phrenology

n.
The study of the shape and protuberances of the skull, based on the now discredited belief that they reveal character and mental capacity.

phrenologic phren'o·log'ic (frĕn'ə-lŏj'ĭk, frē'nə-) or phren'o·log'i·cal (-ĭ-kəl) adj.
phrenologist phre·nol'o·gist n.

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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.

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.

A nineteenth-century proto-science claiming that character and personality could be ascertained by the shape and size of various areas or "bumps" on the skull, resulting from development of the brain centers. It derives from the traditional belief that character traits are reflected in physical appearance, and was associated with physiognomy, the study of outward aspects of the individual.

Phrenology was first systematically developed by Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) at the end of the eighteenth century. He made observations on hundreds of heads and skulls, and in 1796 lectured in Vienna on the anatomy of the brain and the elements of phrenology. His pupil J. K. Spurzheim continued his work in England and America, where phrenology vied with mesmerism and spiritualist phenomena as a popular subject of study during the nineteenth century. Initially, Gall and Spurzheim encountered opposition from some church leaders because their system appeared to imply that personality characteristics were inborn instead of being subject to modification by leading a good life.

Gall was an accredited physician with a detailed knowledge of the brain and nervous system, and he proposed phrenology to his colleagues for their serious scientific consideration. Phrenology became the province of many original thinkers of the day. However, phrenology also was popularized and practiced by non-medical individuals and even fairground charlatans.

Essentially, phrenology defined more than thirty areas of the skull related to such instincts as amativeness, philogeniture, habitativeness, affection, combativeness, destructiveness, alimentiveness, secretiveness, acquisitiveness, and constructiveness, and to such moral faculties as self-esteem, approbativeness, circumspection, benevolence, veneration, firmness, conscientiousness, hope, admiration, idealism, cheerfulness, and imitativeness.

The size and development of these areas implied strong or weak aspects of these instincts and faculties. The areas were measured by calipers and marked off on a chart, so that a complete character reading could be made.

Early exponents of animal magnetism (a precursor of hypnotism, but allied with psychic faculties) developed a new approach named "phreno-magnetism" or "phrenomesmerism." Operators claimed that when any phrenological area of the subject was touched during a trance, the subject acted out the particular faculty associated with that area. Thus, when the operator touched the bump of "combativeness," the entranced subject would exhibit belligerent behavior.

Although now discarded as a failed scientific option, phrenology flourished side by side with mesmerism and Spiritualism during the nineteenth century. Noted scientists were sympathetic, and additional supporters could be found among the literary elite such as Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe.

Interest in phrenology continued in America well into the twentieth century, and the British Phrenological Society, founded in 1886 by Lorenzo J. Fowler, was still in existence in the 1960s, though it had long ceased to affect the culture that surrounded it.

Sources:

Chambers, Howard V. Phrenology. Sherbourne, 1968. Davies, John D. Phrenology, Fad and Science: A Nineteenth Century American Crusade. Archon, 1955. Reprint, Shoe String, 1971.

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

Gall, Franz J. On the Functions of the Brain and of Each of Its Parts: with Observations on the Possibility of Determining the Instincts, Propensities and Talents, or the Moral and Intellectual Dispositions of Men and Animals, by the Configuration of the Brain and Head. 6 vols. Boston, 1835.

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

Wells, Samuel R. How to Read Character: A New Illustrated Handbook of Phrenology and Physiognomy. New York: Samuel R. Wells, 1871. Reprint, Rutland, Conn.: C. E. Tuttle, 1971.

Phrenology, from the Greek words for 'mind' and 'discourse', is about reading character from the shape and especially from the 'bumps' of the skull. This has also been called 'cranioscopy', 'craniology', 'zoonomy', and 'physiognomy', though the last usually refers to reading character from faces. Phrenology was popular from the middle of the 18th to the middle of the 19th centuries; its principal proponents were Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828), who was a physician in Vienna and a more than competent anatomist (he was the first to distinguish the functions of the 'white' and the 'grey' matter of the brain), and Gall's student, Johann Kaspar Spurzheim (1776–1832), who with the controversial Scottish moral philosopher George Combe (1788–1858) spread the doctrine to England and America. It had such a vogue that by 1832 there were 29 phrenological societies in Britain, and many journals in Britain and America, including the Phrenological Journal, a quarterly edited by Combe at Edinburgh from 1823 to 1847. There was, however, much criticism, such as from the philosopher, and early proponent of associative psychology, Thomas Brown (1778–1820), and phrenology was often lampooned in verse and on the stage.

