August 28, 2008--Napoleon's Privates
I have a close friend who is an collector of oddities. Not of the grim and truly odd sort like those gathered by Peter the Great of Russia. In his Kunstkammer, his cabinet of curiosities, he had a four-legged rooster and a two-headed sheep. In addition, to complement his mutated animals, Peter, who fancied himself a dentist of sorts, appeared to take exquisite pleasure in extracting teeth from people over whom he had dental control and through the years built up quite a collection of molars and incisors.
He yanked and collected teeth from subjects from different stations in life—all in the name of pseudo-scientific curiosity--from a singer; a person who made tablecloths, a bishop from Rostow; from Madame Re, the Emperor’s nurse; and from someone he described only as a “fast-walking messenger.” Though apparently not fast enough, considering that he sacrificed a bicuspid in the search for truth. All in the pursuit, Peter claimed, of having and ultimately displaying the wonders of nature and the emerging sciences which were devoted to describing and classifying all the world’s natural wonders.
My friend’s collection is much more benign. He has tens of thousands of objects, enough to fill dozens and dozens of shelves and cabinets in his vast house—hundreds of compasses; uncountable numbers of 19th century children’s mechanical and pull-toys; additional hundreds of teaching tools that were used in early kindergartens in Germany; dozens of finely-crafted so-called “Philosophical Instruments,” which were constructed during the late 19th and early 20th centuries to demonstrate scientific phenomena and principles such as electromagnetism; drawers full of early factory-workers’ photo ID tags; myriad games and puzzles; thousands of pastel-colored clay beads and marbles; cabinets full of 19th century patent medicines—most examples of quackery; mounds of Odd Fellow pins and buttons; a large assortment of symbolic objects from Masonic lodges; and hundreds of other categories within which to focus his brilliantly maniacal collecting and elegant arrangements and displays.
To visit his work, and that’s what it is—a body of work, is to travel deep within the aesthetic and psychic reaches of his inner consciousness and to be thrilled and transformed by the journey. In other words, through his gathering he is practicing his art, and like all artists his work causes us to see both our own outer and inner worlds in fresh perspective.
Some, who have studied obsessive collecting, claim that this form of acquisitiveness is a magnified, distorted version of the impulse to consume that is charteristic of advanced capitalist societies. Though this may be true in some cases, even a quick look through time at indigenous peoples everywhere in the world reveals this same impulse. So the instinct, and it may be just that, to collect may be more hardwired than socially constructed.
Which brings me to John Lattimer. A prominent urologist at Columbia University, Dr. Lattimer died last year at age 92 and left his children with a legendary collection of relics, many of which, his heirs discovered when they needed to sort through the hundreds of boxes of his objects that filled his 30-room house in the New York suburbs, in order to assign value to them for estate tax purposes, many of which were minimally odd and more often than not macabre.
According to the New York Times (article linked below), his daughter Evan found the blood-stained collar President Lincoln was wearing the night he was shot; a theatrical dagger that belonged to John Wilkes Booth, the actor who was also Lincoln’s assassin; Lee Harvey Oswald’s letters home to his mother when he lived in exile in Russia; a pair of monogrammed boxer underwear shorts once belonging to Nazi Field Marshal Hermann Göring; also the cyanide capsule Göring used to kill himself when he was convicted and sentenced to death at the Nurenberg Trials after the Second World War
After her father’s death, Evan Lattimer received a call from another collector who knew about the Göring cyanide canister and offered $120,000 for it. She refused to sell.
Among the oddest items is Napoleon’s penis. You heard me. It was removed from his body during the autopsy and then disappeared into the collectors’ underworld only to pop up again, sorry, in Paris in 1977 where Dr. Lattimer bought it at auction for $3,000.
His daughter received another call from another collector who offered $100,000 for Napoleon’s privates. Not bad for such a shriveled up old thing.
Her brothers were so stunned and upset to lean what it was and that it was among the things their father cherished that they wanted to throw it in the trash. Shades of Lorena Bobbitt.
