Marketplace of the Marvelous

CHAPTER TWO

The Only True Science of the Mind

Phrenology

Lorenzo Fowler knew he’d found the woman for him after feeling the bumps on the head of Lydia Folger. The two first met just weeks before, in March of 1844, when Fowler examined the head of Folger’s uncle Walter, a man known to his neighbors as something of an eccentric, as “odd as huckleberry chowder,” as some put it.1

Less than a month later, Fowler was back to take a reading of the woman who had caught his eye on his first trip, perhaps concerned that fools might run in the family. With Lydia Folger, he had nothing to fear. Nearly eleven years Fowler’s junior, Folger was well spoken, intelligent, and charming with a commanding presence even in her early twenties. Her scholarly and scientific interests would later lead her to become a lecturer, writer, educator, and only the second woman to receive a medical degree in the United States. But first she had to submit to a head reading, one that served as both a personality test and courtship ritual.²

Fowler passed his fingertips over her skull and adjusted his craniometer, a caliper-like device that spanned the head. His instruments allowed him to construct a topographical map of Folger’s head, capable of revealing her intelligence, personality, and character. He found Folger’s brain to be of “full size” and her mind agile and active. Not merely book smart, Folger learned “from everything she sees, hears, or read.” She wasn’t all brains: she also had all the makings of a good wife, with “strongly developed” social and domestic natures and “strong parental feelings.” Fortunately for Fowler, he also discovered that she was unable to “enjoy herself without mate or companion.”3

The reading complete, Fowler must have made a good impression on Folger as well. The two married less than six months later on Nantucket. In Folger, Fowler found a phrenologically suitable wife—a not unimportant factor in the “head conscious” 1840s—as well as a mate whose intelligence and skill would prove vital to his family’s effort to build and sustain phrenology’s popularity in the United States.

To anyone who has ever shaved his or her head and been horrified by the lumps and dents hidden beneath, the idea that those bumps said anything about a person’s character might be unsettling. But for millions of Americans in the nineteenth century, phrenology provided comfort and insight, a way to know and understand behavior and personality with seemingly scientific precision. Why do we act the way we do? What determines the patterns of our behavior? How can we be better people? Every generation seeks answers to these questions, and in the mid-nineteenth century, phrenology provided one incredibly popular and influential explanation.

With phrenology, doctors could easily determine not only that someone thought, felt, and coped with life in a particular way, but why. Its advocates hoped phrenology would become a new diagnostic tool for mental health and a way to understand the brain and its function. But phrenology quickly spread beyond the doctor’s office to become a whole cultural and social system largely divorced from its roots.

Physician Franz Joseph Gall first developed his theories on the anatomy and function of the brain in eighteenth-century Vienna, where Sigmund Freud would later foster another science of the mind, psychoanalysis, in the late nineteenth century. Born in Tiefenbrunn, Germany, in 1758, Gall grew fascinated by the physical structure of the body as a medical student, first in Strasbourg and then Vienna. As a physician, he became a skilled anatomist who learned to dissect the brain to show the origins and pathways of cranial nerves. Gall’s initial question came from something he’d observed in childhood: classmates who excelled at memorization also tended to have large protruding eyes. Theorizing about the connection, Gall suggested that the part of the brain located behind the eyes must be associated with verbal memory. Since all those bulging eyes indicated a shared talent for memorization, Gall supposed that that part of the brain must be more developed, which caused the eyes to bug out. This anecdotal observation and his later anatomical work on the structure of the brain led Gall to formulate his new science of the mind.4

Gall conceived of the brain not as a single organ, as most believed at the time, but as a mosaic of many specialized organs that each governed a particular mental or emotional function—an idea now thought to be mostly correct. He certainly wasn’t the first to try to locate personality in body organs. For centuries, philosophers and scientists had proposed locations for the source of human emotions and character traits. Aristotle, for instance, had suggested that anger came from the liver, a belief still common today in traditional Chinese medicine. Plato took a sunnier view of the liver, describing it as the source of joy and desire while placing anger in the heart. During Gall’s time, prevailing theory held that the brain was the center of immediate mental processes but that feeling and personality came from the soul. Gall was one of the first to hypothesize that all mental and emotional activity occurred in the brain.⁵

Through his study, Gall came to believe that the brain was the organ of the mind, and its shape a reflection of the mental composition of its owner. He also asserted that the shape of the skull matched the shape of the brain within it, so that studying the bumps and indentations of the skull could reveal information about the size, structure, and function of the brain areas beneath it. A large brain organ correlated with a bump on the skull, and vice versa. At the time, before X-rays and CT scans, observing head shape presented the only way to study the living brain.⁶ While head size could indicate overall mental power, Gall didn’t believe that its overall size revealed anything about how the mind was actually organized and functioned, the idea that became the heart of phrenology. That knowledge could only come by studying the individual parts of the skull.⁷

