The Brain and the Bad Lid

A Poetry Tale about Walt Whitman, told by Hello Doggo.

When Walt Whitman died in Camden, New Jersey, in March eighteen ninety-two, a young doctor called Henry Cattell was at the post-mortem. And he was the one who took out the brain.

This wasn’t ghoulishness. It was science. Well, nearly. In Philadelphia, the American Anthropometric Society collected the brains of eminent men, hoping that genius might show up somewhere in the folds. Whitman’s was meant to be a prize exhibit.

It didn’t survive.

For years, the accepted story was this. A careless laboratory attendant dropped the jar. Smash. The poet of the whole wide world, in pieces on the floor.

Then, in twenty twelve, Cattell’s private diary turned up for sale on eBay. And in it is a rather different confession.

“I am a fool,” he wrote, “a damnable fool, with no conscious memory, or fitness for any learned position.”

He’d let Walt Whitman’s brain spoil, he admitted, by not having the jar properly covered. He discovered it in the morning.

Not a crash, then. A lid.

Now, a diary can’t tell us everything, and the dropped jar may just have been a kinder cover story. But it’s hard to argue with a man calling himself a damnable fool in his own handwriting.

In Miracles, Whitman wrote: “Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.”

Every cubic inch of his brain, alas, needed a lid.