Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body by Hugh Aldersey-Williams Page A

photographic studio. In addition to the huge cameras of the day, it contains an assortment of calipers and rulers and other paraphernalia for measuring subjects as well as capturing their image. This was where Alphonse Bertillon introduced the world’s first scientific identity cards. In addition to frontal and profile photographs, Bertillon’s cards gave major body dimensions – and some surprising minor ones, including sixteen characteristics describing the shape of the ear. He tried them out on members of his family. His own card, made on 14 May 1891 when he was thirty-eight, shows him with a trim beard, short wiry hair and a high forehead, his head seeming a little too large for his body. In fact, we can read from the card that his head was 19.4 centimetres tall, while his height from the waist was 78 centimetres and his chest was 95.2 centimetres around. His left foot measured 27.4 centimetres. Bertillon, curiously, came from a family that seems to have had a genetic predisposition to this sort of work: his elder brother was the director of statistics for the city of Paris; his father founded its school of anthropology; and his grandfather had developed the work of Quetelet and coined the word demographics. Bertillon’s innovations – he also introduced crime-scene photography – saw him rise from a lowly clerical position when he joined the Paris police in 1879 to lead its influential Judicial Identity Service less than a decade later. ‘Bertillonage’ was soon taken up by police services around the world. Although it could not be used to establish definite guilt, as further persons not known to the police might have similar measurements, Bertillon’s method was nevertheless good enough to rule out suspects from police enquiries if they did not match a witness’s description.
    It was not possible to prove guilt by using body measurements until the discovery that fingerprints are unique to each individual. After the Indian Rebellion of 1857, William Herschel, a British colonial administrator in Bengal, made himself even more unpopular than he doubtless was already by requiring local workers to guarantee their contracts with a handprint. Herschel also recorded his own fingerprints over a period of years, showing that they did not change. His work was noticed by Francis Galton, one of the foremost figures in Victorian science. Even by the standards of the age, Galton was obsessed with measurement. Over the course of an indefatigable career spanning seventy years, he made many contributions to science, including drawing up the first weather maps, questionnaires and intelligence tests. He invented a handheld ‘pocket registrator’, a bit like the devices used by aircraft flight attendants to count passengers, which could track five independent variables at once, according to which buttons you depressed. The journal Nature noted that it would enable scientists ‘to take anthropological statistics of any kind among crowds of people without exciting observation’. Galton simply could not rest. One of his papers was titled ‘Notes on Ripples in Bathwater’. Another time, in a dull lecture at the Royal Geographical Society, he sought to derive a quantitative index of human boredom from the rate of fidgeting among members of the audience. His true legacy was not in any one thing that he measured, but in the advances he contributed to the methods of statistics needed to process all his data.
    Galton studied the prints Herschel had made along with prints from other subjects, using a pantograph he had built for measuring moths’ wings to trace and magnify key details. He noticed that no two fingerprints appeared to be the same, but was able to go further than this and confirm their uniqueness by statistical analysis. Galton had corresponded with Bertillon – both men proudly carried their own Bertillon system identity cards – and had been influential in recommending Bertillonage to British police forces.