Gall tested his theory on the heads of psychiatric patients, artists, and criminals—people with extreme character traits he hoped to find written on their skulls. Even better than just examining heads, Gall also liked to collect skulls for further study and demonstrations. Gall’s friendship with the deputy chief of police in Vienna helped to enrich his collection as the officer likely had easier access to the criminal minds Gall sought. For those heads still in use by their owners, Gall made plaster casts. By 1792, on the basis of hundreds of these head studies, Gall concluded that there were twenty-seven innate human faculties (Gall’s word for mental or emotional traits or abilities) located in the brain.8

The size and development of these areas implied a greater or lesser amount of each trait. These faculties included everything from reproduction and affection to vanity and musical ability. Each was associated with a discrete part of the brain, which Gall called organs, and a detectable bump on the skull. Not all traits were positive. Gall classified murder and thievery as “evil” and “bad.” Other traits, such as the sexual instinct, were only beneficial in moderation. Gall believed that knowledge of these immoral traits would help individuals keep them suppressed. Of these twenty-seven traits, humans shared nineteen with animals, including reproductive instincts and a sense of sound. Some of Gall’s critics found this animal/human convergence to be particularly offensive. They did not see any connection between the mental and emotional worlds of animals and humans. Gall located all of the specifically human functions, which included religiosity, wit, and moral sense, in the cerebral cortex because he knew from his work in comparative anatomy that it was noticeably larger in humans than animals.⁹

Although Gall gets most of the credit, he was not the first to suggest that the brain, and particularly the cerebral cortex, might not be a single organ. In the fourth century bce, Hippocrates noted that injuries to one side of the head often resulted in weakness on the opposite side of the body, a significant insight, though one that psychologist and historian Stanley Finger cautions should be read with the understanding that physicians of the time knew almost nothing about how the brain worked. Hippocrates was less concerned with determining brain function than with elevating the status of the brain to the body’s primary motor and emotional organ, a major shift from existing beliefs of a ruling heart.¹⁰

Several centuries after Hippocrates and nearly a century before Gall, Swede Emanuel Swedenborg suggested that different parts of the brain may control various physical and mental functions. Born in Stockholm in 1688, Swedenborg came to medicine from a background in mathematics, astronomy, and mining. He grew so entranced with decoding the mysteries of the human body that in 1736, he left his job as the director of Swedish mines to devote himself to medicine and the study of the relationship between the body and the soul. He immersed himself in his studies as a purely intellectual pursuit with no interest in actually becoming a practicing doctor. He visited medical centers in France, Italy, and the Netherlands to shadow doctors and learn about the brain and the nervous system. From these experiences, Swedenborg theorized that the brain must be broken into areas with different purposes, because how else could humans function without mixing up their senses, such as the ability to see, taste, touch, and hear? As evidence of his theory, he noted that injuries to the brain did not affect all abilities equally. A head injury could cause visual loss while not affecting the sense of smell or hearing. Swedenborg’s pioneering conjectures on the brain remained largely unknown, though, overshadowed by the mystical visions he reported experiencing in the 1740s that found him communing with Christ, spirits, demons, and angels. Scientists had a hard time taking seriously the ideas and observations of someone who also claimed to see things unseen. These visions led Swedenborg to abandon medicine for theology, a course on which he never looked back, and one that inspired and influenced such people as poet William Blake, writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, and nurseryman and folk legend Johnny “Appleseed” Chapman. Swedenborg’s theories on the brain were not discovered until 1868 and not translated for decades more. So Gall came to lead the movement toward the theory of a functionally divided brain.11

Even without the mystical issues that relegated Swedenborg to the fringe, Gall struggled for acceptance in the scientific community. Much of the criticism focused on the validity of his research methods. Gall avidly collected heads and skulls for study but quickly threw out any that didn’t fit his hypotheses. Worse, he sometimes contradicted himself to include particular examples that he liked. Gall’s detractors also disparaged his focus on society’s extremes: criminals and the insane on one end, and the most famous and intellectually gifted writers, thinkers, and artists on the other. Gall visited prisons and asylums to observe and collect material, studying the heads of five hundred robbers and murderers and attributing their misdeeds to enlarged organs of acquisitiveness and destructiveness, as well as a small organ for love. He did not just confine his observations to humans. He also looked out for unusual animals, collecting the skulls of dogs that ate only stolen food or those that managed to navigate themselves home from great distances. Gall defended himself by claiming that the relationship between the body and brain could be more easily determined in these outlier cases. He was so sure of his belief that the cranium was an accurate cast of the brain that he stuck almost exclusively to skull shapes in making his pronouncements. By 1802, Gall had collected more than three hundred skulls from people with well-documented mental traits, ranging from the literary to the murderous.12

