Victorian Studies

A centipede was happy! Till
  One day a toad in fun
    Said, "Pray which leg
    Moves after which?"
This raised her doubts to such a pitch,
She fell exhausted in the ditch,
  Not knowing how to run.

On 28 March 1836 one Edward Rigby read an eccentric paper, later published in the London Medical Gazette, to the Royal College of Physicians. Entitled the "On the Pathology of Decapitation," it sought to explain the seemingly obvious problem of why decapitation causes a person's death. Rigby presented several strange cases in which facial movements continued after decapitation. He listed anecdotes of blinking and moving eyes, of wrinkled noses, of lips moving up to two minutes after the cut had been made, and because these actions occurred so long after decapitation, Rigby speculated on the possibility of conscious mental activity in the severed head (23–25). The paper was immediately mocked in a rival medical journal's editorial entitled "The Philosophy of Decapitation." Ironically praising Rigby for his "staggering proofs," it proclaimed that the "discourse of decapitation" was an important physiological question (152).

Yet despite this ridicule, a discourse of decapitation did indeed exist in London biomedical researches of the 1830s and 1840s. It was part of a deeper habit of scientific analysis, a belief that one could know an object or system with certainty by separating it into its basic parts or elements. With this reasoning, I follow the large-scale "way of knowing" proposed by historian John Pickstone. According to Pickstone, such analysis took place in the field of chemistry when researchers disintegrated [End Page 174] apparently simple substances into their separate elements, breaking down water, for example, into oxygen and hydrogen. Other analytic sciences included geology, analytical technology, botany, morphology, and experimental physiology: all of these fields separated various compounds into their simpler elements (117–18).

Analysis even existed in the early-Victorian study of politics and legal reform. In 1838 no less a figure than John Stuart Mill argued that Utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham were analysts—he noted their "method of detail," whereby wholes were investigated by separating them into their constituent parts (48–50). Analysis was thus an important method of investigation in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century.

In this paper I consider four cases in which the nervous system and the mind were analyzed into their simplest "elements," in order to explore how the discourse of decapitation was part of a larger discussion about coordination. For the habit of analysis caused a problem: If an organism could be disintegrated into separate parts, then how did these parts act as a group toward common goals?

Victorian biomedical researchers imagined the collective action of body parts in different ways: some likened the relationship among body parts to the exchange among participants in an economic system, while others relied on metaphors that depicted the nervous system as a musical instrument or as a set of telegraph lines.¹ But the most common way to portray the independent parts' goal-oriented activities was to depict them as acting in a political and social system: as participants in a network of influence, authority, and even coercion. For not only could communities be seen as individuals, but individuals, in turn, could be imagined as communities. In this way, any talk about decapitations, even metaphorical ones, also constituted a discussion about the loss of authority that a person might experience over his or her own self. Decapitation meant the loss not only of a head but also of a headship, of a headquarters, of one's nerve center.

Case One: Myriapods (Centipedes and Millipedes)

In the first half of the nineteenth century, simpler organisms such as centipedes and millipedes (which, as myriapods, are related) provided researchers with comparative anatomical models to understand more complex organisms such as humans. The nervous...