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.

PHRENOLOGY

PHRENOLOGY in antebellum America became a significant influence on the thought of major reformers and literary figures. Perhaps more importantly, it also served as a practical system of psychological diagnosis, prognosis, and counseling that had a major impact on the lives of many individuals. Its roots lay in the late-eighteenth-century claims of the Germans Franz Josef Gall (1758–1828) and Johann Christoph Spurzheim (1776–1832), who argued that the brain is the organ of the mind and that specific mental faculties are located in specific parts of the brain. Many contemporaneous philosophers and physiologists made similar assertions. The phrenologists went further, however, and argued that the strength of each faculty determines the physical size and shape of the specific part of the brain in which it is localized and that the shape of the brain itself determines the shape of the skull that surrounds it.

European phrenological discourse largely revolved around further claims for the broad philosophical and social import of the science, and early American interest in phrenology developed similarly. Although the first American to advance phrenology was, apparently, the Kentuckian Charles Caldwell (1772–1853) of Transylvania University, Americans responded more fully to lecture tours of Spurzheim himself in 1832 and of the Scottish phrenologist George Combe (1788–1858) in the late 1830s. Many were impressed by phrenology's congruence with the "faculty psychology" of Scottish commonsense realism, the prevalent mental philosophy of the period, which emphasized an individual's specific psychological traits. Such considerations excited political and social reformers, including the Protestant clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, the newspaper editor Horace Greeley, the abolitionist and suffragist Sarah M. Grimké, Samuel Gridley Howe (who advocated for the blind and the "feebleminded"), and the educator Horace Mann. They were attracted to phrenology's concern for "self-knowledge" and "self-improvement" and grew to believe that they could use phrenological insights to promote their causes. Scholars have argued that these beliefs helped shape such individually focused reform movements as care for the insane, convict rehabilitation, sex education, temperance, vegetarianism, and women's rights. Literary figures also looked to phrenological insights about character and temperament, and critics have found phrenological influences in the works of such dissimilar authors as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman.

Other antebellum Americans—especially economically and socially striving white middle-class men and women—took phrenology's implications for the individual more personally. Many thus came to believe that an informed phrenological examination by a skilled observer of a person's skull could reveal much about his or her character and mental abilities, and could serve as the basis of expert guidance about an individual's prospects and behavior. As early as 1836, practical phrenologists—most notably the Fowler brothers, Orson Squire (1809–1887) and Lorenzo Niles (1811–1896); their sister, Charlotte Fowler Wells (1814–1901); and her husband, Samuel Robert Wells (1820–1875)—established thriving consulting practices in major American cities that offered pre-marital, career, and other forms of advice. The New York–based firm of Fowler and Wells also sold phrenological publications and plaster casts of phrenological skulls, and published (in addition to dozens of books and

pamphlets) the American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany from 1838 through 1911.

Itinerant phrenologists provided similar psychological services for rural America, and residents of many smaller cities and towns looked forward to their regular visits. Such stopovers often included free (or low-cost) public lectures to illustrate their science's value. But they emphasized private appointments for phrenological character readings. One especially active itinerant phrenologist was Nelson Sizer (1812–1897), who alternately worked with the Fowlers in New York and traveled through New England and the Middle Atlantic states. His memoir, Forty Years in Phrenology (1882), provides many significant insights into the science and its practice.