An excellent speaker and self-promoter, Gall took his theories on brains, heads, and personality on the road, lecturing widely throughout Europe in the early 1800s. His talks were something of a scientific circus. He traveled with a collection of human and animal skulls and cranial casts, as well as wax models of the brain and, for good measure if unclear reasons, two monkeys. Gall illustrated his theories with skulls and live dissections of the spinal cord where he traced the path of nerves. Though he considered himself a serious scientist, Gall availed himself of the same tricks used by patent-medicine sellers of the time, who often used music, drama, and other theatrics on their tours to attract an audience. Gall’s lectures and writings made him a European celebrity.¹³

Yet it was his disciple, German physician Johann Spurzheim, who made phrenology a household word in the United States. Spurzheim first met Gall at one of his lectures in 1800, and the two began collaborating in 1804 after Spurzheim finished his medical training. Spurzheim even coined the name “phrenology” for the new science. The name combined two Greek words, phren, meaning mind, and logos for study or discourse, making phrenology literally a “discourse of the mind.” Gall never called it that, however. He preferred cranioscopy instead because phrenology seemed to focus on the mind, where he cared most about the brain. But Gall’s name never caught on, and phrenology became the popular term for it, with Spurzheim its top marketer and public face.¹⁴

With Spurzheim’s assistance, Gall published his monumental four-volume Anatomy and Physiology of the Nervous System in General and the Cerebrum in Particular between 1810 and 1820. This tome detailed his entire doctrine, which was, in part, a rebuttal of criticisms made by France’s Académie des Sciences. Gall and Spurzheim had hoped to win the académie’s approval as a mark of their standing in the world of science, but it was not to be. The commission assigned to review his work rejected Gall’s application and downplayed his anatomical contributions to medical science.15

Spurzheim and Gall soon found themselves at odds with each other, too. The disagreement over the name of their science was only a surface mark of a much deeper tension over the meaning and use of phrenology. Gall saw himself as a scientist, who defined phrenology specifically and narrowly as a science of the mind resting on dissection and anatomical research. Spurzheim, on the other hand, though trained as a physician, saw himself as a philosopher and reformer. Like many of his contemporaries, Spurzheim viewed the poverty, violence, and vice that had accompanied industrialization and urbanization with concern. He wanted to use phrenology to solve social problems and to empower individuals toward self-improvement.

Spurzheim didn’t disagree with Gall’s main premise that the shape of the skull reflected the development of the brain organs responsible for specific functions. Where he differed was in the moral value given to functions of the brain. Gall’s classification of some faculties as evil did not fit with Spurzheim’s evolving ideas of a basic human benevolence. He did not believe that any faculties were by necessity good or bad; it was simply an imbalance of these attributes that led to sinful words and actions. Spurzheim further argued that naming faculties after a single mode of conduct, as Gall had done, failed to encompass all of the behaviors that each could produce. Seeking greater latitude for the kinds of activities governed by a particular attribute, Spurzheim renamed several of the functions with more neutral titles. Murder, for example, became destructiveness to illustrate the variety of manifestations violent tendencies could take. Others, like cunning, religion, and poetry, were given suffixes like “-ive” or “-ness” to suggest a range of possible outcomes. In Spurzheim’s scheme, writing a poem was only one possible result of having a large organ for poetic-ness. Spurzheim also added new organs, including hope and moral sense, increasing Gall’s original twenty-seven faculties to thirty-three.¹⁶

Perhaps more important for phrenology’s growth, Spurzheim believed that people could change. It was this potential for individual betterment that intrigued him the most about phrenology. Through training and education, Spurzheim argued that people could strengthen their positive brain organs. Like weightlifting builds muscle mass, the brain was an organ to be exercised. The phrenologist acted as the brain’s personal trainer, advising patients on the best course of activity based on their cranial reading. Spurzheim’s views starkly contrasted with those of Gall, who was less optimistic about human nature and potential for improvement. Seeing depravity all around him, Gall attributed evil acts to the very makeup of humans. He argued that traits, good or bad, were inherited and therefore somewhat fixed. Spurzheim, however, believed that phrenology offered the tools people needed to learn about themselves and to apply that knowledge to make the world a better place.17 Here was a “practical system of mental philosophy,” he claimed, that would improve the education of children, the reformation of criminals, and the treatment of the insane.¹⁸ Eloquent and dashing, with sideburns that zigzagged down his cheeks from his upswept brown hair, Spurzheim and his message of hope, self-knowledge, and social improvement proved to be exactly what Americans wanted, and packed lecture halls greeted him on his 1832 tour of New England.

