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The book The Monsters is about writer Mary Shelley and the creation of her novel Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus. Emphasis on the word modern. (What today seems Gothic and geriatric was then cutting-edge.)
First published in 1818, Shelley was only 19 years old when she began the manuscript and the collecting of body parts was a ghoulish topic of the day, but reassembling them to create an entire new human was rather shocking, even blasphemous, posing the question, “Can science go too far?”
In the 1800s there was a mad rush to collect items of natural history, as though if one could assemble one of everything, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the mystery of life could be solved into one giant picture. “Viola! But of course, now it all makes sense.”
The museums around the world started collecting. Behind the brightly lit areas open to the public—their dark archives filled drawers, shelves and cabinets with bones, skulls and soft tissues floating in formaldehyde.
In Broca’s Brain Carl Sagan writes, “Deeper in the room were more macabre and more disturbing collections. Two shrunken heads reposing on a cabinet, sneering and grimacing, their leathery lips curled to reveal rows of sharp, tiny teeth. Jar upon jar of human embryos and fetuses, pale white, bathed in a murky greenish fluid, each jar completely labeled. Most specimens were normal, but occasionally an anomaly could be glimpsed, a disconcerting teratology—Siamese twins joined at the sternum, say, or a fetus with two heads, the four eyes tightly shut.”
“There was more.” Sagan continues, “An array of large cylindrical bottles containing, to my astonishment, perfectly preserved human heads. A red-mustachioed man, perhaps in his early twenties, originating, so the label said, from Nouvelle Calédonie…his head involuntarily drafted in the cause of science. Except he was not being studied; he was only being neglected, among the other severed heads…Men and women and children of both sexes and many races, decapitated, their heads shipped to France only to moulder—perhaps after some brief initial study—in the Musée de l’Homme.” [Museum of Man in Paris].
A man named Paul Broca, who became quite renowned in the study of the human brain, started the collection. (He had many human brains in jars of formalin, which is where Broca’s own brain ended up after he died in 1880.)
In the end, had science gone too far? Too Victor Frankenstein-ish? We might say no, the pursuit of knowledge knows no bounds; the family of the red-mustachioed man, whose head still floats in formalin, might disagree.
Sagan the scientist queried Sagan the humanitarian. “All inquiries carry with them some element of risk…The best way to avoid abuses is for the populace in general to be scientifically literate, to understand the implications of such investigations,” Sagan concludes. This and other musings are found in Broca’s Brain, a collection of essays on the “romance of science,” Carl Sagan’s follow-up to his 1978 Pulitzer Prize winning The Dragons of Eden. During his time on this Pale Blue Dot, perhaps no one did more to popularize science to the television-watching world than the Brooklyn-born, astronomy professor.
Sagan wrote over 600 scientific papers and was author, co-author or editor of twenty books. He died on this date, 20 December 1996, 15 years ago today.
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