International Congress for Criminal Anthropology

• First International Congress for Criminal Anthropology held in Rome, in 1885. (NB Held at the same time in Rome as the International Penitentiary Congress.)
• Second International Congress for Criminal Anthropology held in Paris, August 1889.
• Third International Congress for Criminal Anthropology held in Brussels, August 1892.
• Fourth International Congress for Criminal Anthropology held in Geneva, August 1896.
• Fifth International Congress for Criminal Anthropology held in Amsterdam, September 1901.
• Sixth International Congress for Criminal Anthropology held in Turn, April-May 1906.
• (Seventh?) International Congress for Criminal Anthropology held in Cologne, October 1911.

A Visual Economy of Individuals

A Visual Economy of Individuals: The Use of Portrait Photography in the Nineteenth-Century Human Sciences by Andreas Broeckman. PhD Thesis, 1995: University of East Anglia.

A Fin de siècle dinner menu

While a hidden orchestra played funeral marches, [the guests dined off] … black-bordered plates [and] … enjoyed turtle soup. Russian rye bread, ripe olives from Turkey, caviare, mullet botargo, black puddings from Frankfurt, game served in sauces the colour of liquorice and boot-polish, truffle jellies, chocolate creams, plum-puddings, nectarines, pears in grape-juice syrup, mulberries and black-hearted cherries.

Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, p.27

A coloured meal: black.

Francis Galton, Tea and Cake

Francis Galton, the nineteenth century polymath and cousin of Charles Darwin was obsessed, obsessed with measuring and counting. As a Victorian gentleman scientist, his interests were wide ranging – meteorology, psychology, evolutionary biology, and criminology, amongst others. But in his down time, he turned his attention to the mathematisation of making tea and cutting a cake. Galton: The very model of a nineteenth century British scientist.

(Notes on tea making is part of Galton’s personal notebooks, which form part of the UCL Galton collection, Miscellaneous papers. One reference is to Notebook Item No. 173. ‘Cutting a Round Cake According to Scientific Principles’ Nature, 20 December 1906. p.173. [pictured above])

Nineteenth Century Science Archive

The records of the British Association for the Advancement of Science from 1877-1890, available online through Gallica.

(Gallica also holds the Atget archives.)

Defining Race

I am currently (re)working my chapter on nineteenth century body typing practices, and the work of Francis Galton. In going through the history of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, I have been reading its 1884 report. In amongst the listings for the Anthropology section, there is a listing for a Committee whose purpose was to define racial attributes in the population of the United Kingdom. The title for this group was the Committee for defining the Facial Characteristics of the Races and Principal Crosses in the British Isles.

Words and Phrases

Cadastral – A public record, survey, or map of the value, extent, and ownership of land as a basis of taxation.

Body to Light

Tout le corps inutile était envahi par la transparence. Peu a peu corps se fit lumiére. Le sang rayon. Les membres dans un geste incomprehensible se figerent. Et l’homme ne fut plus qu’un signe entre les constellations.

Louis Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris (Paris: Gallimard, 1926, rpt 1956), p.230.

Translates as

The whole futile body was suffused by transparency. Little by little the body turned into lights. Its blood into a beam. Its limbs froze in an unintelligible movement. And the man was no more than a sign among the constellations.

Prosthetic Information

• When did the peg-leg turn into the artificial limb? Mary Guyatt, in Artificial Limbs for British Veterans of the First World War, traces it to the Marquess of Anglesey’s commission to the London limb-maker Potts for an articulated wooden leg to replace the leg he lost at Waterloo.
• There was a special section at the 1851 Great Exhibition dedicated to artificial limbs.
• There were 35,000 amputee veterans of the American Civil War.
• Following WWI, there were an estimated 300,000 amputee veterans.
• Of these veterans, there were 41,000 British amputees. 11,600 were missing arms; 29,400 were missing legs.
• A Colonel Adams, from the British Army’s Munitions Inventions Department, designed an artificial arm in 1917 which he envisaged could also be used in ‘other appliances, such as for example, control levers, lamp brackets, and so forth, or to aircraft fittings, cameras, and other purposes.’ (Footnote 64, p. 324.)

(From Mary Guyatt, ‘Artificial Limbs for British Veterans of the First World War’, Journal of Design History, Vol. 14, No. 4. 2001. p. 307-325.)

Evaluating shapes and lines

From some readings on physiognomics:

Categories belonging to the level of expressive manifestations, such as the eidetic ones (straight/curved lines; broken/continuous lines), of chromatic (light/dark), or the topological (high/low, before/after), are ratified by the physiognomics into semantic categories of an evaluating order. Such ratifications generally rest upon more or less generalized social conventions, which generate types of odd microcodes. For in Western culture, the vertical line communicates an impression of elevation, the horizontal, one of stability; the circular, one of perfection: the oval, one of reduction; the broken, one of instability, of drama.

Patrizia Magli, ‘The Face and the Soul’, from Fragments for a History of the Human Body, vol. 2. NY: Zone Books. p.95.