In the
nineteenth century, phrenology was hugely influential despite being totally
invalid. Its history shows why we must be skeptical of any belief based solely
on experience.
==“Phrenology. The science of picking the pocket through the
scalp.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1911”=========
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1911”=========
Phrenology’s Influence
In the nineteenth century, phrenology affected all levels of Western life and thought. In Britain, Europe, and America, its influence was felt in anthropology, criminology, education, medicine, psychiatry, art, and literature. In France, it eroded established power and led to wide social changes. In Australia, it rationalized the violence against Aborigines and explained the criminality of convicts. For ordinary people everywhere a head reading was often required for employment or marriage. But how could this happen if phrenology was totally invalid? For answers, we need to start at the beginning.
Phrenology’s Principles
Johann Spurzheim collaborated with Gall on his brain research, and he is the one who actually coined the term phrenology. He eventually went out on his own. He believed that there were 21 emotional faculties (the term for abilities or attributes) and 14 intellectual faculties.
Phrenology had five main principles, which Spurzheim laid out in Outlines of Phrenology (Goodwin, 1999):
“The brain is the organ of the mind.”
The mind consists of about three dozen faculties, which are either intellectual or emotional.
Each faculty has its own brain location.
People have different amounts of these faculties. A person that has more of a certain faculty will have more brain tissue at that location.
Because the shape of the skull is similar to the shape of your brain, it’s possible to measure the skull to assess these faculties (known as the “doctrine of the skull”).
In this text, Spurzheim featured highly detailed descriptions of the faculties and their locations.
Spurzheim popularized phrenology in the U.S. While he was on a lecture tour in America, he passed away. Former attorney turned phrenologist George Combe took over Spurzheim’s work and kept his categories.
Phrenology’s Popularity
Phrenology was particularly popular in the U.S. because it fit so well with the idea of the American dream–the notion that we can accomplish our goals despite a humble heritage.
Spurzheim believed that the brain was like a muscle that could be exercised. Like weights for your biceps, a good education could strengthen your intellectual faculties.
Plus, phrenology promised to improve the public’s everyday lives with simple solutions.
Soon, phrenology became big business and spread to various areas of life. Phrenologists would test couples for compatibility, potential suitors for marriage, and job applicants for different positions.
Brothers Lorenzo and Orson Fowler (who, as an Amherst college student, actually charged students two cents a head) became phrenology marketing gurus. They opened up phrenology clinics, sold supplies to other phrenologists and even started the American Phrenological Journal in 1838. (Its last issue was published in 1911.)
The Fowler brothers sold pamphlets on a variety of subjects. A few of the titles: The Indications of Character, Wedlock and Choice of Pursuits. They also gave lectures and offered classes to phrenologists and the public.
They even created a faculties manual that a person would take home after being examined by a phrenologist. The phrenologist would indicate the strength of a faculty from two to seven and then check either the box that said “cultivate” or “restrain.” Then, the person would refer to the necessary sections of the 175-paged book.
While much of the public was fascinated by phrenology, the scientific community wasn’t impressed. By the 1830s, it was already considered pseudoscience.
Pierre Flourens, a French physiologist and surgeon, questioned the movement and discredited it by performing experimental studies. He experimented on a variety of animals by observing what happened when he’d remove specific sections of their brains.
But science didn’t cause phrenology to fall out of favor. Psychology professionals offering new methods did.
First Steps to Delusion
Around 1790, the German-born anatomist Franz Joseph Gall, one of the founders of modern neurology, put together his skull doctrine that later led to phrenology. He held that behavior such as painting or being careful had their own specialized organs in the brain, and that they influenced the shape of the skull. So the skull’s bumps would indicate behavior and abilities that were innate. Gall spent eleven years examining hundreds of heads to test his ideas: “If … he observed any mechanician, musician, sculptor, draughtsman, mathematician, endowed with such or such faculty from birth, he examined their heads to see whether he might point out a particular development of some cerebral part…. He also called together in his house common people, as coachmen and poor boys, and excited them to make him acquainted with their characters” (Spurzheim 1815, 271).
Gall’s seemingly logical approach had two fatal defects. First, his claims were often based on a single striking case, for example “Cautiousness” was placed above the ears because an extremely cautious priest had a large bump there. Second, Gall looked only for confirming cases and ignored disconfirming cases, a flaw not lost on his critics. Thus David Skae (1847), a physician at the Royal Edinburgh Asylum, noted that once the truth is “fixed upon our minds,” looking for confirmation is “the most perfect recipe for making a phrenologist that could well be devised.” But to Gall and the thousands of phrenologists who came later, personal experience mattered more than procedural defects. Phrenology had taken its first giant step on the road to delusion.Note that the delusion of experience is not limited to artifacts of reasoning such as the Barnum effect.
