phrenology

phrenology As the first biological science of mind, phrenology became an ubiquitous feature of nineteenth-century medical and natural philosopical thought, and of popular culture. Breaking down the distinction between mind and body, phrenology exemplified the shift from the speculative means of studying the human psyche as a metaphysical entity, which characterized Enlightenment thought, to the empirical methods introduced by the new scientific naturalism. Condemned in establishment social and scientific circles as an atheistic, materialist pseudo-science, phrenology was consistently accorded marginal status, a position reflected in historiographies aiming to document science as a story of progress. Recently, however, historians connecting science, medicine, and culture have begun to recognize phrenology's significance as a medium through which a number of naturalistic and functionalist concepts reached a wide and popular audience.

Phrenology's innovative principles were first enunciated in Vienna and Paris, around the turn of the nineteenth century, by the physician, Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828). Significant variations were later introduced by Gall's assistant, J. G. Spurzheim (1776–1832), who applied the neologism, ‘phrenology’, to the doctrine, and by the prolific Edinburgh phrenologist, George Combe (1788–1858). Gall established that the brain was the organ of mind — then a contestable view — and that it was composed of all the faculties that made up the human character. Using the analogy of the anatomical constitution of the body, he argued that the faculties were embodied in discrete cerebral ‘organs’, which were innate and inheritable, and that individual differences derived from variations in the physical organization of the brain. The principles underlying these hypotheses later became widely accepted. Two additional ‘craniological’ hypotheses, however, rendered the science empirically vulnerable, at the same time as they formed the basis of its popularity. Gall contended that the power of each faculty depended upon the size of the ‘organ’ which embodied it; and that the cranium reflected the form of the underlying cerebrum. Accordingly, character could be ‘read’ from the shape of the head. A primary task for craniology (Gall retained this term, along with ‘cranioscopy’ and ‘organology’) and phrenology was the ‘discovery’ and systematization of the faculties. Although Gall was a renowned cerebral anatomist, he insisted that the quasi-physiognomical method of correlating observed behaviour with variations in head shape was more revealing than dissection. Indeed, phrenologists consistently repudiated animal experimentation involving surgical trauma, for ethical as well as scientific reasons.

As the prototype for a normalizing physical anthropology, however, phrenology, with its value-laden stereotyping psycho-techniques, introduced new ethical problems. Gall's curiosity had initially been aroused by the differences he had noticed amongst individuals, but he subsequently began to compare criminals, lunatics, non-European ‘races’, and other ‘deviant’ groups with the gendered and Eurocentric norms that his craniological discourse was designed to construct. Indeed, the definition of normality was one of phrenology's major projects. As Spurzheim argued, this was a specifically medical project, for physicians had to understand the normal before they could recognize and cure the pathological. Spurzheim's phrenological modifications supplied people with new techniques both to construct normality and to achieve it in their own lives. Invoking the analogy of the great chain of being, he grouped the faculties into separate lobes of the brain, placing the ‘higher’ intellectual organs in the forehead, the sentiments — including ‘veneration’ — at the summit, and the ‘lower’ animal faculties (for example, sexuality and mothering) at the base of the brain. Henceforth, human types could be constructed according to the predominance of various groups of cerebral organs. With their Baconian faith in generalization from an accumulation of facts, phrenologists collected large numbers of representative skulls and busts. They established societies and museums, and entered educational institutions, where these reified racial, sexual, and class stereotypes were exhibited for all to absorb, where people could learn the art of head-reading for themselves, and whence phrenological character analysis would begin to enter the domain of popular culture.

Phrenology was given an additional impetus when Spurzheim and George Combe, invoking the Laws of Nature, effected its transformation into a moral and meritocratic science of self improvement and social reform. Spurzheim introduced the element of cerebral functionalism with his theory of the complex interaction of the faculties. Opposing Gall's deterministic conception of each faculty as either good or bad, Spurzheim argued that all of them were intrinsically good, abnormal behaviour resulting from imbalance, when the superior intellectual and moral organs had failed sufficiently to direct the ‘inferior’ organs. Although natural endowment was determined by heredity, appropriate ‘exercise’ — that is, behaviour — could strengthen the good faculties and weaken the bad: hence phrenology's application to criminal and lunacy reform. Moreover, the health and well-being of both the individual and the race could be improved by eugenic manipulation. For Spurzheim, the latter meant selective breeding, through the choice of marriage partners with propitious cerebral and physical constitutions. George Combe, however, later extended the eugenic theme with his addition of the Lamarckian theory of inheritance. In his best-selling tract, The Constitution of Man (1828), Combe popularized these hereditarian theories, providing a comprehensive explanation of the working of the ‘organic laws’, along with advice on how to obey them by applying phrenology to ‘the practical arrangements of life’.

Although phrenology never lacked vociferous opposition, its impact remains indisputable. Its vocabulary infiltrated the language, and its naturalistic character analysis and positivistic conceptual framework, employed by novelists and poets (including Honoré de Balzac, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Walt Whitman) entered the popular imagination. If by the 1840s neurophysiological experimentation had fatally undermined the specific details of its cranial cartography, phrenology's underlying principles had been absorbed by many of the progenitors of the human sciences, and incorporated into the new disciplines of functional sociology, differential psychology, neurophysiology, physical anthropology, and evolutionary theory. As the comparative anatomist, J. F. P. Blumenbach, once declared in relation to phrenology, these disciplines thus contained ‘much which is new and much which is true, but the new is not true and the true is not new’.

Jan Wilson

Bibliography

Cooter, R. (1984). The cultural meaning of popular science. Phrenology and the organization of consent in nineteenth-century Britain. Cambridge University Press.
Young, R. M. (1970). Mind, brain and adaptation in the nineteenth century. Cerebral localization and its biological context from Gall to Ferrier. Clarendon Press, Oxford.

See also craniometry; skull.