Their phrenology was wholly borrowed from the British modifications of Gall's system. The Fowlers swept through Britain on a successful lecture tour before establishing various phrenological institutions, societies and publishing concerns.
Less scientifically pretentious and more overtly entrepreneurial, it is largely this latter-day phrenology whose remnants are still seen today. A phrenological bust in an antique shop will almost invariably bear the label "L. The early phrenological movement was concerned more with providing practitioners with claims to epistemological certainty and intellectual authority than disscussing human races.
Phrenology evolved into wider and wider cultural space over time, beginning with Gall and the highest scientific and social and cultural elites, from Goethe to the king of Prussia, to the British and American scientifically pretentious middle-class phrenological societies of George Combe and finally to the disreputable practical "professors" of phrenology, reading heads for profit and the mass audiences of the Fowlers to the dawn of the 20th century.
So-called "practical" phrenologists like the Fowlers, far outnmubered, in the long run, the interested medical men, the scientifically pretensious and theoretical phrenologists. Many orignal texts are available at this site which portray a broad range of phrenological literature- from high brow to low brow.
During phrenology's first heyday in the ss, many employers could demand a character reference from a local phrenologist to ensure that a prospective employee was honest and hard-working.
This belief that the protuberances on the skull provided an accurate index of talents and abilities was particularly urged to be applied to education and criminal reform. Like another theory of mind that later permeated American culture, phrenology was the brainchild of a Viennese physician fascinated by the human psyche. Even as a schoolboy in the late s, Franz Joseph Gall noticed that classmates who could memorize long passages with ease all seemed to have prominent eyes and large foreheads.
From this he inferred that an organ of verbal memory must lie behind the eyes. He speculated that if one ability was "indicated by an external feature," others might be also.
His expanded theory brought Gall renown, but also the disapproval of church authorities, who considered such ideas heretical. In , the state prohibited him from promoting his theory in Austria. Not surprisingly, this only increased public interest.
In the early years of the 19th century, Gall's ideas spread across Europe. But it was in America, a country starved for a "scientific" insight into the human mind and one that offered the hope of individual perfectibility — read "self-help" , that phrenology would find its most devoted and enduring audience.
And it was Spurzheim, having further expanded Gall's theory and adopted the name "phrenology," who would bring it to our shores. Spurzheim arrived in for a whirlwind lecture tour — one that literally killed him after just six months. But in that short time, he converted thousands, lecturing at Harvard and Yale, and across the American heartland. Ralph Waldo Emerson described him as one of the world's greatest minds.
After Spurzheim's death, John James Audubon sketched his remains for posterity; Harvard president Josiah Quincy handled his funeral arrangements. The mantle fell, in large part, to a ministry student named Orson Fowler, who suddenly found his true calling in Spurzheim's theory and polemical practice.
Fowler began to lecture on the topic to his classmates at Amherst College in Massachusetts, and to offer "readings" for 2 cents apiece. In one friend, the future Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, Fowler reported finding evidence of a "strong social brain" with "very large Benevolence. Orson's enthusiasm infected his younger brother, Lorenzo, along with the rest of the family. The two Fowler brothers — frustrated evangelists both — began touring the country, carrying "the truth of phrenology" from town to town, lecturing and offering readings, analyzing the character and pro-pensities of utter strangers from the bumps and valleys on their skulls.
In one of his early sessions, Lorenzo Fowler studied the head of a shy year-old named Clara Barton. That means they were unable to find any correlation between the contours of the skull and the 23 personality traits, selected to mirror those championed by phrenology.
That is, there is no way lumpy bits of brain are pushing the skull out to create surface bumps — the skull does not mirror the brain surface. That said, it was among one of the earlier disciplines to recognise that different parts of the brain have different functions. However, for better or worse, phrenology is largely considered as a scientific game-changer — with the roots of many modern scientific, but also psuedoscientific disciplines, following in its wake.
An infamous historical discipline finally investigated, and a topnotch science pun: pretty successful day at the office for the Oxford team. Edition: Available editions United Kingdom.
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