Phrenology

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.