Einstein Autopsy
As the pathologist on duty at Princeton Hospital on April 17th 1955, it was Thomas Harvey’s job to carry out the autopsy on Albert Einstein. It must have been a humbling experience, coming face to face with the world-famous physicist, whose theory of relativity was so complex it was fourteen years before it was understood enough to be verified. Who’s to say what inspired Harvey – greed or beneficence, pettiness or awe – but in an instance that was to shape his life forever, he cut the brain out of Einstein’s head and removed it for himself.Harvey chopped the brain into two hundred pieces, gave a third away, and kept the rest hidden in glass jars, floating in murky formaldehyde. Until 1997 when, aged eighty-four, Harvey decided the brain should be taken to Berkeley, to Albert Einstein’s granddaughter Evelyn. It fell to the writer Michael Paterniti to drive him the four thousand miles from New Jersey to California.Einstein died in 1955 and, during an autopsy, the brain was removed from his head, ostensibly to be studied for the keys to its genius. But then, after some years, the brain supposedly disappeared. Rumor had it that it had been cut up and parts of it resided somewhere in a garage in Saskatchewan, next to the basketballs and hockey sticks of some oil rigger’s kids, collecting dust. Other parts were said to belong to Dr. Thomas Harvey who did the autopsy, an odd man who had since vanished.Dr. Thomas Harvey was weird. How weird, though? Like Norman Bates or Boris Karloff, with a basement full of smoking potions and beakers of fluorescent liquid and some strange Frankenstein cloning experiment in progress? Like August Strindberg, in dementia, trying to turn lead to gold? Or weird as in culturally accepted, iconoclastically weird, a cult figure like, say, Burroughs himself, or a shaggy Indian mystic like Rabindranath Tagore? (from Driving Mr. Albert by Michael Paterniti, copyright 2000, Little, Brown and Company, London)
Dr. Al
posted by Dr. Al at
7/24/2006 12:20:00 PM
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