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Phrenology is a pseudoscience that involves the measurement of bumps on the skull to predict mental traits. It is based on the concept that the Human brain is the organ of the mind, and that certain brain areas have localized, specific functions or modules. It was said that the brain was composed of different muscles, so those that were used more often were bigger, resulting in the different skull shapes. This provided reasoning for the common presence of bumps on the skull in different locations. The brain "muscles" not being used as frequently remained small and were therefore not present on the exterior of the skull. Although both of those ideas have a basis in reality, phrenology generalizes beyond empirical knowledge in a way that departs from science. The central phrenological notion that measuring the contour of the skull can predict personality traits is discredited by empirical research. Developed by Germans physician Franz Joseph Gall in 1796,Graham, Patrick. (2001) Phrenology videorecording: revealing the mysteries of the mind. Richmond Hill, Ont.: American Home Treasures. the discipline was influential in the 19th century, especially from about 1810 until 1840. The principal British centre for phrenology was Edinburgh, where the Edinburgh Phrenological Society was established in 1820.
Phrenology is today recognized as pseudoscientific.; ; ; The methodological rigor of phrenology was doubtful even for the standards of its time, since many authors already regarded phrenology as pseudoscience in the 19th century.; ; ; There have been various studies conducted that discredited phrenology, most of which were done with ablation techniques. Marie-Jean-Pierre Flourens demonstrated through ablation that the cerebrum and cerebellum accomplish different functions. He found that the impacted areas never carried out the functions that were proposed through phrenology. Paul Broca also discredited the idea when he discovered and named the "Broca's area": the patient's ability to produce language was lost while their ability to understand language remained intact, due to a lesion on the left frontal lobe. He concluded that this area of the brain was responsible for language production. Between Flourens and Broca, the claims to support phrenology were dismantled. Phrenological thinking was influential in the psychiatry and psychology of the 19th century. Gall's assumption that character, thoughts, and emotions are located in specific areas of the brain is considered an important historical advance toward neuropsychology.Fodor, JA. (1983) The Modularity of Mind. MIT Press. pp. 14, 23, 131Simpson, D. (2005) "Phrenology and the Neurosciences: Contributions of F. J. Gall and J. G. Spurzheim" ANZ Journal of Surgery. Oxford. Vol. 75.6; p. 475 He contributed to the idea that the brain is spatially organized, but not in the way he proposed. There is a clear division of labor in the brain but none of which even remotely correlates to the size of the head or the structure of the skull. It contributed to some advancements in understanding the brain and its functions. While phrenology itself has long been discredited, the study of the endocast of the skulls of archaic human species allows modern researchers to obtain information about the development of various areas of the brains of those species, and thereby infer information about their cognitive and communicative abilities, and possibly even about their social lives. Due to its limitations, this technique is sometimes criticized as "paleo-phrenology".
Other terms historically used to discuss this specific relationship between the skull and the mind, and especially Gall's study of them include craniology, cranioscopy, zoonomy, organology, bumpology and functionalism. Craniology and cranioscopy became detached from the specific sense of phrenology, and were later used to refer merely to the study of the skull, as in anthropology. Many of the other words had or have meanings in other sciences, and their use to refer to the study of phrenology is now archaic.
These areas were said to be proportional to a person's propensities. The importance of an organ was derived from relative size compared to other organs. It was believed that the Human cranium skull—like a glove on the hand—accommodates to the different sizes of these areas of the brain, so that a person's capacity for a given personality trait could be determined simply by measuring the area of the skull that overlies the corresponding area of the brain.
Phrenology, which focuses on personality and character, is distinct from craniometry, which is the study of skull size, weight and shape, and physiognomy, the study of facial features.
Gall's list of the "brain organs" was specific. An enlarged organ meant that the patient used that particular "organ" extensively. The number—and more detailed meanings—of organs were added later by other phrenologists. The 27 areas varied in function, from sense of color, to religiosity, to being combative or destructive. Each of the 27 "brain organs" was located under a specific area of the skull. As a phrenologist felt the skull, he would use his knowledge of the shapes of heads and organ positions to determine the overall natural strengths and weaknesses of an individual. Phrenologists believed the head revealed natural tendencies but not absolute limitations or strengths of character. The first phrenological chart gave the names of the organs described by Gall; it was a single sheet, and sold for a cent. Later charts were more expansive.
