Samuel George Morton, an anatomy professor at Penn medical school, amassed about 900 skulls, some of which came from enslaved people, in the 1830s and 1840s. After his death in 1851, skulls continued to be sent to the collection from all over the US and the world, swelling its inventory possibly to as many as 1,700 skulls which are currently stored in the physical anthropology section of Penn Museum.
He then calculated the quantity of material needed to fill each skull and converted it into cubic inches, from which he attained what he presented as the average brain size for each racial group. Caucasians, he concluded, had the largest brains and Ethiopians the smallest. to uncover ties between the university and slavery, leading to calls for return of the collection’s remains of enslaved people., the Penn Museum removed into storage a number of skulls of enslaved people that originated from a plantation in Cuba and that were still on display in glass cabinets in a classroom.
In Europe, institutions which will be watching the Penn events intensely given their own collections include the Museum of Man in Paris, the National Anthropology Museum in Berlin, and the British Museum and the Natural History Museum in London. An especially macabre element of this history is that Morton, who practiced as a doctor at the almshouse, would have known personally some of the individuals whose skulls he collected.