It looks, though, that even if they had done so, the IRS would still have wanted to tax it. They're so relentless. Can’t they just let sleeping whatevers lie?
He yanked and collected teeth from subjects from different stations in life—all in the name of pseudo-scientific curiosity--from a singer; a person who made tablecloths, a bishop from Rostow; from Madame Re, the Emperor’s nurse; and from someone he described only as a “fast-walking messenger.” Though apparently not fast enough, considering that he sacrificed a bicuspid in the search for truth. All in the pursuit, Peter claimed, of having and ultimately displaying the wonders of nature and the emerging sciences which were devoted to describing and classifying all the world’s natural wonders.
My friend’s collection is much more benign. He has tens of thousands of objects, enough to fill dozens and dozens of shelves and cabinets in his vast house—hundreds of compasses; uncountable numbers of 19th century children’s mechanical and pull-toys; additional hundreds of teaching tools that were used in early kindergartens in Germany; dozens of finely-crafted so-called “Philosophical Instruments,” which were constructed during the late 19th and early 20th centuries to demonstrate scientific phenomena and principles such as electromagnetism; drawers full of early factory-workers’ photo ID tags; myriad games and puzzles; thousands of pastel-colored clay beads and marbles; cabinets full of 19th century patent medicines—most examples of quackery; mounds of Odd Fellow pins and buttons; a large assortment of symbolic objects from Masonic lodges; and hundreds of other categories within which to focus his brilliantly maniacal collecting and elegant arrangements and displays.
To visit his work, and that’s what it is—a body of work, is to travel deep within the aesthetic and psychic reaches of his inner consciousness and to be thrilled and transformed by the journey. In other words, through his gathering he is practicing his art, and like all artists his work causes us to see both our own outer and inner worlds in fresh perspective.
Some, who have studied obsessive collecting, claim that this form of acquisitiveness is a magnified, distorted version of the impulse to consume that is charteristic of advanced capitalist societies. Though this may be true in some cases, even a quick look through time at indigenous peoples everywhere in the world reveals this same impulse. So the instinct, and it may be just that, to collect may be more hardwired than socially constructed.
Which brings me to John Lattimer. A prominent urologist at Columbia University, Dr. Lattimer died last year at age 92 and left his children with a legendary collection of relics, many of which, his heirs discovered when they needed to sort through the hundreds of boxes of his objects that filled his 30-room house in the New York suburbs, in order to assign value to them for estate tax purposes, many of which were minimally odd and more often than not macabre.
According to the New York Times (article linked below), his daughter Evan found the blood-stained collar President Lincoln was wearing the night he was shot; a theatrical dagger that belonged to John Wilkes Booth, the actor who was also Lincoln’s assassin; Lee Harvey Oswald’s letters home to his mother when he lived in exile in Russia; a pair of monogrammed boxer underwear shorts once belonging to Nazi Field Marshal Hermann Göring; also the cyanide capsule Göring used to kill himself when he was convicted and sentenced to death at the Nurenberg Trials after the Second World War
After her father’s death, Evan Lattimer received a call from another collector who knew about the Göring cyanide canister and offered $120,000 for it. She refused to sell.
Among the oddest items is Napoleon’s penis. You heard me. It was removed from his body during the autopsy and then disappeared into the collectors’ underworld only to pop up again, sorry, in Paris in 1977 where Dr. Lattimer bought it at auction for $3,000.
His daughter received another call from another collector who offered $100,000 for Napoleon’s privates. Not bad for such a shriveled up old thing.
Her brothers were so stunned and upset to lean what it was and that it was among the things their father cherished that they wanted to throw it in the trash. Shades of Lorena Bobbitt.
It looks, though, that even if they had done so, the IRS would still have wanted to tax it. They're so relentless. Can’t they just let sleeping whatevers lie?
posted by Steven Zwerling at
6:30 AM
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