The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
STEALING THE SKULL
Ahead of Burns Night on January 25, Michael Alexander hears about the night in 1834 when a surgeon robbed the poet’s grave and stole his skull in the name of science
W hile the poetry of Robert Burns is mainly moving, melancholic and thoughtful, studies of his works suggest that the spectre of death was never far from his thoughts with references to epitaphs, reflections and musings on the dead.
Burns wasn’t above the gritty detail either, as his Epitaph for William Nicol shows: “Ye maggots, feed on Nicol’s brain.” Having been poorly for much of his short adult life, Burns was only too well aware of his own mortality.
A Bard’s Epitaph, written in 1786 when he was just 27, suggests he never expected to see old age.
But Scotland’s Bard could hardly have imagined events after his death when his skull was stolen by phrenologists who believed studying his cranium could crack the secrets of his success.
Born on January 25 1759, Burns died of rheumatic heart disease at his home in
Dumfries on the morning of July 21 1796, aged just 37.
His funeral took place on Monday July 25 1796, the same day his fifth surviving child, Maxwell, was born.
He was interred in the far north-east corner of St Michael’s Churchyard in Dumfries; a simple “slab of freestone” – which still survives – being all his wife, Jean Armour, could afford.
In the years following his death, Burns’ admirers came to believe that his simple grave was an insufficient memorial to the poet.
A circular was published by John Syme on November 29 1813 calling for the public to subscribe to the cost of a mausoleum.
Eighteen local worthies attended a meeting in the George Inn in Dumfries on December 16 1813, and the project to fund a fitting public subscription memorial was launched.
Among those who took a leading part in the fundraising campaign was Sir Walter Scott.
One of the subscribers was the Prince Regent, later George IV, who gave 50 guineas.
Money flowed in from all over Britain and from as far afield as India and America.
More than 50 designs were received through a public competition with the plans of Thomas F Hunt, a London architect, being adopted.
From the moment of its completion, and the private exhumation of Burns’ body on September 19 1815 from his original simple grave at one end of St Michael’s churchyard, Dumfries, to his new mausoleum at the posh end of the same cemetery, Burns’ Mausoleum became a place of pilgrimage.
Yet at a time when grave-robbing was the talk and the scourge of Scotland, Burns’ own
skull would be controversially removed from the new grave some 19 years later in the name of phrenology – the fledgling “science” and ultimately misguided belief that you could infer much about an individual’s character and their traits from the lumps and bumps of their skull.
Phrenology was a hot topic of debate in Scotland after 1814 when Spurzheim’s theory of phrenology was first published in English.
However, despite the pseudo-science being immediately debunked, this did little to dent the widespread belief in it as a science.
“In the first half of the 19th Century, advocates of this pseudo-science were busy doing all they could, by fairs means or foul, to secure access to the skulls of all of Scotland’s interesting and important figures of history,” says Fife Council archaeologist Douglas Speirs.
“The devotees of phrenology believed that armed with this new ‘science’ they could apply phrenological study to reveal and explain the greatness of Scotland’s national historical figures.
“Burns was an obvious, high-value target for study, but understandably, his wife, Jean Armour, would not give consent for these weasels to get their hands on her deceased husband’s skull.
“This obstacle was overcome in 1834 when Jean Armour died and was buried with her husband.”
Mr Speirs explained how local phrenologist and Dumfries Courier editor, John Mcdiarmid, had long lamented that the opportunity had not been seized to make an