Philly Plain Dealer

In the waning years of the 19^th century, a group of elite Philadelphian intellectuals made a bizarre pact: to have their brains harvested after death. They called themselves the American Anthropometric Society (AAS), and their mission was simple, if unnerving: to collect and study the brains of Philadelphia’s greatest minds. Not metaphorically. Literally. These were men of science, mostly, or at least men who wished to be remembered as such, and they believed that by preserving their brains for future study, they might contribute to the understanding of genius via neuroanatomy. Needless to say, the club was highly exclusive, and profoundly cocksure of their own intelligence.

Among the names on the society’s charter was Walt Whitman, an American titan of creative prowess and author of Leaves of Grass. You may also know him from the eponymous bridge in South Philadelphia. Whitman’s inclusion in this elitist 19^th-century brain cult may come as a surprise, given his public image as the gentle, self-effacing bard of the American people. But then again, he was the one who wrote: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large — I contain multitudes.” And in this case–his head case–he did.

Whitman was in esteemed company. Other notable AAS members included Harrison Allen, a comparative anatomist and one of the Society’s founders; Edward Spitzka, a noted neurologist who later examined the brain of Leon Czolgosz (the man who assassinated President McKinley); and William Osler, one of the founders of Johns Hopkins Hospital and a towering figure in modern medicine. The list goes on, full of Philadelphian men whose reputations loomed large in their respective fields.  

Whitman died in 1892, at the age of seventy-two, after years of chronic illness. His body, battered by pneumonia and tuberculosis, finally gave out in his Camden home (a modest house, now a museum, and still standing today on Mickle Street if you ever feel like making a literary pilgrimage). Upon his death, the terms of his membership in the American Anthropometric Society were set in motion. His brain, as promised, was removed by Dr. Henry Ware Cattell, a physician affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania and a fellow AAS member. While the specifics of the post-mortem bilateral hemispherectomy remain hazy, reports suggest the procedure was handled with care.

The problem came later, during the post-cranial analysis. Accounts vary, some blame a clumsy assistant, others a poorly sealed jar, but the outcome is the same: Whitman’s brain, the physical seat of his boundless poetic grandeur, was destroyed. The jar shattered, brain tissue torn asunder. A skein of brain matter and shards of glass scattered across the lab floor. Multitudes indeed, Mr. Whitman. 

The remains of the brain were swept up into a hazardous waste bin and sent to be incinerated, rendering the tissue that once composed “O Captain, My Captain” into atmospheric carbon dioxide. 

Whitman’s brain’s eulogy was astonishingly lacking. News of his brain’s destruction wouldn’t come for weeks. When it did, it was headline news in Philadelphia. The official Society record would later describe the organ, with admirable understatement, as “unfit for preservation”. And just like that, the most renowned brain in AAS’s limited collection was gone.  

Whitman’s cerebral misadventure would prove to be the most spectacular failure in the Society’s short, strange history. But it did not mark the end of the story. Of the hundreds of prominent Philadelphians that had pledged their brains to the AAS., about 60 brains actually made it into their collection. The brains were meticulously cataloged, bathed in formaldehyde, and labeled with the donor’s name, profession, and date of death. For a time, the collection resided at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school. There, they spent the early 20^th century floating gently in preservatives, waiting to yield insights into the neuroanatomy of genius that never quite materialized.

Eventually, interest in phrenology and anthropometry began to subside. The premise that genius was located within the sulci and gyri of the brain started to seem less like science and more like cerebral palm-reading. By the mid-20^th century, the collection had shifted from a research tool to curiosity, more fit for the Mütter museum than a laboratory. 

By the 1960s, through damage, disposal, or loss, the collection had dwindled to just 22 brains. The brains that remained were moved to the Wistar Institute, a prestigious private biomedical research adjacent to the University of Pennsylvania campus. The transfer was administrative and quiet. Today, details about the collection are sparse. According to rumor, the brains still exist, sealed away in a storage locker in Wistar’s basement, suspended in a flaxen solution, untouched for decades. They simply sit, gathering dust in the dark. I reached out to the Wistar Institute about the collection but received no response, which is fitting, in a way.

There is something grimly poetic about it all. The men of the AAS, so desperate to be remembered for their minds, ended up preserved not in books, but in bell jars, shelved and neglected in the dark. That their brains–the ultimate vessel of thought, memory, and human experience—could be bottled and stored like relics in a mausoleum of science now feels less like triumph and more like eternal imprisonment.

Perhaps it’s for the best that Whitman’s brain never suffered the same dim, dusty fate. In a way, its destruction was a kind of cosmic mercy: as the jar slipped from some lab assistant’s fingers, the poet’s brain was spared from perpetual stasis. Instead, it returned to the earth like everything else– like all the rest of us.

“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.” – Walt Whitman