The Swiss pastor Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801) introduced the idea that physiognomy related to the specific character traits of individuals, rather than general types, in his Physiognomische Fragmente, published between 1775 and 1778. His work was translated into English and published in 1832 as The Pocket Lavater, or, The Science of Physiognomy. He believed that thoughts of the mind and passions of the soul were connected with an individual's external frame.
Of the forehead, When the forehead is perfectly perpendicular, from the hair to the eyebrows, it denotes an utter deficiency of understanding. (p. 24)
In 1796 the German physician Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) began lecturing on organology: the isolation of mental faculties and later cranioscopy which involved reading the skull's shape as it pertained to the individual. It was Gall's collaborator Johann Spurzheim who would popularize the term "phrenology".
In 1809 Gall began writing his principal1833, The American Journal of the Medical Sciences, Southern Society for Clinical Investigation work, The Anatomy and Physiology of the Nervous System in General, and of the Brain in Particular, with Observations upon the possibility of ascertaining the several Intellectual and Moral Dispositions of Man and Animal, by the configuration of their Heads. It was not published until 1819. In the introduction to this main work, Gall makes the following statement in regard to his doctrinal principles, which comprise the intellectual basis of phrenology:
Through careful observation and extensive experimentation, Gall believed he had established a relationship between aspects of character, called faculties, with precise organs in the Human brain.
Johann Spurzheim was Gall's most important collaborator. He worked as Gall's anatomist until 1813 when for unknown reasons they had a permanent falling out. Publishing under his own name Spurzheim successfully disseminated phrenology throughout the United Kingdom during his lecture tours through 1814 and 1815 and the United States in 1832 where he would eventually die.
Gall was more concerned with creating a physical science, so it was through Spurzheim that phrenology was first spread throughout Europe and America. Phrenology, while not universally accepted, was hardly a fringe phenomenon of the era. George Combe would become the chief promoter of phrenology throughout the English-speaking world after he viewed a brain dissection by Spurzheim, convincing him of phrenology's merits.
]]The popularization of phrenology in the middle and working classes was due in part to the idea that scientific knowledge was important and an indication of sophistication and modernity. Cheap and plentiful , as well as the growing popularity of scientific lectures as entertainment, also helped spread phrenology to the masses. Combe created a system of philosophy of the human mind that became popular with the masses because of its simplified principles and wide range of social applications that were in harmony with the liberal Victorian world view. George Combe's book On the Constitution of Man and its Relationship to External Objects sold more than 200,000 copies through nine editions. Combe also devoted a large portion of his book to reconciling religion and phrenology, which had long been a sticking point. Another reason for its popularity was that phrenology balanced between free will and determinism. A person's inherent faculties were clear, and no faculty was viewed as evil, though the abuse of a faculty was. Phrenology allowed for self-improvement and upward mobility, while providing fodder for attacks on aristocratic privilege. Phrenology also had wide appeal because of its being a reformist philosophy not a radical one. Phrenology was not limited to the common people, and both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert invited George Combe to read the heads of their children.
The American brothers Lorenzo Niles Fowler (1811–1896) and Orson Squire Fowler (1809–1887) were leading phrenologists of their time. Orson, together with associates Samuel Robert Wells and Nelson Sizer, ran the phrenological business and publishing house Fowlers & Wells in New York City. Meanwhile, Lorenzo spent much of his life in England, where he initiated the famous phrenological publishing house L. N. Fowler & Co. and gained considerable fame with his phrenology head (a porcelain head showing the phrenological faculties), which has become a symbol of the discipline. Orson Fowler was known for his Octagon house.
Phrenology came about at a time when scientific procedures and standards for acceptable evidence were still being codified. In the context of Victorian society, phrenology was a respectable scientific theory. The Phrenological Society of Edinburgh founded by George and Andrew Combe was an example of the credibility of phrenology at the time, and included a number of extremely influential social reformers and intellectuals, including the publisher Robert Chambers, the astronomer John Pringle Nichol, the evolutionary environmentalist Hewett Cottrell Watson, and asylum reformer William A. F. Browne. In 1826, out of the 120 members of the Edinburgh society an estimated one third were from a medical background. By the 1840s there were more than 28 phrenological societies in London with more than 1,000 members. Another important scholar was Luigi Ferrarese, the leading Italian phrenologist. He advocated that governments should embrace phrenology as a scientific means of conquering many social ills, and his Memorie Riguardanti La Dottrina Frenologica (1836), is considered "one of the fundamental 19th-century works in the field".