This wasn’t the first time phrenology had come to the United States. American physicians John Warren, John Bell, and Charles Caldwell had learned about phrenology in Europe in the 1820s and returned home eager to spread the word. Caldwell became one of phrenology’s most ardent and well-known advocates in American medicine. Known as the “American Spurzheim,” he went on to write the first American book on the subject.¹⁹ Regular doctors responded favorably to phrenology at first because they hoped that it would open up the mysteries of the mind, transforming what had long been abstract concepts into something concrete that might aid in diagnosis. But throughout the 1820s, phrenology remained primarily an academic pursuit, followed by some regular doctors but not many others outside of medicine and science. Spurzheim’s lecture tour brought phrenology to the masses in the 1830s.²⁰

While phrenology became very popular in Europe, it was in the United States that it found its most devoted audience. One reason phrenology attracted so many followers was that it seemed to provide the toolbox for the American dream. No matter how humble your beginning, anyone could learn about him- or herself using phrenological principles and then use that knowledge to strengthen desired qualities through personal initiative and perseverance. Phrenology affirmed core nineteenth-century American values about an individual’s unlimited potential for growth and development. The prospect of consulting science for answers rather than the traditional received wisdom of religious and political leaders appealed to an American society with a strong anti-authoritarian and anti-elitist bent. People could reach their highest potential simply by paying close attention to their physical and mental attributes and those of their potential mates. Phrenology seemed to provide what the strict Calvinist religion of Puritanical America had not: a way to better what God gave you, empowering individuals to help shape their own future, and making man the master of his own mind.

Spurzheim’s whirlwind lecture tour triggered phrenology’s explosive growth in North America—unfortunately, it also killed him six months later, when he caught a cold and died a short time later. Spurzheim remained committed to his cause until the end, though, claiming only the desire “to live as long as I can for the good of science.” Fittingly for his chosen field, Spurzheim’s brain and skull became part of a phrenological collection, given first to the Boston Athenaeum and then to the Boston Phrenological Society.21 The man who prepared Spurzheim’s skull for display declared it “conspicuous, with its ideal facial angle as an example of a highly cultivated and intellectual type.” Several years later, in 1840, Spurzheim’s skull was joined by that of James Roberton, an admirer who asked to be displayed alongside his hero forever, a request largely honored to this day as both reside in the Warren Museum Exhibition Gallery at Harvard University.²²

Thousands came out to watch Spurzheim’s funeral procession to Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery, including the entire medical faculty of Harvard and all of the members of the Boston Medical Association. The service included a stirring performance of “Ode to Spurzheim,” composed after his sudden death by poet John Pierrepont and sung by the city’s Handel and Haydn Society. “For the stores of science brought us, / For the charm thy goodness gave, / To the lessons thou has taught us, / Can we give thee but the grave?” implored one stanza.²³ That Spurzheim’s funeral attracted such a wide and distinguished audience attests to the great interest and credibility given phrenology by Americans in its early days. His was hardly the funeral of someone thought a quack.

The New England Magazine reported soon after his death that Spurzheim had remarkable success in attracting converts to phrenology, “not only from among mere lecture-goers and literary triflers, but from the most scientific and learned in various professions: Physicians, Surgeons, and Lawyers, of great present eminence.”24 The Massachusetts Medical Association proclaimed his death “a calamity to mankind.” English writer Harriet Martineau, who visited the United States the same year as Spurzheim, reported that “the great mass of Americans became phrenologists in a day.” Ralph Waldo Emerson hailed him as one of the greatest minds in the world, while the American Journal of Medical Sciences declared, “[T]he prophet is gone.”²⁵

With Spurzheim’s death, phrenological authority passed to Scotsman George Combe. A lawyer by training, Combe was far more interested in human psychology than legal wrangling. He had first met Spurzheim in Edinburgh in 1816, and though skeptical of phrenology at first, Combe soon found himself drawn to Spurzheim’s optimistic vision of the mind. In 1820, Combe and his brother founded the Edinburgh Phrenological Society, the first of its kind in the world. Most of its members, primarily young middle-class professional men, had been converted to phrenology at the hand of Spurzheim himself.²⁶

