3/22/2023 0 Comments Shrunken heads on display![]() A staffer has unlocked a glass-fronted display cabinet and is wordlessly removing bell jars that hold the club's collection of shrunken heads, placing them in front of Brown and me. "Teach me!" Rosen says in his gleeful, booming bass. If I found someone who did this kind of craft." He refers to head shrinking as a "kind of craft." As in, "It wouldn't bother me to have my head shrunk. Like a cop or an undertaker, Brown has grown blasé about the grisly particulars of his current work. He is 57 but looks younger, the gray in his beard just starting to get the upper hand on the red. Gustavo Struve" (as stated on his current business card). He has taken two years off from his job to devote himself to "Investigating the Life of Dr. The walls and ceiling beams are hung with fringed expedition flags commemorating the adventures that are the primary requirement for membership here. We're having lunch around the club's Long Table. Both Alexander and Brown had been denied permission to look at the museum's bodies, which had been removed from public display in the late '70s. And, best of all, it could be viewed in person. This one was a new specimen, distinct from Alexander's mystery men and the one pictured in Struve's lecture brochure. So a few months ago, Brown was headed to the Chicago-based Adventurers Club to examine a "shrunken boy" that Gustav had donated in 1935. During an expedition to his parents' Idaho basement in 2003, Brown stumbled upon a box of the old man's papers and decided to write a book about him. One person who saw Alexander's story in Outside was Struve's grandnephew David Brown, who works at a natural-foods co-op in Boise, Idaho. Alexander located Struve's son, now deceased but then living in Quito, who told her interpreter, "Papa used to make the mummies." Museum records provided little beyond this: A doctor from Ecuador, Gustav Struve, had sold them to the museum in the early 1920s. ![]() ![]() Having learned about two shrunken men on display at New York City's Museum of the American Indian, natural-history writer Caroline Alexander set out to determine their origins in 1993. Shrunken bodies? Struve appeared to have proof a photo showed a shrunken man nestled in his palm like a passenger in a bucket seat. ![]()
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