DR. RICHARD HARLAN “NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Dr. Richard Harlan HDT WHAT? INDEX DR. RICHARD HARLAN DR. RICHARD HARLAN 1796 September 19, Monday: George Washington arranged publication of his farewell address (although this was in the form of an oration, actually it was never delivered by voice), which appeared in the Philadelphia American Daily Advertiser on September 19, the day of his departure from that city for Mount Vernon. READ THE FULL TEXT Richard Harlan was born in Philadelphia, son of a farmer and merchant. NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT Dr. Richard Harlan “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX DR. RICHARD HARLAN DR. RICHARD HARLAN 1815 Less than a month after his 19th birthday, Richard Harlan was elected a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Dr. Richard Harlan HDT WHAT? INDEX DR. RICHARD HARLAN DR. RICHARD HARLAN 1816 During this year and the following one, Richard Harlan served aboard an East India vessel to Calcutta, as surgeon. Rammohan Roy published a condensation of the religious material with which he was working, for Hindustani speakers as VEDANTA SAR and for English speakers as AN ABRIDGEMENT OF THE VEDANT. He also prepared translations of the KENA UPANISHAD and the ISHA UPANISHAD into Bengali and English, and a condensation of the ISHOPANISHAD portion of the YAJURVEDA containing an introduction to Hindu metaphysics. THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Dr. Richard Harlan HDT WHAT? INDEX DR. RICHARD HARLAN DR. RICHARD HARLAN 1818 The last of the original grove of black walnut trees that had been preserved in Philadelphia, a tree in front of the office of J. Ridgeway opposite the State House on Chestnut Street, was in this year chopped down. Richard Harlan graduated at the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania. He would be employed as a teacher of anatomy in Joseph Parish’s private medical school, and publish a text on the human brain, ANATOMICAL INVESTIGATIONS. He would practice as a physician in Philadelphia. THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Dr. Richard Harlan HDT WHAT? INDEX DR. RICHARD HARLAN DR. RICHARD HARLAN 1820 Richard Harlan was appointed a physician in the Philadelphia Dispensary. DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD. Dr. Richard Harlan “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX DR. RICHARD HARLAN DR. RICHARD HARLAN 1821 The father of William Jardine, Sir Alexander Jardine, was dying, and the son returned from medical school at Paris to Scotland to attend to the details of being 7th Baronet of Applegirth, Dumfriesshire, a large landed proprietor. During this year and the following one, Professor François Pierre Guillaume Guizot’s lectures on representative government would be appearing in two volumes as HISTOIRE DES ORIGINES DU GOUVERNERNENT REPRÉSENTATIF. Augustin Jean Fresnel of France presented the laws which would for the 1st time enable the intensity and polarization of reflected and refracted light to be calculated. HISTORY OF OPTICS Jean-Pierre Abel-Rèmusat’s “Sur la succession des 33 premiers patriarches de la religion de Bouddha” appeared in the Journal des Savantes. For the following decade, Professor Abel-Rèmusat and Humboldt would be producing LETTRES ÉDIFIANTES ET CURIEUSES SUR LA LANGUE CHINOISE. In Edinburgh, Transactions of the Phrenological Society. While on a visit to Paris, Dr. Charles Caldwell (1772-1853), a Philadelphia racist who had become a professor at a university in Kentucky, met the phrenologists Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) and Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776-1823) and decided to combine their doctrine of brain differences between individuals with his own doctrine of racial differences to form a much needed doctrine of brain differences between races. HDT WHAT? INDEX DR. RICHARD HARLAN DR. RICHARD HARLAN “Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline. We may therefore be sorely tempted to misuse that power in furthering a personal prejudice or social goal — why not provide that extra oomph by extending the umbrella of science over a personal preference in ethics or politics?” — Stephen Jay Gould BULLY FOR BRONTOSAURUS NY: Norton, 1991, page 429 HDT WHAT? INDEX DR. RICHARD HARLAN DR. RICHARD HARLAN By the end of the 1820s, Dr. Caldwell had examined enough native American skulls found in mounds, and had felt the heads of enough native Americans visiting the cities, to be comfortable that hasn’t going to hurt anybody, in announcing that when the wolf, the buffalo and the panther shall have been completely domesticated, like the dog, the cow, and the household cat, then, and not before, may we expect to see