Eine kleine skull-musik . . .
Ben Macintyre
Death is no longer the end of a person's life: dig them up, analyse them and revelations will emerge
THIS IS THE STORY of Einstein’s brain, Galileo’s finger, Shelley’s heart, Beethoven’s hair and Napoleon’s penis. But first, the tale of Mozart’s long-lost head.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born, as everyone in the world must now be aware, 250 years ago this month, and died 35 years later. He was buried in Vienna, but the gravedigger who had planted him later recovered the decomposing composer’s skull, when the grave was re-used. This macabre object spent more than century in a basement in Austria, before being passed to the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg in 1901.
On Sunday scientists who have carried out DNA comparisons with Mozart’s relatives exhumed from the family vault will finally reveal whether or not this skull once contained the most fertile musical brain of all. Tests should also prove whether Mozart died from a head injury, kidney disease or rheumatic fever, and put paid to the theory, propagated in the play Amadeus, that he was poisoned by his rival Antonio Salieri.
Mozart’s putative cranium is only the latest human artefact to offer up secrets long presumed to be dead and buried. The collecting of bones, hair and other remains is a common form of ancestor worship in many cultures, a way to cling to the dead. Preserving Galileo’s digit and Shelley’s heart (or possibly liver) was a grisly form of hero worship and, in the latter case, the focus of a posthumous battle over his literary legacy. But what was once mere superstition has now, thanks to science, formed an entirely new species of post-mortem history, and in the process changed the way we look at the past.
Last month, six hairs that once belonged to Ludwig van Beethoven were subjected to the most powerful X-ray beam in the Western hemisphere, providing conclusive evidence that the composer’s slow and painful death was caused by lead poisoning, probably from his lead wine cups. Beethoven would have applauded this definitive diagnosis: he left specific instructions asking doctors to explain his illness, so that others might avoid his “ wretched existence”.
Napoleon, we can be fairly sure, would have been less pleased at the enduring fascination with his remains. His hair has been examined for evidence of poisoning; 12 pairs of his trousers have been measured for proof of weight loss suggesting cancer; and in 1972, a very small thing in a box purporting to be the emperor’s membrum virile was put up for auction and then withdrawn, providing headline writers with a field day.
Size doesn’t matter if you are an emperor; nor, it seems, if you are a genius. When Albert Einstein died in 1955, a Princeton pathologist decided to preserve his brain in a jar, on the basis that the organ responsible for the theory of relativity was worthy of further study.
Einstein’s brain was quite small, weighing in at just 2.7lb. The Russian writer Ivan Turgenev had a brain weighing 4.4lb. (But then, everything is relative.) Examination of the physicist’s brain tissue found a cluster of cells in a region of the brain associated with mathematical and language skills. Those findings are disputed, but Einstein’s brain, much of which remains pickled, may yet provide a map for the neural geography of genius.
The great and good (and bad) are now being dug up and scientifically tested as never before: Butch Cassidy, the last Dauphin of France, Tsar Nicholas II, Josef Mengele. Nothing wipes out conspiracy theories faster than a DNA swab. But more than that, the scientific analysis of human remains has changed our approach to history itself: death is no longer the end of the story of a person’s life, but often the beginning.
Knowing that Mozart died from a bump on the head would not change our appreciation of his music, but it brings him a little closer. Instead of offering a set of accepted verities, pickled in the past, history allied with science has been reinvented as an evolving, endlessly fascinating set of soluble mysteries.
“History is a lie that nobody contests,” declared Napoleon, but he did not reckon on the scientists carefully measuring his trousers. The small secrets hidden in Mozart’s skull and Beethoven’s hair become revelation when applied to global human history.
Genetic technology has become a historical tool of supreme versatility, for DNA provides clues to every facet of the past: society, disease, environment, migration, environment and, ultimately, human evolution itself.
Genetic science can tell us much that was thought lost and unknowable; it can tell us what Oetzi, the 5,000-year-old Tyrolean iceman, ate for his last supper, and who is buried in the mass graves of Srebrenica and Tikrit. Above all, science can tell us where we come from, which is the very point and purpose of history.
A US appeals court recently ruled that scientists should be allowed access to a skeleton, accidentally discovered on a riverbank near Kennewick in Washington State in 1996. The remains of Kennewick Man are thought to be more than 9,000 years old, probably the oldest and best-preserved remains found in North America. The skeleton, quite different from those of Native Americans, could rewrite the story of human diversity. The local Umatilla Indians insisted these were the bones of an ancestor, and should be buried; anthropologists and historians launched a furious legal struggle to preserve the remains for science.
And so, for a decade, Kennewick Man drifted in legal limbo, guarding his secrets. The row represented a conflict between science and religion, between the rights of indigenous people and the demands of the (usually white) experts; but this was also a clash between rival visions of history: one static, local and private; the other evolving, accessible and universal.
Kennewick Man is now finally free to sing his song. From Salzburg to Washington State, in a new marriage of science and history, we can listen to the ancient music of the bones.
timesonline.co.uk |
