Phrenology

Phrenology, coming from the Greek terms for “mind” and “knowledge,” is a study that claimed it was possible to determine character, personality traits, and criminality based on the shape of a person's head.

The concept of being able to read somebody's head started with the Greek philosopher Aristotle. However, the idea was first developed as a scientific idea by the German anatomist Franz Joseph Gall who originally developed a concept of “canioscopy,” which involves a study of the skull, or cranium, as it was called in Latin. Gall became “the founding father of phrenology” and his works became criticized by the Roman Catholic Church who argued that Gall's concepts were contrary to religious teachings. When Gall's work was rejected by the Austrian court, he moved to Germany where he met with Joseph Caspar Spurzheim and collaborated with him before moving to France in 1807. There, he started writing on phrenology, his ideas becoming popular in the United States and Britain, with Spurzheim disseminating the idea in the latter country.

Phrenology in Britain was developed by two Scottish brothers, George Combe and Andrew Combe—the former being the author The Constitution of Man, or Elements of Phrenology (1838). Soon afterward, two American brothers, Lorenzo Niles Fowler and Orson Squire Fowler, started to run a phrenological firm, designing the “phrenology head”—a china head with different sections of the brain marked.

Although Franz Joseph Gall used phrenology to draw some conclusions about race in Victorian Britain, there was great interest in the possibility of using the shape of the head to study the likelihood of criminality. As a result, it was common for the heads of executed criminals to be examined to see whether there were “bumps” or other signs common to the heads of other criminals. For instance, in the Australian state of Victoria, after criminals were hanged, their heads were cut off and the hair shaved from them, with plaster casts being made of their heads which were then used by phrenologists. Although this was an accepted practice at the time, there was consternation when this happened to the executed bushranger Ned Kelly in 1880, mainly because he had a large public following.

Interest in phrenology remained high during the Victorian and Edwardian periods, with the British psychiatrist Bernard Hollander writing a number of [Page 1378]bestselling books including The Mental Function of the Brain (1901) and Scientific Phrenology (1902). Even the prominent politician, who later became prime minister, David Lloyd George, openly expressed his interest in phrenology, wanting to meet with C. P. Snow so that he could study the shape of the author's head.

However, phrenology as a discipline was excluded by the British Association for the Advancement of Science and other groups and is now discredited as a pseudoscience. The Belgian Roman Catholic priest Paul Bouts tried to restart interest in phrenology, which had become popular during the Nazi period in German as a way of finding a “scientific” basis for racial superiority. The whole concept of phrenology has now been largely debunked.