The Archaeology of Race

The Eugenic Ideas of Francis Galton and Flinders Petrie

Debbie Challis

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781472502193
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

How much was archaeology founded on prejudice? The Archaeology of Race explores the application of racial theory to interpret the past in Britain during the late Victorian and Edwardian period. It investigates how material culture from ancient Egypt and Greece was used to validate the construction of racial hierarchies. Specifically focusing on Francis Galton's ideas around inheritance and race, it explores how the Egyptologist Flinders Petrie applied these in his work in Egypt and in his political beliefs. It examines the professional networks formed by societies, such as the Anthropological Institute, and their widespread use of eugenic ideas in analysing society. Archaeology of Race draws on archives and objects from the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology and the Galton collection at UCL. These collections are used to explore anti-Semitism, skull collecting, New Race theory and physiognomy. These collections give insight into the relationship between Galton and Petrie and place their ideas in historical context.

1

Races and Men: ‘All Is Race’

A dummy figure of Dr Robert Knox is displayed in the Surgeon’s Hall Pathology Museum, part of the Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh. It features in the reconstruction of Dr Knox’s study from his house, that is nearby at No. 8 Surgeon’s Square. This reconstruction includes some of Knox’s specimens, his desk, writing tools, violins, a Dutch painting, an engraving of John Barclay and, as described on the museum label, ‘two African “Bantu” figures’.

Dr Robert Knox was a conservator in the medical museum from 1825 to 1831 (Figure 1.1). According to his biographer Henry Lonsdale, Knox turned the museum from a ‘poor affair’ with a collection of medical instruments and collection of about 300 specimens of ‘medical deformities’ to an important pathology collection that incorporated much of the collection of the surgeon Sir Charles Bell as well as cataloguing what was there and preserving more anatomical specimens (Lonsdale, 1870: 36).

However, Robert Knox is not notorious for his prowess as a museum curator, but rather as the surgeon who received the bodies of the victims from the notorious killers William Burke and William Hare. For about a year, until being charged with murder in October 1828, Burke and Hare brought to Knox’s surgery and teaching room their murder victims for dissection. The museum now references this infamous affair as well as mentioning the ‘two African “Bantu” figures’, which were illustrative of the fact that ‘the races of men were of particular interest to the anatomist’. Yet Knox, apparently, did not approve of the collection of human skins or their display (Bates, 2010). The label elaborates on Knox’s work on race by quoting from the Lancet’s obituary for Knox; reference is made to his book Races of Men (1850), as the ‘impress of a highly original though very erratic mind, which dares boldly to grapple with long-standing dogmas, and in not a few instances, lays bare their hollowness’. Alongside this quote and text is a photograph of the tombstone which was placed on Knox’s formerly unmarked grave in Brockwood Cemetery, Surrey, in 1966.

Figure 1.1 Reconstruction of Robert Knox’s Study at No. 8 Surgeon’s Square in the Surgeon’s Hall Pathology Museum, Royal College of Surgeons Edinburgh. Photograph taken by Debbie Challis, 2008

This first chapter explores Robert Knox’s complex and frequently contradictory views on race, antiquity and Egypt as a means of illustrating how racial theory developed during the nineteenth century. Knox was considered an extreme exponent of the separation of different races, particularly with his very negative opinions on ‘Jews’ and ‘Celts’. The Surgeon’s Hall reconstruction of Knox’s study makes no mention of the racist controversies over Knox’s theories, though there has been a good deal of scholarship on Knox and his role in ideas about race in the nineteenth century. A medical museum obviously exhibits human remains, but when I visited Knox’s study in 2008, I found the display of the remains of two South African people uncomfortable. The term ‘Bantu’ was used as a general term for all Black Africans in South Africa, most notoriously by the Apartheid governments. The term replaced ‘Kaffir’, another derogatory term used in the nineteenth century and by Knox himself, but ‘Bantu’ has been long regarded as extremely offensive and it is strange to see it used today (even in parentheses). Arguably, these human remains have a very different historical and cultural context to that of medical specimens. Samuel Alberti has described how there is a ‘subtle process of objectification’ in the movement from ‘a person to a thing’ in medical museums, though this can often be complicated by traces of identity that are distinct (Alberti, 2011: 100–1). Given the content and history of Robert Knox’s work, the function of these people within the display and their distinct identities should make the creation of them as objects more complicated than usual.