Gall claimed to have discovered his phrenological principles inductively from people (and animals) of his acquaintance who had marked character traits associated with distinctive skull shapes, or 'bumps' that could be felt with the fingers. For example, the region he numbered as 1 — Amativeness (Instinct de la génération), at the back of the head below the inion — he identified from its heat in a hysterical widow. Just above this region is No. 2 — Philoprogenitiveness (Amour de la progéniture) — which Gall selected as the organ for the love of children because this occipital part of the skull is prominent in women and apes, in whom the love of infants is supposedly stronger than in men. To take an intellectual example: No. 22 (Individuality), immediately above the nose, was named as the organ for recognizing external objects and for forming ideas from being large in Michelangelo and small in the Scots.

The 26 regions identified as personality organs by Gall (increased to as many as 43 by later phrenologists) were based on very few instances. Implausible excuses were made for exceptions, and for such matters as inability to distinguish the skulls of saints from those of sinners. Phrenology does, however, have considerable importance in the history of psychology and brain studies. Even its obvious failures are revealing.

Phrenology is based on the notion that mind is intimately related to physical brain function. It is thus opposed to Cartesian mind–brain dualism, and is in line with much modern neurological thinking, and with 'identity' accounts, which suppose that mind is an aspect of brain structure and function. Phrenology implies some kind of localization of brain function, though what are thought to be localized in the brain, as read from the 'bumps', are complete traits of ability and character, rather than processes generating characteristics of behaviour and intellect. The implied notion of brain 'organs', such as Veneration, Wonder, Wit, Tune, Language, Memory, Vanity, Cautiousness, and so on, is misleading, because these depend on many underlying processes which, as we now know, are widely separated and in many cases never appear in the 'output' of the brain. Nevertheless, we do still speak of 'speech centres' (see language areas in the brain), and evidence for speech in pre-human and early human skulls is sought from bumps in casts corresponding to those anatomical features associated with language in modern man.

Phrenology made psychological classifications which still survive. Spurzheim grouped human faculties in the following way:

I. Feelings, divided into:

1. Propensities (internal impulses to certain actions).
2. Sentiments (impulses prompting emotions as well as action).
(i) Lower: those common to man and the lower animals.
(ii)Higher: those proper to man.

II. Intellectual faculties, divided into:

1. Perceptive faculties (knowledge by observation and through language).
2. Reflective faculties (knowledge by intuition and reasoning, especially by noting comparisons).

Although the phrenologists accepted and formulated faculty psychology, they did not contribute to brain anatomy. This, in part, was because they did not say, simply, that the larger the 'bump' the greater the characteristic. Thus Spurzheim writes, in Phrenology: In Connexion with the Study of Physiognomy (1824), under the heading 'Of the heads of the sexes':



He continues:

But he then argues:





Spurzheim concludes that phrenologists examining innate dispositions 'do not compare the heads of the sexes together, nor even those of the same sex; they judge of every head individually, and form conclusions in regard to the dispositions generally, according as the respective faculties are developed'.

The phrenologists generally stressed innateness of faculties. Spurzheim, while admitting that the education of the girls of his time was inferior to that of boys, argues that 'girls are more commonly instructed in drawing, painting, and music than boys', and often spend much time at these occupations; 'nevertheless, no woman has hitherto produced such works as those of Handel, Mozart, Haydn, Titian, Rubens, Paul Veronese, Canova, and so many others'. He adds: 'The female sex appears to greater advantage in actions which result from feeling.' Now this argument depends on the assumption of faculty psychology, that skills such as painting are developed simply by practising that particular skill. But it is possible that other, and perhaps traditionally male, activities transfer knowledge and abilities to give males an advantage even for skills such as painting which are frequently practised by girls. This possibility could hardly have been considered by proponents of a faculty psychology based on localized organs of behaviour and personality.