Many reformers' and literary figures' interest in phrenology began to wane by the 1850s. Although some observers claim this decline can be traced to growing mainstream medical and scientific criticisms of phrenology, it more likely stems from the reorienting of reform efforts away from the use of moral suasion to promote individual "self-enlightenment" (about which phrenology claimed to have something to say) to attempts to pass laws prohibiting or requiring specific behaviors. (Archetypically, temperance yielded to prohibition.) This decline had (at least initially) little impact on the Fowlers or the itinerant phrenologists, who continued through the 1880s and after to provide individual psychological guidance. After all, many scholars agree that the phrenologists derived their character readings less from their studies of their clients' skull shapes than from their sensitivity to all aspects of an individual's behavior, language, dress, and "body language" during their examinations. (In this way, Author Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes later emulated their practice.) The phrenologists hinted as much in private and emphasized the positive "spin" they gave to their readings to enhance their impact. Phrenological advice remained sought after by Americans for many years; a phrenological vocational guidance bureau operated in Minneapolis during the 1930s. Historians of psychology even argue that phrenology's emphasis upon the practical helped shape the scientific interests of the first academically trained American psychologists. These men and women abandoned their German teachers' overriding interests with "the mind" to emphasize mental function and ability and life in the world—just the concerns that the phrenologists stressed—and these concerns have dominated American psychology since the 1880s.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Davies, John D. Phrenology: Fad and Science: A Nineteenth-Century American Crusade. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1955.

Fowler, Orson S. The Practical Phrenologist: A Compendium of Phreno-Organic Science. Boston: O. S. Fowler, 1869.

Sizer, Nelson. Forty Years in Phrenology; Embracing Recollections of History, Anecdote, and Experience. New York: Fowler and Wells, 1882.

Sokal, Michael M. "Practical Phrenology as Psychological Counseling in the 19th-Century United States." In The Transformation of Psychology: Influences of 19th-Century Philosophy, Technology, and Natural Science. Edited by Christopher D. Green, Marlene Shore, and Thomas Teo. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2001.

Stern, Madeleine B. Heads and Headlines: The Phrenological Fowlers. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971.

Michael M.Sokal

See alsoPsychiatry ; Psychology ; Self-Help Movement .

Phrenology

An approach, primarily of historical interest, to describing the thinking process based on the belief that different mental capacities are controlled by specific locations in the brain.

Although people recognize the brain as the center of mental processes, this contemporary view has not always been accepted. Philosophers and scientists have proposed different ideas throughout history about the process of thinking that have since been rejected as inaccurate. One such rejected approach was phrenology. Phrenologists believed that our different mental capacities were controlled by specific locations in the brain. Although scientists today recognize the general validity of this belief, the problem was that the phrenologists developed ideas that did not really describe the way the brain functions.

German scientist Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828), a recognized expert on anatomy, proposed the initial ideas on phrenology. He proposed that some areas of the brain were highly developed in certain individuals, which lead to specific behaviors. For instance, he claimed that pick-pockets were acquisitive (i.e., possessed the desire to own things) because of excess development of an area on the side of the head. One of Gall's contemporaries, Johann Spurzheim (1776-1832) identified 35 different mental faculties and suggested the location in the brain that related to each one. Each trait was claimed to lead to a certain behavior; the inclination toward that behavior could be detected by assessing the bumps on a person's skull. Scientists now recognize that the shape of the skull does not relate to the shape of the brain.

From the start, phrenology was controversial. For instance, the Roman Catholic church pressured the Austrian government to prevent Gall from lecturing in an area that the Church regarded as materialistic and atheistic. This tactic apparently served to increase the interest in phrenology. Although Gall developed his ideas with a serious scientific perspective, Spurzheim was more of an entrepreneur. He coined the term phrenology (which Gall never accepted), popularized it, and brought it to the United States. Spurzheim's goal was to reform education, religion, and penology using principles of phrenology. He died shortly after arriving in America, however. Spurzheim's work was continued by the British phrenologist George Combe (1788-1858), whose book on phrenology, Constitution of Man, was quite popular. According to psychology historian David Hothersall, Combe was highly respected by scientists in the United States. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Interestingly, at one point he was asked to justify slavery on the grounds that people of African descent had "inferior" skulls. Combe refused, noting that educated slaves were the intellectual equals of white people. Similarly, Combe rejected the second-class status of women, asserting that they were not intellectually or emotionally inferior to men.

