PHRENOLOGY.

Phrenology, a science popular from the early to the mid-nineteenth century, was dedicated to the discernment of one's character or traits of personality from reading—that is, feeling the shape and size of—the bumps on one's skull. As formulated by the German physician and anatomist Franz Josef Gall (1758–1828) and as popularized by his student and follower Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776–1832), phrenology was based on five main tenets: (1) the brain is the organ of the mind—mental activity is produced by the structure and function of the brain, not through some spiritual or immaterial process; (2) the brain is not unitary but a congeries, or collection, of separate faculties; (3) these faculties are localized in different regions of the brain; (4) the activity of a mental faculty determines the size of the brain organ that represents it; and (5) the skull ossifies over the brain during infant development, so that an external examination of the size and shape of the bumps on the skull will reveal the size of the underlying brain organs. A staunchly materialistic doctrine, phrenology held that each mental faculty, envisioned by Gall as an innate instinct, produced a striking behavior or characteristic. Each innate mental faculty was in turn produced by its underlying brain organ, whose size depended on its activity and which could be revealed by its corresponding cranial bump.

Origins and Development

Gall was born in Baden, Germany, and studied medicine in Strasbourg and Vienna, where he established a successful medical practice and became renowned as a comparative anatomist. In the 1790s he began to develop the principles of phrenology out of his observations of his fellow students—those with protuberant eyes, he noted, had particularly good memories—and of animals, as well as from dissection of human and animal brains. He also amassed a large collection of skulls, both human and animal, and busts, to support his theory. His method, however, depended on anecdote and striking confirmation rather than rigorous experimental testing of his theory. In Vienna, Gall lectured on phrenology as a "craniologist," but by 1805, joined by Spurzheim, he traveled around Europe to spread his ideas, eventually settling in Paris. There, between 1810 and 1819, he and Spurzheim published the four volumes and atlas of 100 engraved plates of Anatomy and Physiology of the Nervous System … with Observations on the Possibility of Identifying Many Intellectual and Moral Dispositions of Men and Animals by the Configuration of Their Heads. In addition to propounding the principles of phrenology, the work constituted a major contribution to cerebral anatomy.

Gall identified twenty-seven basic mental faculties, each correlated with a brain organ: faculties such as veneration, wonder, wit, tune, memory, language, cautiousness, secretiveness, and philoprogenitiveness (love of children). He rejected the notion that the mind was a tabula rasa—a blank slate—and emphasized that each of these mental faculties was inherited as an innate instinct. He and the phrenologists who followed him tended to be interested in differences between individuals as well as between groups. Men and women, for example, were thought to possess different types of faculties.

Spurzheim, however, parted ways with his mentor, changing the content and focus of Gall's science in several important ways. First, Spurzheim actually coined the term phrenology, distinguishing it from physiognomy (reading character from the face) and craniology (measurement of the skull), thereby establishing its claim as a new science. Second, Spurzheim shifted the emphasis of phrenology from anatomy, which was Gall's main interest, to the religious, moral, and philosophical aspects of the science and to its political and social applications and consequences, a move that laid the groundwork for its popularity. He added new mental faculties to Gall's original twenty-seven and grouped the faculties into two major categories: feelings, including propensities and sentiments, and intellectual faculties, of perceptive and reflective kinds. Finally, Spurzheim abandoned Gall's emphasis on the innateness of the faculties and promulgated phrenology as a doctrine of self-help instead of determinism. In Spurzheim's formulation, education and exercise were the means to build up, train, or control the mental faculties and brain organs, and it was this more optimistic view that became part and parcel of popular phrenology. Leaving aside Gall's notion that human beings possessed such evil faculties as murder, Spurzheim promulgated the notion that people were intrinsically good and could be perfected through the practice of phrenology, altering their mental faculties through exercise.

To spread phrenological doctrine, Spurzheim traveled to Britain, where he met George Combe (1788–1858), a lawyer and moral philosopher in Edinburgh. Spurzheim's teachings converted Combe to phrenology, and he helped to popularize the science in Britain and North America. In 1828 Combe published The Constitution of Man Considered in Relation to External Objects, a work that formed the basis for orthodox phrenology and that developed Spurzheim's connection between phrenology, self-help, and social reform. At the height of phrenology's popularity in the early 1830s, there were more than two dozen phrenological societies in Britain alone. Numerous books, lecture series, and journals were devoted to the science, including the Phrenological Journal, which Combe edited in Edinburgh from 1832 to 1847. Thousands of serious believers espoused the doctrine, from the eminent doctors and scientists of the day to famous literary and cultural figures. Phrenology became central to the sociology and psychology of Herbert Spencer, the evolutionary science of Robert Chambers and Alfred Russel Wallace, and the anthropology of James Hunt and Paul Broca. Because of its associations with social and political reform, phrenology surged in popularity among the less educated classes as well.

Decline

As it became increasingly popularized and vulgarized, phrenology fell into disrepute and by the1840s was discredited by most physiologists. The increasing demand for phrenologists' services in assessment of character allowed charlatans to flourish as head readers, undermining the scientific integrity of the doctrine. Disunity and splits within the movement itself, antagonism from the religious establishment on account of its perceived materialism, and new discoveries about brain function in neuroanatomy and physiology all helped to push phrenology to the margins of science. In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, its popularity remained strong, especially in Britain and the United States. In America, for example, the entrepreneurial Fowler brothers, Lorenzo and Orson, established a successful business in character advice based on phrenological principles and sold china busts, models of the head marked with the divisions of the various phrenological faculties, that became popular among collectors. Phrenology also became associated with other popular psychological movements: in the combination of phrenology and mesmerism known as phreno-mesmerism, when the practitioner touched various parts of the subject's head, the subject evinced the traits supposedly connected to the underlying brain organs. Such continuing popular uses for phrenology show that it maintained its place in drawing room and parlor throughout the nineteenth century, even if it had lost scientific sanction.

Phrenology was relegated to the status of pseudoscience for political and social reasons as well as scientific ones. As medicine and the sciences of anatomy and physiology diversified and professionalized in the late nineteenth century, there was no longer any room in them for the kind of informally trained practitioner that many a popular phrenologist represented. Meanwhile, the work in localization of function in the brain, associated with Broca and with the German researchers Gustav Fritsch and Eduard Hitzig, while seemingly returning to Gall's principles, actually disputed them by localizing not complex mental faculties but much simpler sensory and motor functions. But debate over the extent and type of localization of brain function—a debate that phrenology can be understood to have started—continued throughout the twentieth century and is still not entirely settled.

See also Anthropology ; Philosophy of Mind ; Pseudoscience .

bibliography

Combe, George. The Constitution of Man Considered in Relation to External Objects. Edinburgh: Anderson, 1828.

Cooter, Roger. The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

——. Phrenology in the British Isles: An Annotated Historical Bibliography and Index. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1989.

De Giustino, David. Conquest of Mind: Phrenology and Victorian Social Thought. London: Croom, Helm; and Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1975.

Gall, Franz Josef. On the Functions of the Brain and Each of Its Parts. Translated by Winslow Lewis Jr. Boston: Marsh, Capen, and Lyon, 1835.

Shapin, Steven. "Homo Phrenologicus: Anthropological Perspectives." In Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture, edited by Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1979.

Spurzheim, Johann Gaspar. Phrenology, or the Doctrine of the Mental Phenomena. Boston: Marsh, Capen, and Lyon, 1833.

Young, Robert M. Mind, Brain, and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and Its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier. Oxford: Clarendon, 1970.

Nadine Weidman