Traditionally the mind had been studied through introspection. Phrenology provided an attractive, biological alternative that attempted to unite all mental phenomena using consistent biological terminology. Gall's approach prepared the way for studying the mind that would lead to the downfall of his own theories. Phrenology contributed to development of physical anthropology, forensic medicine, knowledge of the nervous system and brain anatomy as well as contributing to applied psychology.
John Elliotson was a brilliant but erratic heart specialist who became a phrenologist in the 1840s. He was also a Animal magnetism and combined the two into something he called phrenomesmerism or phrenomagnatism. Changing behaviour through mesmerism eventually won out in Elliotson's hospital, putting phrenology in a subordinate role. Others amalgamated phrenology and Animal magnetism as well, such as the practical phrenologists Collyer and Joseph R. Buchanan. The benefit of combining mesmerism and phrenology was that the trance the patient was placed in was supposed to allow for the manipulation of his/her penchants and qualities. For example, if the organ of self-esteem was touched, the subject would take on a haughty expression.
Phrenology was mostly discredited as a scientific theory by the 1840s. This was due only in part to a growing amount of evidence against phrenology. Phrenologists had never been able to agree on the most basic mental organ numbers, going from 27 to over 40, and had difficulty locating the mental organs. Phrenologists relied on cranioscopic readings of the skull to find organ locations. Jean Pierre Flourens' experiments on the brains of pigeons indicated that the loss of parts of the brain either caused no loss of function, or the loss of a completely different function than what had been attributed to it by phrenology. Flourens' experiment, while not perfect, seemed to indicate that Gall's supposed organs were imaginary. Scientists had also become disillusioned with phrenology since its exploitation with the middle and working classes by entrepreneurs. The popularization had resulted in the simplification of phrenology and mixing in it of principles of physiognomy, which had from the start been rejected by Gall as an indicator of personality. Phrenology from its inception was tainted by accusations of promoting materialism and atheism, and being destructive of morality. These were all factors that led to the downfall of phrenology. Recent studies, using modern day technology like Magnetic Resonance Imaging have further disproven phrenology claims.
During the early 20th century, a revival of interest in phrenology occurred, partly because of studies of evolution, criminology and anthropology (as pursued by Cesare Lombroso). The most famous British phrenologist of the 20th century was the London psychiatrist Bernard Hollander (1864–1934). His main works, The Mental Function of the Brain (1901) and Scientific Phrenology (1902), are an appraisal of Gall's teachings. Hollander introduced a quantitative approach to the phrenological diagnosis, defining a method for measuring the skull, and comparing the measurements with statistical averages.
In Belgium, Paul Bouts (1900–1999) began studying phrenology from a pedagogical background, using the phrenological analysis to define an individual pedagogy. Combining phrenology with personality type and graphology, he coined a global approach known as psychognomy. Bouts, a Roman Catholic priest, became the main promoter of renewed 20th-century interest in phrenology and psychognomy in Belgium. He was also active in Brazil and Canada, where he founded institutes for characterology. His works Psychognomie and Les Grandioses Destinées individuelle et humaine dans la lumière de la Caractérologie et de l'Evolution cérébro-cranienne are considered standard works in the field. In the latter work, which examines the subject of paleoanthropology, Bouts developed a teleology and orthogenesis view on a perfecting evolution, from the paleo-encephalical skull shapes of prehistory, which he considered still prevalent in and savages, towards a higher form of mankind, thus perpetuating phrenology's problematic racializing of the human frame. Bouts died on March 7, 1999. His work has been continued by the Dutch foundation PPP ( Per Pulchritudinem in Pulchritudine), operated by Anette Müller, one of Bouts' students.
During the 1930s, Belgian colonial authorities in Rwanda used phrenology to explain the purported superiority of over .
The popularly held phrenological belief in the Victorian era was that women's brains were smaller and weaker than those of men and as such were incapable of being practitioners themselves. Evidence from letters written by the phrenologists Johann Spurzheim to his wife, Honorine Spurzheim, suggest that he had a number of women attending his lectures that were interested in phrenology. He held the belief that women did not have necessary "superiority of intellectual powers". Despite this, many middle class women were just as captivated by the pseudoscience as their male counterparts. Contributions to the field of phrenology would be made by prominent figures such as Lydia Folger Fowler, the second American woman ever to receive a medical degree, who created character charts and lectured extensively on the subject.