Two enterprising brothers, Orson and Lorenzo Fowler, marketed phrenology as a means by which people could improve themselves. Unlike Gall, who believed that heredity dictated one's strengths and weaknesses, the Fowlers preached the environmental message that people could improve themselves by practice and could overcome weaknesses by virtue of their will. They wrote extensively for popular audiences and published a journal of phrenology that existed from the 1840s to 1911. They also set up a clinic in New York where clients could be tested; they toured the United States, giving advice wherever they went; and they emphasized the practical vision of phrenology, minimizing the scientific aspects of their field.

Meanwhile, scientists and philosophers quickly dismissed phrenological ideas. Leading biologists and

physicians of the day showed that the specific locations deemed important by the phrenologists were not associated with specific mental processes. Similarly, careful research in the area revealed that phrenologists were susceptible to biased observations in cases in which the research supported phrenological claims. During the 19th century, at the height of phrenology's popularity among the general public, scientists regarded the field with disdain and characterized it as a discipline dressed up to look like science. Nonetheless, phrenology exerted a positive influence on the fields of physiology and, later, biology, and sparked research on the relationship between the brain and behavior.

Further Reading

Cooter, Roger. The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Hothersall, David. History of Psychology. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990.

Phrenology

Austrian physician Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) speculated that different mental functions are located in specific parts of the brain, therefore becoming the first person to complete the theory of cerebral localization. In his book The Anatomy and Physiology of the Nervous System in General and the Brain in Particular, a four-volume set published between 1810 and 1819, Gall set down the principles that focused on the contours and measurements of the human head as the basis of his doctrine on cranioscopy or phrenology. (The word phrenology stems from phrenos, or mind, and logos, meaning study.)

Gall believed it possible to establish individual behavior, personality, character, and strengths and weaknesses by studying the contours or bumps on the head. Complete with topographical maps depicting and illustrating his findings, his book and theories caused a sensation that still continues today. Many either embraced and hailed phrenology as a new science, or shunned or scorned it at best, as a "pseudoscience." Even today, there are some doctors, practitioners, societies, and websites advocating the authenticity and accuracy of phrenology.

Perhaps because it appeared so logical, with easy-to-follow maps and interpretations of them, phrenology provided a relatively simple diagnostic technique, and caught on as a raving sensation throughout parts of Europe and the United States. The supposed scientific, medical application of phrenology soon found its way into the hands of self-taught and self-styled "experts" who exploited it. Phrenology became the basis for many things, from the selection of marriage partners to employees for the workplace; as a diagnostic tool for mental illness to a way of determining personality profiles— but mainly to generate money. Phrenology parlors were everywhere between 1820 and 1842, giving rise to many inventions. Phrenology machines made it possible for a person to get a detailed interpretation of their personality by allowing a helmet to descend upon his or her head and measure and read the bumps on the skull. Some of these machines and their history are preserved and on display in the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Sources:

cooper, helen, and peter cooper heads, or the art of phrenology. london: london phrenology co. ltd., 1983.

gall and phrenology. [online] http://human-nature.com/mba/chap1.html. 22 november 2002.

hedderly, frances. phrenology, a study of mind. london: l. n. fowler & co. ltd., 1970.

phrenology study of the shape of the human skull in order to draw conclusions about particular character traits and mental faculties. The theory was developed about 1800 by the German physiologist Franz Joseph Gall and popularized in the United States by Orson Fowler and Lorenzo Fowler through their publication the Phrenological Almanac and other publications. Modern neurology and physical anthropology have refuted the theory and consider its use a form of quackery.

phre·nol·o·gy / freˈnäləjē/ • n. chiefly hist. the detailed study of the shape and size of the cranium as a supposed indication of character and mental abilities. DERIVATIVES: phre·no·log·i·cal / ˌfrenəˈläjikəl/ adj. phre·nol·o·gist / -jist/ n.

phrenology XIX. f. Gr. phrḗn, phren- mind + -LOGY.

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