Combe simplified the scholarly theories of Gall and Spurzheim to make them more accessible to regular people. He shared many of Spurzheim’s optimistic beliefs but added a few of his own in accordance with the philosophies of natural law and secular society popular in Europe. Like Spurzheim, Combe did not believe that humans were flawed by design; instead, evil resulted from violations of natural laws through either ignorance or willful disobedience. Everyone could attain happiness by living morally and personally believing in God—which put him squarely in the camp of other nineteenth-century reformers of all stripes, from temperance advocates to abolitionists. Combe also delved more deeply into physiology and used phrenology to advocate for the health of the rest of the body and its environment. He claimed that the size of the faculties wasn’t the sole means of assessing mental capacity: the health and condition of the whole person had to be considered as well. Anything that reduced what he called “natural vitality”—from coffee and alcohol to tight corsets and urban living—was potentially harmful to overall health.

Combe was particularly interested in using phrenology to improve education, his interest driven in part by his own childhood. Born in 1788 and one of twelve children raised in a small house at the foot of Edinburgh Castle, Combe remembered enduring lessons that consisted solely of memorizing and translating Latin texts. Forced to sit for hours, Combe found no outlet for his childhood energy, nor did he find the mental stimulation he craved. Any restless movement drew fierce punishment. His teacher, Mr. Fraser, kept order with “The Rod of Correction,” a knotted riding whip that produced brutal welts and sometimes drew blood when cracked over students’ arms and legs. From these experiences, Combe came to believe that education should prepare students to become rational future citizens by nurturing their physical, moral, and intellectual capacities. Focusing on dead languages only left the child ignorant “of the constitution of the social system in which he is destined to move.” How could students successfully navigate the world if all they knew were the words and texts of societies long since past? Above all, said Combe, learning should be pleasurable. The interests of students should be encouraged and classroom activities designed to dovetail with each student’s natural talents and proclivities as discovered through phrenology. He suggested lessons that taught students to ask questions and to learn through discovery and hands-on investigation rather than the standard course of memorization and passive listening.27

Combe published his theories, philosophies, and advice for living as The Constitution of Man in 1828, a book not completely devoted to phrenology but one that helped to cement phrenology’s association with the Protestant ethic of progress, hard work, and self-improvement. In addition to the educational applications of phrenology, Combe proposed that marriage should be based on the pairing of the best-developed brains, and that criminals should be kept in solitary confinement to break their evil thoughts and desires and replace them with new moral influences. Combe’s book became a phenomenal success. More than 100,000 copies sold in the United States and Britain, and Ralph Waldo Emerson called it “the best sermon I have read for some time.” It was said that only the Bible and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress were more likely to be found on the shelves of English-speaking homes in the 1830s.²⁸

By the time Combe arrived in the United States for his own lecture tour in 1838, phrenology had all but ceased to be strictly a medical science. It had instead come to resemble a social movement with its patchwork of scientific, religious, and moral components. Practitioners and followers had spread its message to the far corners of the nation. Phrenological charts began appearing in the pages of popular magazines. The Boston-based Ladies’ Magazine published diagrams of the head from three angles along with detailed listings of each faculty, its location on the head, the qualities associated with it, and some general comments on each faculty’s prevalence in the general population. Readers learned that “conscientiousness” tended to be larger in children than in adults, which the author saw as a “poor reflection” on the state of American manners.29

Americans from all classes of society found much to admire in phrenology. The upper classes liked it because it reassured them that the social hierarchy that placed them on top was “natural”; the emerging middle class and working classes liked it because its meritocratic message confirmed their hope of advancement through personal striving and self-improvement.³⁰ Phrenology seemed to provide answers for all kinds of questions, only a handful of them medical, which led to both its explosive growth and its near divorce from its purely scientific origins. Moreover, phrenology also became commercialized in the United States, in large part due to the efforts of the remarkable Fowler family.

The Fowler brothers, Lorenzo Niles and Orson Squire, turned their interest in phrenology into a substantial business based in New York City in the 1830s. The eldest brother, Orson Squire Fowler, hadn’t set out to be a phrenologist. The son of a farmer and church deacon from upstate New York, Orson first pursued the ministry but found his true calling in Spurzheim’s theory. He began to lecture on the topic to his classmates at Amherst College in Massachusetts and offered head readings for two cents each.³¹ His enthusiasm soon infected his younger brother, Lorenzo, along with the rest of the family, including younger sister Charlotte; her husband, Samuel Wells; and Lorenzo’s wife, the attractively headed Lydia Folger. After graduation, the brothers put aside their plans for a life in the church for another kind of missionary work: “Phrenologize Our Nation, for thereby it will Reform the World!”³²