Feel the Bumps, Know the Man
In those days, the workings of the brain were largely unknown. The idea of the four humors was still popular, as was bloodletting. Traits of ability and of character were held to be equal in all men at birth and were wholly determined by upbringing. To claim otherwise was a crime against morality and God.
But phrenology did claim otherwise. It said traits were innate, localized in the brain, and measurable by head shape. What was once a mystery was now widely seen as an exact science. If true, it promised to revolutionize just about everything.
But it was not true. Phrenology was partly right about brain functions being localized but wrong about the actual functions. Not slightly wrong; totally wrong. The brain involves processes such as moving, touching, hearing, and seeing, not phrenological traits such as neatness, curiosity, love of children, attachment to home, and relish for food.
As shown by modern imaging techniques, some of these processes are localized in distinct regions, while others are distributed and interactive. But all are sufficiently diversified that brain damage or cell loss may have no noticeable effect. The same techniques have shown that the claimed phrenological organs do not exist.
Nor is brain size a measure of power to the extent claimed by phrenologists. So we can look at phrenology knowing that a certain head shape cannot possibly mean what it is supposed to mean. Few beliefs about man can match phrenology for such certainty of invalidity.
Influence Revisited
What attracted millions of converts and made phrenology historically important was the appeal of its philosophy. By offering a recipe for living and self-improvement based not on metaphysics but on claims testable by experience, phrenology was a dream come true. And in the 1810s it took off like a rocket; first in Europe, then Britain, then America.
The average life expectancy in Britain (adjusted for high infant mortality) at that time was forty years, a quarter of the population was illiterate, few homes had running water or even a clock, and a phrenology book cost a quarter of the average weekly wage. Yet in less than twenty years about thirty phrenological societies were formed, and roughly one person in 3,000 was “moderately well instructed in phrenology, [more] than there are of persons equally advanced in geology, entomology, botany, astronomy, or similar sciences” .
In 1840s phrenology had divided into two camps: one a fortune-telling scam where a travelling phrenologist could earn more in a week than in a whole year of farm laboring; the other a serious study whose journals were filled with alarms against the impostors. (The later parallel with newspaper astrology is unmistakable here.) Both camps promoted phrenology as a matter not of belief but of demonstration. Test-it-and-see was an essential part of the message. So how could an actually invalid phrenology survive such a process? First, a look at replies to stock objections.
Stock Objections
Phrenologists felt they had convincing replies to every stock objection: The skull varies in thickness. Not enough to matter. Everything relates to size not quality. Experience shows that phrenology works. Stomachs digest different foods, so why can’t brain organs do different things? Stomachs may be versatile but their function is the same.Parts of the brain can be destroyed without apparent effect, so how can traits be localized? The investigators were ignorant of phrenology and missed the relevant behavior.
But other objections were ignored. Organs could be in layers (so head shape could be meaningless?), the same organ appears on both sides of the head (so we believe with one and disbelieve with the other?), important traits such as sympathy and love of truth are missing, and worst of all any head can be made to fit any behavior so nobody could know if phrenology was wrong. For example, a small Combativeness could still be combative due to a large Firmness, a large Destructiveness, or a large Approbation (fights to gain admiration). Spurzheim’s nonfalsifiability was working well. But phrenologists were not interested. Why worry when there were testimonials?
Testimonials
Critics of New Age beliefs “typically encounter anecdotes and testimonials where there ought to be rigorous pre- and post-treatment comparisons” (Beyerstein 1990, 33). Phrenology provides a definitive test of testimonials because it had lots of them, even from the very top:
“I never knew I had an inventive talent until phrenology told me. I was a stranger to myself until then” (Thomas Edison). “The phrenologist has shown that he is able to read character like an open book ... with an accuracy that the most intimate friends cannot approach” (Alfred Russel Wallace, cofounder of the theory of evolution). “I declare that the phrenological system of mental philosophy is as much better than all other systems as the electric light is better than the tallow dip” (William Gladstone, four times prime minister of England). All are from Severn (1913, 6).
There were also countless testimonials from ordinary people. “Scarcely a day passes that the editor of the Phrenological Journal does not receive some outburst of thankfulness from a grateful recipient of needed counsel” (Sizer and Drayton 1899). “35,000 testimonials” said a sign in the window of a London phrenologist (see picture in Parker and Parker 1988, 34). How could 35,000 clients be wrong, to say nothing of Edison, Wallace, and Gladstone? The answer boils down to experience. And wishful thinking.
