Phrenology's Bumpy Path

You can tell the difference between these skulls, right?

The images above were created by the lithographer Godefroy Englemann to illustrate the work of the scientist Joseph Vimont in 1835. They were meant to illustrate the ways in which the shape of one’s skull shapes that person’s abilities and proclivities.

If you’re a skilled skull-reader, I’m sure you’ve already figured out that the first skull bears signs of trouble — indeed, it belonged to “a public woman, remarkable for the depravity of her morals, her great propensity to steal and cruellty.” The second skull shows us what the head of a man of great genius and creativity looked like — it’s the skull of the Renaissance painter Raphael, whose works include the School of Athens.

Don’t see the difference? Me neither. But people like Englemann and Vimont did. They were some of the most significant proponents of the “science” of phrenology; Vimont’s book, Treatise on human and comparative phrenology, accompanied by a magnificent folio atlas of 120 plates, containing more than 60 subjects of human and comparative anatomy, of perfect execution (gotta love those 19th century titles), purported to be a guide to the ways in which the shape of the human head could reveal the secrets within.

They illustrated in detail the brain of a dead French soldier:

And attempted to show how the head-shape of an executed murderer reflected his true nature, and perhaps his fate:

Books like these were all over the place in the early 19th century, because phrenology — the art and science of discerning a person’s character and abilities from the shape of their head and skull — was all the rage.

Queen Victoria had her kids’ skulls read in the same way that you might take your offspring to the doctor for a checkup. She later appointed a phrenologist to tutor Prince Alfred. The Anglican Archbishop of Dublin said that 'I am as certain that Phrenology is true as that the sun is now in the sky.” And Alfred Wallace — the man who discovered evolution alongside Charles Darwin — went to his grave believing that phrenology had merit.

Most sophisticated, educated Europeans of the early 19th century were convinced that phrenology was cutting-edge science. By the 1830s, London had more than two dozen phrenological societies. A doctor and botanist named Hewitt Watson sounded a little like a modern AI evangelist scoffing at the fools who doubt his vision of the future when he wrote in 1836 that

In ten years from this time the public laugh or the public pity will be freely bestowed upon the anti-phrenologists. In another ten years, anti-phrenology will exist in the last decrepitude of age. And in ten years more, it will be a subject for the historians of things that have ceased to be.

When Franz Joseph Gall and his disciple-turned-rival Johann Gaspar Spurzheim developed phrenology, their theory was pretty straightforward: the brain was like a collection of different muscles that governed different faculties. The more developed parts of the brain would be bigger in the same way that a strong muscle is big; these dominant parts of the brain would show up as bumps in the skull. A skilled phrenologist could feel the bumps and ridges on a patient’s skull and discern their strengths, weaknesses, and dominant personality characteristics.

This early diagram, from around 1806, shows the areas that supposedly corresponded to various skills and proclivities, ranging from “sexual instinct” to “murder” to “philosophical judgment.”

These could be mapped onto a person’s head, as in this 1824 illustration:

I like this pictorial guide to the regions of the brain:

Phrenologists practiced on or referred to physical models, too:

Or just marked up a skull they happened to have lying around:

A typical visit to a phrenologist might involve letting a strange man in a room full of skulls touch your head for a while:

But a skilled observer might be able to identify someone’s character from afar. This guy’s head shape meant he’d be “reflective.”

Mister Reflective would be likely to be an introvert, lost in thought, while the guy on the left would be an extrovert:

Lots of respectable people thought phrenology was cutting-edge science, but not everybody did. The practice attracted plenty of mockery, and deservedly so.

This cartoon mocks George Combe, the Scottish phrenologist who lectured all over Britain (and had been invited to the palace to read the young royals’ skulls). Here, he’s made to look quite silly, with an overly-lumpy head:

This painting from the 1820s shows a man reading his own skull and receiving a nasty surprise:

And I’m not entirely sure what’s going on here, but the man having his head examined seems quite excited…

This cartoon imbues feet with qualities similar to bumps on the skull, predicting “gossip-pativeness” and “combativeness:”

All good things must come to an end, including quack medical theories. Phrenology could not withstand the scrutiny it had begun to attract by the middle of the 1800s.

First, anatomists quickly realized that there was no correspondence between the shape of the brain and the shape of the skull — lumps in the skull were bone, not a reflection of what lay underneath. Second, the phrenologists themselves could never quite agree on what they believed. Some claimed that there were 40 distinct areas of the brain, while others found only 27. Scientists began to experiment on animal brains and found that phrenologists’ beliefs didn’t correspond to the evidence.

And Pierre Paul Broca put what should have been a final nail in phrenology’s coffin when he studied the brain of a man who had lost the ability to talk but was still able to understand speech. He found that the man had a localized lesion in what came to be known as “Broca’s Area” of the brain, which controls speech. His findings contradicted phrenologists’ ideas about the geography of the brain.

That should have been that — the theory was disproved — but phrenology lived on in the alternative-medicine and self-help world. The vagueness of phrenology’s original theories meant that people could adapt and change them to suit their beliefs.

In 1902, you could buy Vaught’s Practical Character Reader, which would tell you whose head made them a genuine father:

Or a dangerous thug:

I really enjoy this attempt to phrenologize Woodrow Wilson, published in the Tacoma Times in 1912:

And I’m sure that whatever Professor Douglas lacked in graphic-design skills he made up for in the quality of his Seattle phrenology courses in 1908:

People even went high-tech with phrenology. This woman is having her head read by a psychograph, a head-measuring machine that was sold into the 1930s:

Phrenology was a weird and easily mockable practice, but it had a dark side. Slaveowners and imperialists used the tenets of phrenology to “prove” that the people they were oppressing weren’t as smart or as moral as white people. Phrenologists used the skull shape of a Carib man, for example, to declare that he was “An untamable savage, and of the lowest order of human beings.” Even into the twentieth century, colonists in Rwanda used phrenology to justify treating the Tutsi ethnic group as more “civilized” than the Hutus. These distinctions would, of course, eventually lead to a horrific genocide.

Some phrenologists were at least a little bit more enlightened about race. In the famous Amistad case in 1840, phrenologists, including George Combe, were called in to examine the enslaved prisoners in Boston. He described the prisoners’ skulls:

Their heads present great varieties of form as well as of size. Several have small heads, even for Africans; some short and broad heads, with high foreheads but with very little longitudinal extent in the anterior lobe. Their leader Cinquez or Jinquez, who killed the captain of the schooner, is a well-made man of 24 or 25 years of age.

His head is long from the front to the back, and rises high above the ear, particularly in the regions of Self-Esteem, and Firmness. . . . This size and form of brain indicate considerable mental power, decision, self-reliance, prompt perception, and readiness of action. . . .

Combe was an abolitionist, but he also used phrenology to patronize black people. He thought that the skull-shapes of black people would

render the Negro in slavery a safe companion to the White, will make him harmless when free. If he were by nature proud, irascible, cunning, and vindictive, he would not be a slave; and as he is not so, freedom will not generate these qualities in his mind.

But recent research by Rachel Walker shows that African-Americans used phrenology to argue against racism. Black intellectuals appealed to phrenological principles to claim that people like Frederick Douglass and Sarah Margru Kinson Green — a child captive on the Amistad who eventually enrolled at Oberlin College — were every bit as capable as white people. This image of Green was used to “show” that her head-shape indicated “independence, perseverance, energy, and unusual intellectual powers; remarkable memory, and the faculty of acquiring education.”

That’s the thing about a “science” that is, fundamentally, hogwash: you can use it to support whatever narrative you prefer.

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