The phrenology preached by the Fowlers had a particularly American spin. Taking Combe’s programs of physical and mental hygiene, the Fowlers translated phrenology into a doctrine of perfectionism, a set plan designed to create a perfect social and moral system. This idea of perfection fit the millennial ideas so common among many kinds of reformers in the nineteenth century. The Fowlers also added new faculties to Spurzheim’s thirty-three, including conjugality (attachment to one’s partner), vitativeness (love of life), and bibativeness (fondness for liquor), though they had to stop after a few additions because there were limits to how much the fingers could plausibly “read” on the head. The Fowlers’ version of phrenology was an attempt to bring together all the strands of science capable of improving the mind or benefiting mankind, which they believed would herald a new and better world.33 And like all true-blooded nineteenth-century American entrepreneurs, they also just happened to sell all the phrenological gear and accessories needed to make this happen.

The Fowlers aimed their commercial phrenology at regular people through their lecture tours and popular literature, promoting themselves with the ancient Greek aphorism “Know thyself.” Their missionary fervor was matched by a shrewd business sense and theatrical flair. Appearing in theaters and lecture halls across the eastern United States beginning in 1834, the Fowlers explained the basics of phrenology and offered hands-on analyses of volunteers’ heads. The lectures were free (though the examinations were not) and drew large crowds as well as a few celebrities.³⁴ Few could resist sales pitches that promised to

point out, and show how to obviate, at least one fault, and cultivate one virtue, besides reinvigorating health—the value of which ASTOR’S MILLIONS can not equal! Shall, then, the trifling examination fee prevent what is thus INFINITELY valuable? Will you allow this to intercept your MENTAL progress, especially if just starting in life? In no other way can you even obtain for your self, at such a trifle, as much good—as great a luxury.³⁵

The following year, in 1835, they set up an office in Clinton Hall, at the corner of Nassau and Beekman streets, in New York City.

After her marriage to Lorenzo Fowler in 1844, Lydia Folger began lecturing on phrenology, physiology, anatomy, and hygiene to largely female audiences. Having a female phrenologist on board was a tremendous boon to the Fowlers’ business, as many women were uncomfortable attending lectures on health given by men. In 1849, when she was only twenty-seven years old, Lydia enrolled in the newly established Central Medical College of Syracuse and Rochester, New York. The curriculum of Central Medical College, an “eclectic” medical school, consisted of plant remedies, diet, and hygiene. Lydia received her medical degree a year later, only the second woman in the United States to do so (the first, Elizabeth Blackwell, graduated from New York’s Geneva Medical College in 1849). In 1850 she became principal of the “female department” at her alma mater, becoming the first female professor of medicine in the United States. She also established her own medical practice in New York City, specializing in the health of women and children, while continuing to write and lecture on phrenology with her husband.36

Many women practiced phrenology, though fewer became recognized leaders like Lydia than in other forms of irregular medicine. In part, this was because phrenology lacked organizational structure and cohesion. There was no national phrenological association, and most patients had a one-time encounter with a phrenologist rather than an ongoing relationship. Phrenology was largely an individual pursuit. Most phrenologists supported women’s rights, adopting the phrenological view of women as full human beings endowed with human potential. Many phrenologists used the science to argue for the mental equality of the sexes while others found evidence of particular strength in faculties traditionally associated with women like morality, benevolence, and religiosity. Female phrenologists like Lydia and Charlotte Fowler examined and lectured before audiences of women almost exclusively. The same was true in nearly all medical fields, regular or irregular, as modesty and social propriety tended to keep women and men separated, particularly in matters of the human body. But while it was rare for a woman phrenologist to give a head reading to a man, female patients could and did receive readings from practitioners of either sex.³⁷

In 1838, the Fowlers began publishing the American Phrenological Journal, which quickly became one of the most widely read magazines in the nation and remained in circulation until 1911. They also published a library’s worth of inexpensive books on health and reform topics. These publications advised readers on the best daily regimens of diet, work, and play for proper mental functioning. Others, many penned by Lydia, offered advice on marriage and on conceiving and raising children. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Fowlers’ publications could be found all over the country, and phrenological ideas had become a part of everyday conversation.