However, in many ways, the Surgeon’s Hall display must be considered in the context of the mixed response to Knox among historians. Some historians of the history of medicine, such as Andrew S. Currie, considered Knox to be a ‘martyr’ to the cause of anatomy with little support from the University of Edinburgh and Royal College of Surgeons (Currie, 1932). In 1966, there was a campaign for a proper memorial stone for Knox so that his importance as an anatomist would be recognized. This view of Knox is influenced by the feeling that he was a scapegoat in the ‘Burke and Hare affair’ and a victim of out of date legislation around the use of bodies for dissection. The Surgeon’s Hall Museum appears to reflect the view that Knox was an overlooked martyr to the cause of medical reform. On the other hand, the historian Ruth Richardson has pointed to Knox’s culpability in the ‘Burke and Hare affair’, albeit in the context of the problems of acquiring bodies for dissection and against the backdrop of a parliamentary enquiry and the 1832 Anatomy Act (Richardson, 1987). Maclaren recognized the problems with Knox’s racial theories that had come from his study of the indigenous races of South Africa, while pointing out the contradictions within his ideas:

Quite apart from their lack of scientific validity, these theories might be held to be almost as obnoxious as the racial theories of Nazi Germany or the socio-political concept of Apartheid. On the other hand, it is likely that those who would most vehemently object to Knox’s view of the ethnic inferiority of the African peoples, would applaud his strongly expressed condemnation of the effects of European colonialism upon Africa. (Maclaren, 2000: 39)

Elsewhere, Douglas A. Lorimer feels that there is too much focus on Robert Knox and his legacy and not enough on other contemporary racial theorists; arguing that ‘we need to be wary of the tired game of intellectual history in which we try to trace commonplace ideas to specific authors’ (Lorimer, 1997: 218). Other historians have written about Knox’s contribution to comparative anatomy, his politically Radical ideas and how this connected to his racist philosophy (Biddiss, 1976; Richards, 1989; Young, 2008). While recognizing the validity of Lorimer’s concerns about giving Knox too much importance for articulating ideas and assumptions already circulating in certain intellectual and medical circles, I contend that a nuanced understanding of Knox is important mainly because he brought these ideas and assumptions to a wider public audience.

My troubled reaction to the reconstruction of Dr Knox’s study at the Surgeon’s Hall Museum has made me reconsider issues with the wider public understanding of Knox today and how his racial ideas had an impact on the people he wrote about. The recent Burke and Hare film (2010), starring actors Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis with Tom Wilkinson as Doctor Robert Knox, played the gruesome story of the murders for dissection for laughs. The questionable taste of portraying the murder of a dozen people in this way was not assisted by the fact that the film was one of the dullest and least funny I have ever seen. Knox is either played for laughs, as in a 2004 Doctor Who spin off CD Medicinal Purposes in which he is played by actor Leslie Phillips, or as profoundly sinister, Knox is said to be the inspiration of the character of Dr Thomas Potter in Matthew Kneale’s novel English Passengers (2000). None of these twenty-first century popular characterizations adequately addresses Knox or his legacy.