the full-blooded Indian civilized, like the white man. In 1830, Dr. Caldwell would present his THOUGHTS ON THE ORIGINAL UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACE, (NY: E. Bliss), one of his thoughts on the original unity of the human race being that “To the Caucasian race is the world indebted for all the great and important discoveries, inventions and improvements, that have been made in science and the arts, [while the African has remained] Motionless; fixed to a spot, like the rocks and trees, in the midst of which they dwell; each generation pursuing the same time-beaten track.... Even century succeeds to century, and the last finds them the same degraded and unimproved beings with the former.” One medical historian has asserted that “phrenology ... was certainly at least as influential in the first half of the nineteenth century as psychoanalysis was in the first half of the twentieth.”1 Dr. Caldwell would become such an advocate of phrenology, the scientistic doctrine that was so amply supporting his racism, that he would even become a vigorous opponent of the teaching of the science of chemistry! By the end of the 1830s, Dr. Caldwell would become the most popular phrenologist in America, partly by pandering to the American need for a scientific legitimation of genocide at a time before the mainline American scientific establishment had –under the leadership of the American school of ethnology based in Philadelphia– taken up the cudgel on 1. Ackerknecht, Erwin H. MEDICINE AT THE PARIS HOSPITAL, 1794-1848. Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1967, page 172. HDT WHAT? INDEX DR. RICHARD HARLAN DR. RICHARD HARLAN behalf of genocide beginning in about 1839. “The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlers will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians.” — Lyman Frank Baum, author of the OZ books Mr. Trust Me, the White Man’s Ambassador HDT WHAT? INDEX DR. RICHARD HARLAN DR. RICHARD HARLAN Dr. Richard Harlan was elected as Professor (Lecturer) of Comparative Anatomy at Charles Willson Peale’s Philadelphia Museum. Here is his illustration of a hermaphrodite orangoutan that was found to have perfectly formed male and female genitalia: WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF Dr. Richard Harlan “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX DR. RICHARD HARLAN DR. RICHARD HARLAN 1822 Dr. Richard Harlan was appointed a physician in the Philadelphia Almshouse, where he would remain in practice until he would decide, in 1838, to relocate to France. A Colored Orphan Asylum was created in Philadelphia. Of course, no such faculty would be needed in Boston.2 A student of Dr. Joseph Parrish, Samuel George Morton, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. After earning an advanced degree from Edinburgh University in Scotland in 1823, he would begin the practice of medicine at Philadelphia in 1824. From 1839 to 1843, he would be the Professor of Anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania. In Philadelphia, construction began on the foundations and walls of the Eastern State Penitentiary. William Strickland was fired from his job overseeing the construction and John Haviland, the architect who had created the design for the building, was hired to replace him. 2. In 1838 a mob of Philadelphians, persuaded that “nigger charity” was not different from throwing money away, would torch this orphanage. We don’t know whether Dr. Morton would have agreed with this sort of sentiment, but we do know that he supposed black people to be essentially and necessarily inferior to white people — and therefore somewhat less entitled to consideration. HDT WHAT? INDEX DR. RICHARD HARLAN DR. RICHARD HARLAN 1824 Professor Richard Harlan’s OBSERVATIONS ON THE GENUS SALAMANDRA (Philadelphia), and textbook on the human brain, ANATOMICAL INVESTIGATIONS. He would collect crania. CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT Dr. Richard Harlan “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX DR. RICHARD HARLAN DR. RICHARD HARLAN 1825 Publication in Philadelphia by the firm of A. Finley of a book that Henry Thoreau would own and would rely upon, Professor Richard Harlan’s FAUNA AMERICANA; BEING A DESCRIPTION OF THE MAMMIFEROUS ANIMALS INHABITING NORTH AMERICA, a catalogue of American mammals, the 1st of its kind. FAUNA AMERICANA Along the banks of the Delaware River Professor Harlan had discovered a curious skull. It would eventually be determined to be merely the skull of a South American paca, brought out of place, but Professor Harlan incautiously assigned this to a new genus and species of North American “Osteopera platycephala” (and, he would be blistered for this error, anonymously, by the naturalist Dr.