Phrenology seemed to give promise of objective assessments and judgements of people; it was even proposed to select Members of Parliament from candidates having propitious bumps. It was suggested, as a joke, by the distinguished editor of Blackwood's Magazine and professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh, John Wilson ('Christopher North'), that children's heads should be moulded — to accentuate their good qualities and remove evil. The suggestion was taken up by several practising phrenologists.

With the advent of experiments in which small regions of brain were removed, by careful operations pioneered by the French physiologist Pierre Flourens, and by electrical stimulation with fine wires, electrodes, pioneered by Gustav Theodor Fritsch (1838–97) and Julius Eduard Hitzig (1838–1907) on the 'motor cortex' of dogs (1870), it at last became obvious that functions are localized, but that localized functions are not simply related to behavioural skills, or to mental attributes or abilities. However, although this became clear to many physiologists towards the end of the 19th century, it was resisted by some, and especially by the members of the Gestalt school of psychology, who held that the brain works holistically, with perception given by perceived objects represented 'isomorphically' as brain traces like pictures, so that circles are represented by circular traces, houses by house-shaped traces, and so on. This was a rejection of functionally interacting processes of analysis and of inference-generating perceptions, in favour of notions more like those of the phrenologists. And such ideas die hard. One might say that the current interest in 'cerebral dominance', with the left hemisphere of the cortex supposedly 'analytic' (responsible for skills such as arithmetic and logical thinking) and the right hemisphere 'synthetic' or 'analogue' (responsible for intuitive and artistic skills), is the dying kick of phrenology. (See split-brain and the mind.) Physiological experiments on localizing functions give very different functional maps from those of the phrenologists (Figs. 1 and 2) and are highly revealing and of great use in brain surgery; yet they too are subject to logical difficulties of interpretation. For ablation especially, there are difficulties in inferring from loss, or change in behaviour, what the missing region does in the normal intact brain. It is extremely difficult to isolate functions in interactive systems, and in systems where parts can take over the functions of other parts when these are overloaded or damaged. Moreover, it is logically necessary to appreciate what the functions are before they can be named or localized. Physiological functions are not units of behaviour, and so are not to be discovered simply from observation. What is required is an adequate theoretical understanding — an adequate conceptual model — of brain function, which is something very different from the localized mental faculties of the phrenologists.

Recently, however, the brain has been seen to be organized in 'modules' carrying out complex functions, such as face recognition (Fodor 1983). This is something of a return to phrenological ideas.


Fig. 1.



Fig. 2. The regions identified as personality organs, according to the classification of Gall, with additions by Spurzheim and Combe, were: 1. Amativeness

2. Philoprogenitiveness

3. Concentrativeness

4. Adhesiveness

5. Combativeness

6. Destructiveness

6a. Alimentiveness

7. Secretiveness

8. Acquisitiveness

9. Constructiveness

10. Self-esteem

11. Love of approbation

12. Cautiousness

13. Benevolence

14. Veneration

15. Conscientiousness

16. Firmness

17. Hope

18. Wonder

19. Ideality

20. Wit

21. Imitation

22. Individuality

23. Form

24. Size

25. Weight

26. Colour

27. Locality

28. Number

29. Order

30. Eventuality

31. Time

32. Tune

33. Language

34. Comparison

35. Causality


(Published 1987)

— Richard L. Gregory

Bibliography
• Fodor, J. A. (1983). The Modularity of Mind.
• Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1992). Beyond Modularity.
• Van Wyhe, J. (2004). Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientific Naturalism.

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A cynical view of the world by Ambrose Bierce

n.

The science of picking the pocket through the scalp. It consists in locating and exploiting the organ that one is a dupe with.

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - frenologi

Nederlands (Dutch)
studie van schedelvorm als persoonlijk- heidsleer, frenologie

Français (French)
n. - phrénologie

Deutsch (German)
n. - Phrenologie

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - (ιατρ.) φρενολογία

Italiano (Italian)
frenologia

Português (Portuguese)
n. - frenologia (f)

Русский (Russian)
френология

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n. - frenología

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n. - frenologi

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
颅相学

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n. - 顱相學

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n. - 골상학

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 骨相学

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‏(الاسم) علم فراسه الدماغ ومعرفه قوى الإنسان العقليه‏

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n. - ‮חקר צורת הגולגות וגודלה כמצביעים על אופי ותכונות שכליות, פרנולוגיה‬

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