Phrenology

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 Phrenological bust for mapping areas of the skull. The science of phrenology reached its apex during the early 1830s and began its eventual decline approximately a decade later. Adherents were still numerous in the late nineteenth century, especially in the United States and Britain. PHOTO RESEARCHERS, INC. 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.