In 1929, the British Phrenological Society published thirty testimonials entitled The Revival of Phrenology: The Phrenological Principles and Localisations Confirmed by Modern Scientists. None mentioned the results of actual tests, yet they supposedly showed that “the main principles of phrenology can no longer be disputed.”
Plainly Demonstrated
Yes, phrenology seemed to work. It was the apparent accuracy of readings that was so convincing to practitioners and clients. It was “so plainly demonstrated that the non-acceptance of Phrenology is next to impossible”
The phrenologist Stackpool O’Dell (1925, 12) explains how “in his daily experience, when he says that a child has unusual talent for drawing, he finds that it is so, or when he says of another that he has exceptional musical capacity, it proves correct.... He judges these points by the shape of the head, and a due consideration of temperament. And ... his conclusions, in most instances, will be recognized as strikingly correct.”
George Combe
The experience of George Combe, the most famous British practitioner of his time, seems even more convincing. In 1829, he visited a Dublin asylum to demonstrate phrenology to its doctors who, when his readings of selected inmates were over, compared them with their own diagnoses. For a male aged thirty-seven Combe found “predisposed to melancholy” versus the diagnosis “melancholy, great timidity of disposition.” For a female aged forty-eight Combe found “self-esteem is predominant” versus “monomania, pride.” There were sixteen hits as good as these, two nearly as good, one miss, and four passes with “no grounds for inference.” In general, the outcome was “completely in harmony with what was anticipated.” Combe’s many visits to prisons and other asylums were just as successful (Williams 1894).
Encouraging Delusion
The problem in the above cases is that there are no controls to guard against delusion. In Severn’s case, the reading is either very general (so anyone would agree with it) or is guessable from personal contact. In O’Dell’s case, we cannot tell if his hits are genuine or are due to circumstances, including not wanting to be seen disagreeing with a renowned phrenologist.
This is similarly true in Combe’s case, which allowed cueing by the subject’s appearance and by sensing the attitudes of those present. Given a timid, fearful subject, or a proud disdainful one, together with reciting aloud the often opposing indications, and no doubt a practiced skill in reading human nature and onlookers, Combe could hardly go wrong. Indeed, he almost never mentions unobservable phenomena such as abilities, preferring things like melancholy (a term then applied to any personal distress) and propensity to thieving, both consistent with a dependence on cues. If this failed, the result could always be explained by an opposing organ, by upbringing, or by declaring that criticism comes from men and not Nature—and only Nature had the authority to say whether phrenology was true or not.
Alternatively, failures could simply be ignored, as when Severn (1929, 83) visited O’Dell and asked if he could be a phrenologist. “He examined my head and pointed out so many mental faculties detrimental to my acquiring proficiency that I gave up further thought of qualifying professionally.” Yet he became a top British phrenologist! Notice how easily the obviously wrong reading was ignored.
Rare U-Turns
To their credit, not every believer remained a believer. American psychologist Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) practiced phrenology and invented a device to improve the measurement of cranial features, but he later abandoned phrenology as unscientific.
The British botanist Hewett Watson, author of the 1836 survey Statistics of Phrenology, was convinced of phrenology’s validity. But after three years as editor of the Phrenological Journal, which “obliged him to make more close scrutiny into various points,” he saw that much “is doubtful, if not erroneous.” Given a choice between upsetting believers and promoting nonsense, he preferred to resign (Watson 1840).
Uncovering Delusion
The following study, the only one of its kind that I could find, shows how a simple control uncovers the delusion. A female patient aged twenty-two of Morgenthaler (1930), a Swiss psychiatrist, was amazed at the penetrating accuracy of her phrenological reading. It had twenty-six statements such as: “You are a blend of natural feelings and much stronger emotions. You are a definite female, which explains your weaknesses. You are not sharply focused. Critical judgments give way to warm-hearted feelings.” So Morgenthaler asked ten female subjects to judge how well each statement applied to them. An average of 70 percent said the statements were definitely or probably correct, 13 percent were uncertain, and 17 percent said they were definitely or probably wrong. It was the classic Barnum approach to instant delusion. The subjects knew the reading was not theirs; otherwise their acceptance might have been even higher.
Bird Brains Tell All
In the 1840s, the eminent French physiologist Pierre Flourens introduced the experimental approach that phrenologists had steadfastly rejected. He found that the intellect in pigeons and chickens gradually weakened as the brain was cut away, but still remained even when very little brain was left, which effectively demolished the claims of phrenology. A similar point had been made earlier by the American anatomy professor Thomas Sewall. So the need to test actual people disappeared, ironically just at the time when the rise of experimental psychology would have made such tests possible. But enough tests were made to confirm the expected negative results.
