HOUDINI'S BRAIN ESCAPES THE SMITHSONIAN

In a recent article by Christopher Heaney, Smithsonian Institution Archives Predoctoral Fellow from Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin, we learn that the Smithsonian Institute once had hoped to obtain Houdini's brain for "expert study and analysis." 

According to the article, Dr. Aleš Hrdlička "invited Houdini to his third-floor chambers in the National Museum. Hrdlička had examined another escape artist and, “[having] found this man more or less abnormal physically … he expected to find these abnormalities even more marked in the case of Houdini,” Washington’s Evening Star reported on November 2, 1926." 

"Next, it turned out that Houdini’s “uncanny ability to perform the seemingly impossible was not the result of any physical abnormality,” but “the results purely of a superior mentality and untiring practice,” just as Houdini had always claimed. At fifty-two years-old the debunker of psychics and pseudo-scientists had aged—a receding hairline, wavy locks more grey than black, his left handwounded—but his five-foot-five frame was still fit, his blue-brown eyes still sparkled, and his toes remained “prehensile through training.”

"After he died in a Detroit hospital on October 31, he was placed in his bronze “Buried Alive” casket and sent to New York, where he—and his brain—were embalmed and buried alongside his mother in the Jewish Machpelah Cemetery."

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