The way in which Knox broadcast his views, and their later publication, is crucial for understanding their wider circulation. He also spoke in a period when attitudes to ideas about race shifted sharply. Knox’s views around race were seemingly contradictory and an exploration of his work sums up the difficulty of assessing characters from a different era with cultural attitudes that can easily be misread. In the context of understanding Francis Galton’s and Flinders Petrie’s ideas about race and antiquity, it is pertinent to understand Knox’s focus on defining race in antiquity and his use of monuments and sculpture from ancient Egypt and Greece in assessing racial attributes. Knox was a generation older than Galton and two to Petrie and neither shared his Radical politics or background in medical science and comparative anatomy, though Galton began in that direction. Few archaeologists and anthropologists in the 1880s and 1890s directly attributed their ideas to Knox, but his influence on what became the Anthropological Institute was profound. Knox’s emphasis on the importance of both material culture and of ancient Egypt permeated archaeology, anthropology and racial science during the nineteenth century. Furthermore, Knox placed great emphasis on reading race through the face, an idea that was central to Petrie’s interest in racial types and ancient portraiture.

Robert Knox: Biographical sketch

Michael Biddiss draws attention to the complicated nature of Robert Knox’s character and writing (Biddiss, 1976). Biddiss points out that there were three curiosities about Knox’s thinking on race; first Knox ‘propounded a racism with substantial traces of benevolence’:

The second is the high degree of systematization to which his racism aspires. Finally there is the fact that his contribution, developing between 1825 and 1850, comes remarkably early in the history of any fully fledged European racist philosophy. (Biddiss, 1976: 245)

In essence Knox was a ‘savage Radical’, the description used by the Medical Times to describe him in his obituary. This meant that Knox was a Radical as regards politics and highly critical of the political establishment. A position that was not unusual among scientific or literary men in the 1810s and 1820s, particularly in Scotland, in the midst of an economic recession following the end of the Napoleonic Wars (Lenman, 2009). He was an atheist, and publicly scathing about Christianity and the power of the Church, whether Established or ‘Dissenting’. Knox’s opinions were uncompromisingly Radical, and included fiercely anti-slavery and anti-colonial views. Later disciples of Knox’s writings around race frequently ignored these forcefully argued aspects of his work.

Robert Knox was born in 1791 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and undertook further studies in surgery at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. He became an assistant surgeon in the army and was stationed in Brussels after Waterloo. During the Cape Frontier Wars (1817–20), he acted as army surgeon at Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. It is widely believed that his interest in ethnography developed while he was in South Africa; though a dispute, possibly to do with his anti-colonial beliefs, led him to leave the army and return to Europe. Knox spent the year 1821 studying in Paris with leading French anatomists and surgeons, Georges Cuvier, Cuvier’s rival Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hillaire, and Dominique-Jean Larrey. Cuvier also applied ideas about the ‘hierarchy of race’ to understanding comparative anatomy. He was opposed to the idea that human beings evolved, in part because the mummies from Egypt showed the same human physique; these ideas can also be found in Knox’s theories around race. Saint Hilaire, on the other hand, had described a unity of ‘vertebrate body plan’ and ‘postulated the existence of laws regulating development cross the animal kingdom’ (Bates, 2010). Known as Geoffroyan transcendental anatomy, this system considered that animals developed from lower forms through natural laws rather than being created separately. It was also used in politically Radical ideas to argue for progressive self-advancement, regardless of class in society. Anatomy and Zoology appealed to Radicals as these natural laws appeared to erode the established modes of social class and religious beliefs.