Phrenology had an appeal to middle class women as a chance to understand their own minds and "know thyself" by creating charts that were very clear evidence for the organs of intellect being just as prominent in their brains as they were in men's.
It is, however, allowable to take as a principle, that there will be a relation betwixt vigour of intellect and perfection of form; and that, therefore, history will direct us to the original and chief family of mankind. We therefore ask, which are the nations that have excelled and figured in history, not only as conquerors, but as forwarding, by their improvements in arts and sciences, the progress of human knowledge?Phrenological teachings had become a widespread popular movement by 1834, when Combe came to lecture in the United States. Sensing commercial possibilities men like the Fowlers became phrenologists and sought additional ways to bring phrenology to the masses. Though a popular movement, the intellectual elite of the United States found phrenology attractive because it provided a biological explanation of mental processes based on observation, yet it was not accepted uncritically. Some intellectuals accepted organology while questioning cranioscopy. Gradually the popular success of phrenology undermined its scientific merits in the United States and elsewhere, along with its materialistic underpinnings, fostering radical religious views. There was increasing evidence to refute phrenological claims, and by the 1840s it had largely lost its credibility. In the United States, especially in the South, phrenology faced an additional obstacle in the antislavery movement. While phrenologists usually claimed the superiority of the European race, they were often sympathetic to liberal causes including the antislavery movement; this sowed skepticism about phrenology among those who were pro-slavery. The rise and surge in popularity in mesmerism, phrenomesmerism, also had a hand in the loss of interest in phrenology among intellectuals and the general public.
John Brown Jr., son of the abolitionist John Brown, travelled for a time as a lecturer on phrenology.
While residents of the Western coastal urban regions of South Africa were skeptical of the ideological beliefs behind phrenology, those on the inland frontier were very receptive to the ideas of "biological determinism". Andrew Smith, better known as the founder of zoology, as well as Robert Knox were among these frontiersmen who were supportive and adherent to the ethnological implications of phrenology. Many phrenologists who came to South Africa, or took example from the native people there, would use findings to fuel more racist implications of the pseudoscience. Bushmen and other African people that had the misfortune of living on the frontier were subject to being remarked as similar "to that of the monkey" in facial structure. They had effectively become targets for European imperialist that sought to prove the superiority of their civilization through one sided field work. The inherit issue with their world view was that they conceived these ideas in Europe before coming to Africa on a mission to seek confirmation bias for their rhetoric.
These are common to man and animal.
Superior sentiments
These produce emotion or feeling lacking in animals.
One of the earliest publications of phrenology was George Combe's Phrenological Journal which sat among other books, pamphlets, and articles he published in order to popularize the pseudoscience. As mentioned previously, phrenology had a wide reach and a multi-faceted appeal from nobility to working class, and this would be his breakthrough publication in Great Britain. The most compelling argument Combe would make for the superiority of European nations and people over that of the rest of the world would be in an article he published titled "On the Cerebral Development of Nations". In this publication he determined that the reason Africa, Asian, and American Indians had never had a superior civilization due to "their inherent mental deficiencies".
The Edinburgh Phrenological Society had their own scholarly journal called the Phrenological Journal and Miscellany which ran from 1823 to 1847. This was highly influential and the most highly sought after publication to read on phrenology in the British provinces in the early nineteenth century.
Phrenology (2002) by the Roots was named so after group member Black Thought saw an article in a scientific journal and the group "appropriated the term, not only for its political irony ..."
Phrenology, as well as physiognomy appears in a number of popular Victorian-era media and journal publications such as Dracula and The Picture of Dorian Gray. In both of these works, the villains are shown to have the face of evil and it is heavily implied that the facial structure of characters can lead to some sort of conclusion as to the nature of their character. Works such as these gave the pseudoscience validation, and shows how far spread and influential its implications about the way people act being connected to their head structure truly were.
As early as the 1840's, phrenology had its fair share of critics from other scientists and philosophical thinkers of the time. Clergymen in particular protested against the human mind being reduced to a secular, materialistic thing that could be understood without the notion of a soul.
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