Lindsey TannerVerified account

2/ Whitman was into phrenology and he wanted his brain preserved. So after Whitman died in March 1892, Philadelphia physician Dr. Henry Cattell removed Whitman’s brain and put it in a jar.

3/ Fifteen years later, in 1907, another doctor, Edward Anthony Spitzka, publicly revealed that the brain was gone. He claimed someone at some point dropped the jar. Spitzka lamented “not even the pieces were saved.” Newspapers blamed a careless (and anonymous) lab assistant.

4/ Spitzka is a minor character here, but he’s fascinating. His dad testified at the trial of presidential assassin Charles Guiteau. Spitzka himself was still a med student when he conducted the autopsy on another presidential assassin, Leon Czolgosz.

5/ Also, the younger Sptizka at one point went around collecting the brains of criminals who had been executed. Brain-collecting was a thing in those days.

6/ Anyway, a few years after that, Whitman’s friend started asking around to see if Spitzka was telling the truth about the jar being dropped. The friend was told something surprising: Whitman’s brain actually was damaged right around the time of the autopsy, back in 1892.

7/ Supposedly, the director of the Wistar Institute looked in the files and found that “the brain was accidentally broken to bits during the pickling process.”

8/ So it was a mystery. Whitman's brain is gone. No one could say with certainty what happened (bad pickling? dropped jar?) or who was responsible.

9/ Fast forward to 2012. Someone buys Cattell’s diary on eBay and a researcher looks at it. The diary shows that Cattell was a bit of a sad sack, full of self-doubt and relying on his parents for cash.