Phrenology

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An example of an historical scientific conception

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Phrenology (sometimes called cranioscopy) is the practice of reading bumps on the head to determine people's character traits. Today it is largely seen as as nonsense, but during the nineteenth century it was widely seen as both scientific, and progressive. Before the advent of modern psychology, phrenology offered a science of the mind based on anatomy: that is,

that there was nothing in the vast confusing complex of human emotions and jumbled facts of existence that could not be explained and made sense of through the precise mapping of the mental faculties."

Cooter, 1984, p.175

It has been claimed to be

"the nineteenth century's most popular and popularised 'science' and one of its most fecund in the period preceding Darwin."

Cooter, 1984, p.2

Cooter discusses the large number people who gave public lectures in phrenology, suggesting that

"…It seems unlikely that these numbers [of lecturers that phrenology called forth] were ever at any time in history surpassed by lecturers on any other science subject…"

Cooter, 1984, p.151

Researchers had begun to identify some degree of localisation of function in the brain (there are areas that are important for movement, for vision, for speech etc.), and this was extrapolated to develop a 'conceptual framework' that saw all human brains to have the same basic organisation – being structured into a series of organs responsible for different aspects of a person's character and behaviour. Moreover, as there were clearly individual differences between different people's brains (at least, as found post-mortem) it seemed reasonable that people could have some of these organs either exceptionally or under-developed, explaining why they had more of less of some characteristic.

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By charting these organs on the brain it was possible to see when they were located within the skull. As the skull protected the brain it would have relative bumps and depressions, according to which organs were well, or less well, developed in individuals. Thus it was possible to see why some people had strong or weaker tendencies to show certain emotions or behaviours.

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This is of course highly simplistic, and seriously flawed, but at the time reflected a genuine attempt to make sense of individual psychology in terms of the exciting new discoveries about what had previously been a very mysterious and poorly understood organ – the human brain. It was also a 'science' that was open to adoption by those looking to provide people with greater self-knowledge, and open to abuse by those who looked to justify inequalities in society by using a theory that could 'explain' those inequalities as due to the physical and mental characteristics of different people.

A theory

I described phrenology as offering a conceptual framework, as it is not a single conception, but like all scientific theories, a network of related conceptions that collectively can offer a perspective on some topic or phenomenon.

"As developed at the end of the eighteenth century by Franz Joseph Gall, a successful Viennese physician, phrenology (or 'craniology', as he preferred to call it) was a combined theory of brain and a science of character based on the following tenets:
(i) the brain is the organ of the mind;
(ii) the brain is not a homogeneous unity but an aggregate of mental organs;
(iii) these mental organs or physical faculties are topographically localized [sic] into specific functions;
(iv) other factors being equal, the relative size of any one of the mental organs can be taken as an index to that organ's power of manifestation; and
(v) since the skull ossifies over the brain during infant development, external craniological means can be used to diagnose the internal state of the mental faculties."

Cooter, 1984, p.3

Even if today this may read as pseudoscience (as we know about the brain, and its natural variation, as well as how environment influences people) it convinced many people at the time. Cooter reports for example that The Lancet (the leading medical journal), between "1823 to 1851 devoted over six hundred pages to what it regarded as a 'beautiful and useful' science…" and quote the author Edgar Allen Poe as reporting "[phrenology] has assumed the majesty of a science, and, as a science ranks among the most important which can engage the attention of thinking beings."

Not everyone was convinced, however. The naturalist, Alfrd Russel Wallace, was unimpressed:

"…although Cranioscopy has been assiduously studied for many years, it has produced no results at all comparable with the labour and research bestowed upon it. No approach to a theory of the excessive variations of the cranium has been put forth, and no intelligible classification of races ¹ has been founded upon it."

Wallace, 1869 ¹

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Note:

¹ As this quotation suggests, although Wallace seems to have seen through phrenology, he strongly held another scientific misconception – that humans beings can be divided into different 'races' on biological grounds. Like many of his contemporaries, though, his notion of race was quite different from the alternative conceptions held by some people today (i.e., that humans can be divided on scientific grounds into a handful of different distinct races). Wallace considered there were many different racial groups – often somewhat aligned with Nationality.

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Work cited:

• Cooter, R. (1984). The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science. Phrenology and the organization of consent in nineteenth-century Britain. Cambridge University Press.
• Wallace, A. R. (2015). Malay Archipelago (J. van Wyhe, Ed. The Annotated Malay Archipelago ed.). NUS Press. (1869)

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