Read more
The human head is exceptional. It accommodates four of our five senses,
encases the brain, and boasts the most expressive set of muscles in the body.
It is our most distinctive attribute and connects our inner selves to the outer
world. Yet there is a dark side to the head's preeminence, one that has, in the course
of human history, manifested itself in everything from decapitation to headhunting.
So explains anthropologist Frances Larson in this fascinating history of decapitated
human heads. From the Western collectors whose demand for shrunken heads
spurred massacres to Second World War soldiers who sent the remains of the Japanese
home to their girlfriends, from Madame Tussaud modeling the guillotined head
of Robespierre to Damien Hirst photographing decapitated heads in city morgues,
from grave-robbing phrenologists to skull-obsessed scientists, Larson explores our
macabre fixation with severed heads.
About the author
Frances Larson is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Durham and the author of
An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World and
Severed. She lives in Durham.