Knox resettled in Edinburgh in 1822. The city was one of the world centres of medicine and surgery in the eighteenth century, and attracted medical students and scientists. Although there was competition from London and Glasgow by the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was still a significant city for teaching anatomy (Lawrence, 1988). Significantly, it attracted several figures who were key in the development and promotion of racial theories. Samuel George Morton, later a skull collector and exponent of scientific racism in the United States, partially trained as a doctor in Edinburgh in 1820 (Fabian, 2010: 21). It was also home to the phrenologist George Coombe in the 1820s. His ‘science’, promoting the ‘important materialist premise that the brain was the organ of the mind’, led to greater importance being placed upon brain and cranium size. Distinctions were then made between different ethnic groups (Fabian, 2010). In 1828 Coombe published Constitution of Man, setting out the ‘laws of nature’ in phrenology and encapsulating a ‘reformers’ manual’ built around social reform while following the ‘natural laws’. Coombe discusses the nature of inheritance and the need to avoid marriages between unsuitable parties, even considering the necessity of legislation to prevent such marriages. David Stack argues that, despite this discussion, Coombe was not a ‘proto-eugenicist’. He was conscious that knowledge about inheritance was imperfect and still considered the environment for the mother and child an instrumental factor in intellectual and emotional development (Stack, 2008: 88–9). Coombe may not have been a ‘proto-eugenicist’ but it is significant that such ideas, particularly those connecting inheritance to facial characteristics, circulated at such an early date.

While in America on a lecture tour in the late 1830s, Coombe assisted Morton with the publication of a key work in racial science, Crania Americana, promoting it in both Britain and America (Fabian, 2010: 25). Coombe and Morton differed over slavery but agreed on the essence of a racial hierarchy with White European people at the top and Black African people towards the bottom. Knox held a similar view, additionally pronouncing, like Blumenbach, that specific environments were suitable for the races native to them. Knox went further on slavery, describing the ‘Saxons’ in America as hypocrites who claimed to be ‘nature’s democrat – the respecter of law when the law is made by himself’ (Knox, 1862: 11). Despite their anti-slavery views, both Coombe’s and Knox’s ideas were later used by American racial scientists for the maintenance of slave ownership. Although Knox’s ideas about reading the face paralleled Coombe’s in some respects, Knox dismissed phrenology. It is striking, however, that Knox and Coombe developed related ideas in the same city at roughly the same time and later had similar (mis)readings of their theories.

Knox became notorious when, between 1827 and 1828, the murderers Burke and Hare supplied Knox with the bodies of 16 victims they had suffocated for use in his dissection classes. Knox was later criticized for not noticing marks and blood, indicating murder, on the bodies delivered to him. Yet he applied the observational principles of aesthetics to anatomy even when dissecting. Knox’s biographer Henry Lonsdale, who studied with him, describes a class during which the body of Mary Paterson, a prostitute who had been murdered by Burke and Hare in April 1828, was being dissected:

The body of the girl Paterson could not fail to attract attention by its voluptuous form and beauty, students crowded around the table on which she lay, and artists came to study a model worthy of Phidias and the best Greek art. (Lonsdale, 1870: 101)

Mary Paterson’s body had been preserved in whisky for three months. Prior to the dissection, Knox sent for the artist John Osbourne to sketch Paterson as Venus with a ‘perfect human figure’ (Richardson, 1987: 135). Knox’s approach illustrates how anatomists responded to an ideal beauty. Like other anatomists he was influenced by the construction of beauty in Greek sculpture, which was studied for representations of anatomy (Bates, 2011). Greek sculptures had provided models for anatomy for some time. This is pertinently illustrated by William Pink’s cast of a flayed man, ‘Smugglerious’ (a prisoner hanged at Tyburn). Created for the surgeon William Hunter in 1775, the figure was presented in the pose of the famous classical sculpture The Dying Gaul (Richardson, 1987: 37–8; Kemp and Wallace, 2000: 87). There were various ‘anatomical Venuses’ in the form of sculpted Renaissance and Classical Venus, often made from wax with removable parts and organs. Anatomical Venuses could be eroticized by positioning them on beds or in clothing. The point with these objects was the presentation of a dissectible work of art with anatomical perfection, distinguishing them from real corpses (Bates, 2008). In his classroom, Knox turned Mary Paterson into an anatomical Venus from real flesh, adding a particularly eerie edge to his later claim that women with the features of a Greek Venus could regularly be seen walking around London.

The murder of Mary Paterson cast some suspicion on Burke and Hare; a student in the cl...