dr. Daniel Longaker referred to as “the last sickness.” Whitman—in his younger days the picture of health, a tan, tall, bearded Byron—declined rapidly after the first of what would be three strokes. Over the years he collected diagnoses: deafness, depression, emotional trauma, hypertension, malaise, mercury poisoning, night sweats, photophobia, sinusitis, soldier-borne blood poisoning, tinnitus, and trembling.
In March of 1892, at age 73, he died, having recently completed the design for his own tomb: a hillside mausoleum large enough for seven Walt Whitmans (which, arguably, there were). Certainly the autopsy unearthed enough to kill seven Whitmans: “bilateral pleural effusions, consolidations, emphysema, miliary tuberculosis with extensive peritonitis, nephritis, a tubercular abscess involving the bones, and meningitis.” The pathologist also found a “fatty liver, a large gallstone, an adrenal cyst, a large prostate, and colonic masses.” Whitman’s lungs had collapsed to one-sixteenth their normal breathing capacity. On the last day of his life, Whitman was cyanotic with an irregular pulse. He died blue, and out of sync with himself.
