Frances Larson

Explores the dark and varied obsessions of Western civilization with decapitated human heads, from collectors of shrunken heads and trophies of war to phrenologists and cryonicists.

A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

Severed

An Infinity of Things tells the story of one of the largest private collections ever created, and the life of the man behind it. Funded by his vast personal fortune, Wellcome planned a great museum filled with treasures from all corners of the globe, charting the history of human health from prehistory to the present day.

How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World

An Infinity of Things

A serious and seriously entertaining exploration of the dark and varied obsessions that the 'civilized West' has had with decapitated heads and skulls

In the first decades of the 20th century, five women - Katherine Routledge, Maria Czaplicka, Winifred Blackman, Beatrice Blackwood and Barbara Freire-Marreco - arrived at Oxford to take the newly created Masters in Anthropology. Though their circumstances differed radically, all were intent on visiting and studying remote communities a world away from their own. Through their work, they resisted the prejudices of the male establishment, proving that women could be explorers and scientists, too. In the wastes of Siberia; in the villages and pueblos of the Nile and New Mexico; on Easter Island; and in the uncharted interior of New Guinea, they found new freedoms - yet when they returned to England, loss, madness and self-doubt awaited them. Frances Larson's masterful group biography is a revelatory portrait of five hidden heroines of British scholarship.

Frances Larson

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