Application
Some people with causes used phrenology as justification for European superiority over other “lesser” races. By comparing skulls of different ethnic groups it supposedly allowed for ranking of races from least to most evolved. Broussais, a disciple of Gall, proclaimed that the Caucasians were the “most beautiful” while peoples like the Australian Aboriginal and Maori would never become civilized since they had no cerebral organ for producing great artists.Surprisingly few phrenologists argued against the emancipation of the slaves. Instead they argued that through education and interbreeding the lesser peoples could improve.Another argument was that the natural inequality of people could be used to situate them in the most appropriate place in society. Gender stereotyping was also common with phrenology. Women whose heads were generally larger in the back with lower foreheads were thought to have underdeveloped organs necessary for success in the arts and sciences while having larger mental organs relating to the care of children and religion.While phrenologists did not contend the existence of talented women, this minority did not provide justification for citizenship or participation in politics.
One of the considered practical applications of phrenology was education. Due to the nature of phrenology people were naturally considered unequal with very few people would have a naturally perfect balance between organs. Thus education would play an important role in creating a balance through rigorous exercise of beneficial organs while repressing baser ones. One of the best examples of this is Félix Voisin who for approximately ten years ran a reform school in Issy for the express purpose of correction of the mind of children who had suffered some hardship. Voisin focused on four categories of children for his reform school:
-Slow learners
-Spoiled, neglected, or harshly treated children
-Willful, disorderly children
-Children at high risk of inheriting mental disorders
Phrenology was one of the first to bring about the idea of rehabilitation of criminals instead of vindictive punishments that would not stop criminals, only with the reorganizing a disorganized brain would bring about change.
Voisin believed along with others the accuracy of phrenology in diagnosing criminal tendencies. Diagnosis could point to the type of offender, the insane, an idiot or brute, and by knowing this an appropriate course of action could be taken.A strict system of reward and punishment, hard work and religious instruction, was thought to be able to correct those who had been abandoned and neglected with little education and moral ground works. Those who were considered mentally challenged could be put to work and housed collectively while only criminals of intellect and vicious intent needed to be confined and isolated.
Reception
Britain
Phrenology was introduced at a time when the old theological and philosophical understanding of the mind was being questioned and no longer seemed adequate in a society that was experiencing rapid social and demographic changes.
France
While still not a fringe movement, there was not popular widespread support of phrenology in France. This was not only due to strong opposition of phrenology by French scholars but also once again accusations of promoting atheism, materialism and radical religious views. Politics in France also played a role in preventing rapid spread of phrenology.
Ireland
Phrenology arrived in Ireland in 1815, through Spurzheim.While Ireland largely mirrored British trends, with scientific lectures and demonstrations becoming a popular pastime of the age, by 1815 phrenology had already been ridiculed in some circles priming the audiences to its skeptical claims. Because of this the general public valued it more for its comic relief than anything else, however It did find an audience in the rational dissenters who found it an attractive alternative to explain human motivations without the attached superstitions of religion.
United States
Through the teachings of Gall and Spurzheim phrenological teachings spread, and by the 1834 when Combe came to lecture in the United States phrenology had become a widespread popular movement.
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 over phrenology among those who were pro-slavery.The rise and surge in popularity in mesmerism, phreno-mesmerism, also had a hand in the loss of interest in phrenology among intellectuals and the general public.
Specific phrenological modules
Propensities
Propensities do not form ideas; they solely produce propensities common to animals and man.
- Adhesiveness
- Alimentiveness
- Amativeness
- Acquisitiveness
- Causality
- Cautiousness
- Combativeness
- Concentrativeness
- Constructiveness
- Destructiveness
- Ideality
- Love of life
- Philoprogenitiveness
- Secretiveness
Sentiments
Lower sentiments
These are common to man and animal.
- Cautiousness
- Love of Approbation
- Self-esteem
- Truthfulness
Superior sentiments
These produce emotion or feeling lacking in animals.
- Benevolence
- Conscientiousness
- Firmness
- Hope
- Ideality
- Imitation
- Veneration
- Wit or Mirthfulness
- Wonder
Intellectual faculties
These are to know the external world and physical qualities
- Coloring
- Eventuality
- Form
- Hearing
- Individuality
- Language
- Locality
- Number
- Order
- Sight
- Size
- Smell
- Taste
- Time
- Touch
- Tune
- Weight
Reflecting faculties
These produce ideas of relation or reflect they minister to the direction and gratification of all the other powers
- Causality
- Comparison
REFERENCE
