Gavin Francis is an author, University of Edinburgh alumni, GP and all round friend of the museum. Here he looks at one of the more unusual items to be found in the occasionally bizarre collections of the Anatomical Museum:
‘There be many Unicorns, and consequently many Horns’ wrote Thomas Browne – physician, naturalist, polymath, wordsmith – in the early 1640s. Browne’s intention was to debunk the idea that ‘unicorns’ were rare, pointing out that, just off the top of his head, he could think of unicornous beetles, whales, and rhinos, and would be keeping his mind open as to whether there might be other sorts around. In his survey of the animal kingdom he left out human beings, but in 1671, the year Browne was knighted, an Edinburgh woman came before five witnesses in order to have a horn removed from her head.
The horn is preserved in Edinburgh University’s Anatomical Collections; an attached silver medallion reads: ‘This horn was cut by Arthur Temple, Chirurgeon, out of the head of Elizabeth Low, being three inches above the right ear, before thir witnesses Andrew Temple, Thomas Burne, George Smith, John Smyton and James Twedie, the 14 of May 1671. It was agrowing 7 years, her age 50 years.’
Its shape is that of a question mark, puzzling at the mystery of its own existence; its surface is gnarled and fissured as a ram’s horn. Low is long gone, but her horn survives. If we believe the testimony of the medallion she may have received humane, even compassionate treatment. The middle years of the seventeenth century were a time of witchhunts in southern Scotland, with accused women being regularly strangled and burned.
Perhaps the witnesses were afraid of her. In his book ‘Pseudodoxia Epidemica’ or ‘Vulgar Errors’ Browne puzzled over the significance of human horns, calling them ‘the hieroglyphic of authority, power and dignity.’ Alexander the Great is usually depicted with a horned helmet, as was Attila the Hun, and in Ovid’s Metamorphoses the future king of Rome accepts his destiny to rule only once horns begin to grow from his head.
In my clinical career I’ve only once encountered a human unicorn. She was a middle-aged woman, met during a student attachment to the Dermatology clinic on Lauriston Place. The teaching consultant asked her to lift up her fringe to reveal a horn of about two inches in length, brown and ridged, curved like the stalk on a Halloween pumpkin. ‘We’re making arrangements to remove this,’ the consultant said. ‘These cutaneous horns are made of keratin, just like your hair, nails and … rhinocerous horns.’
We students stood in a half moon around her, attempting to look on with a professional, rather than horrified, interest.
‘Don’t take it off today,’ she replied. ‘I’ve a costume party next week – I was thinking of going as a unicorn.’
Gavin Francis is a GP in Edinburgh, and the author of Adventures in Human Being and most recently Shapeshifters – On Medicine & Human Change. www.gavinfrancis.com
Anatomical Museum, University of Edinburgh 