The Fowlers’ New York City offices, known as the Phrenological Cabinet, became one of the most visited places in town. Combining the attractions and oddities of P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, a carnival sideshow, and a scientific curiosity cabinet, the museum easily provided visitors a full day of entertainment. Busts, mummies, and paintings from around the world covered the walls and filled display cases. Visitors could look at the heads of murderers and pirates, as well as those of famous leaders like President John Quincy Adams and Julius Caesar. The Fowlers also had casts made from George Combe’s extensive skull collection. The busts were particularly important, being one of the chief tools of the phrenologists’ trade. The Fowlers also instructed others how to make their own head casts, though they recommended that followers first practice on an apple to get the hang of it before attempting a human head.38 These busts provided a road map of the head, demarcating all of the organs of the mind with clearly marked boundaries on a smooth-crowned model of the skull.³⁹

Visitors could test their ability to judge character by viewing the collection that represented “racial types,” skulls of people from different races, and “persons of eminence in talent and virtue, and . . . those who were notorious for crime.”⁴⁰ The idea that a man’s character could be read led some to attempt to make determinations of the moral, intellectual, and social development of different human races based on the shape of their heads and jaws. After Charles Darwin popularized the idea that humans descended from apes, some saw different facial features like the protruding jaw and sloped forehead as signs of lower development and thus a closer relationship to primitive man, which became the basis of racial stereotyping. Classes were offered to teach phrenology to anyone who wanted to learn. The youngest Fowler, Charlotte, taught classes geared specifically toward women. Since admission was free, visitors came in hordes.⁴¹

Tourists could take a piece of their visit to the Phrenological Cabinet home with a stroll through the museum’s extensive gift shop. The Fowlers offered a set of seventy phrenological watercolors for thirty-five cents and phrenological busts, the particular specialty of Lorenzo, for sale as souvenirs. These “high quality” busts, “showing the exact location of all the Organs of the Brain,” sold for $1.25 and could be sent by freight or express for those who couldn’t make the trip to New York.⁴² Lorenzo’s original design can still be found for sale in novelty stores today.

As with many other irregulars, phrenology wasn’t the Fowlers’ only interest, and their office became a meeting place for all kinds of reformers. This wasn’t surprising, as the idea of perfectibility that imbued phrenology could also be found in the rhetoric of other popular social reform movements. The Fowlers championed vegetarianism, mesmerism, temperance, and even architectural reform. Of architecture, Orson Fowler believed that octagonal houses, in particular, were more healthful because the eight walls formed wider angles than the typical ninety degrees, allowing for the freer circulation of fresh air. The cost and space efficiency of the design also made the houses accessible to the rich and poor alike. Lydia Fowler and her sister-in-law Charlotte also campaigned for women’s rights out of their offices, seeing phrenology as scientific evidence of women’s equal mental capacity and thus their ability to work, vote, and certainly lead. “Reform, Reform, REFORM, is emphatically the watchword of the age,” declared Orson Fowler.43

In the early 1840s, the Fowlers attacked the inadequacies of the American educational system, particularly condemning the lack of rights afforded to children. Of course, one of the rights that the Fowlers believed all children should be entitled to was that of having a phrenologically based education on the model first proposed by Combe. It must have thrilled them to read that noted school reformer Horace Mann proclaimed himself “more indebted to Phrenology than to all the metaphysical works I ever read.”⁴⁴ Mann had been greatly influenced by Combe’s theories. He adopted The Constitution of Man as a text for the normal schools of Massachusetts, and even named his son George Combe Mann for his phrenological hero. The Fowlers only hoped that other educators would prove so enlightened.⁴⁵

Although they became the most well known, the Fowlers weren’t the only ones selling and promoting phrenology in the United States. By the late 1830s, itinerant phrenologists crisscrossed the country giving head exams and handing out periodicals and other information. More than twenty thousand traveling phrenologists plied their trade throughout the nineteenth century, many using it as a first step out of their childhood home and into adulthood. Reading heads gave young men a way to get off the farm and make a good living before settling down and marrying.⁴⁶ There was probably not a community in the nation that did not entertain at least one visit from an itinerant phrenologist. These traveling phrenologists also benefited from the demonstrative nature of examining heads. Americans did not just want to read about scientific advances, but to engage with science directly. Phrenology offered that chance and made Americans head-conscious in a way they had never been before.

Phrenologists often took head readings using a device called a craniometer. Gall had invented the device based on his knowledge of the anatomy of the brain. He believed that the ridges of the brain gathered behind the ears and radiated outward, so he created a tool that rested in the ears like the points of a compass. Rotating the device over the skull, a phrenologist could measure the size of each organ using the phrenological chart as a starting place.47 Do-it-yourself guides offered instruction and tips for finding each organ. Draw a line from “the outer angle of the eye, to the top of the ears, and extend it straight backward an inch and a half to an inch and three quarters, and you are on Combativeness,” counseled The Illustrated Self-Instructor in Phrenology and Physiology. “This organ starts about midway to the back part of the ears, and runs upward and backward toward the crown of the head. To ascertain its relative size, steady the head with one hand, say the left, and place the balls of your right fingers upon the point just specified letting your elbow be somewhat below the subject’s head, which will bring your fingers directly across the organ.” Once in the right position, the phrenologist felt for the fullness and sharpness of the organ.⁴⁸ Skilled phrenologists—as well as those out to make a quick buck—could complete readings in about thirty minutes.

Head readings tended to be flattering, or at least so vague as to not be insulting, since bad feelings could hurt repeat business. Readings tended to shore up prevailing attitudes and reflected contemporary beliefs about the appropriate roles of men and women. Women’s skulls usually exhibited strong parental feelings and large organs of “Benevolence” and “Inhabitiveness,” just the areas needed to keep women at home with the kids.⁴⁹ As William James noted in his Principles of Psychology in the late nineteenth century, “Phrenology hardly does more than restate the problem. . . . To answer the question, ‘Why do I like children?’ by saying, ‘Because you have a large organ of philoprogenitiveness,’ but renames the phenomenon to be explained.”⁵⁰ Nevertheless, confirmation was what many people wanted, and it brought crowds of supporters to the phrenologist’s doors.

Many of these itinerant phrenologists were eminently practical, recognizing the value of providing actionable, concrete advice. This kind of counsel was in great demand as America became a nation of increasing geographic and social mobility. It was also quite a different tack than that taken by Spurzheim and Combe, who were far more theoretically oriented and had little to offer people looking for tangible answers to life’s basic questions. Practical phrenologists, on the other hand, functioned more like psychics, determining career aptitudes or marriage prospects with declarative prognostication. Unlike psychics, though, phrenologists appeared to have science on their side, a considerable attraction in post-Enlightenment nineteenth-century America.51

The Fowlers, too, were highly practical in their phrenology, offering what they called vocational guidance and employment counseling. They were so successful at it that some employers required job applicants to bring a recommendation of their abilities from the Fowlers. For those in search of a calling, the Fowlers had a list of “developments” that would lead to success in particular careers, almost like a career aptitude test, but one that measured your head rather than your demonstrable skills. Lawyers, for instance, required a large area of “Eventuality” to recall cases, while the perceptive faculties should dominate the medical profession. The mechanic needed a sizable zone of “Constructiveness.” For those wanting to follow in the Fowlers’ footsteps, a good phrenologist needed a “first-rate head” marked by good perception, an excellent memory, strong “Comparison and Human Nature,” “Constructiveness,” and “Ideality.”⁵² Once people knew what line of work they wished to pursue, they needed only to cultivate the faculties necessary for success in that particular calling.

Phrenology could work against employment as well. In 1867, the New York Times reported that a Montreal postmaster had fired several employees after a phrenologist found them deficient in skills he deemed essential to the job. “The moral and intellectual bumps were found deficient, so much so that it was impossible to retain those gentleman any longer as public servants,” claimed the phrenologically devoted postmaster.⁵³ Heads did not lie. Unless, of course, they did. A decade earlier, Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most popular and highest-circulation women’s magazine of the nineteenth century, proclaimed that women had an advantage over men in potentially deceiving the phrenologist. All they had to do was adjust their hair. “Upon most of the betraying prominences, complete disguise may be put, and those which are creditable and beautiful may be greatly thrown into relief, heightened and made to tell upon expression. An inch forward or backward in the placing the knot of the hair, gives the head (the most common observer sees, without knowing why) a very different character,” stated the author. A woman could “make her head show, phrenologically, for pretty much what she pleases.”54

Work wasn’t the only area for which the Fowlers offered advice: they also counseled on love. The Fowlers declared that love, like all areas of life, was governed by exact scientific rules; you needed only to consult a phrenologist to learn how to apply them. Using guidelines dictated by temperament and phrenological development, the Fowlers created charts that would help clients choose “congenial companions for life.” Generally, their advice was straightforward and not unlike that found in modern advice columns. Persons of the same temperament, especially if on the extreme end of that temperament, should not be married. The same held true for those of opposite temperaments. Instead, people should aim to find mates with compatible and complementary traits. “Suppose your very large Benevolence fastens upon doing good as your highest duty,” wrote Orson Fowler, “how can your feelings in other respects harmonize with a selfish companion, whose god is gain, and who turns coldly from suffering humanity, refusing to bestow charity, and contending with you for casting in your mite.” Some of their advice was less predictable, though. Those with “bright red hair should marry jet black” and the curly haired should never marry another with curly hair, the style and coloring of hair presumably indicating character traits that would clash.⁵⁵ Godey’s Lady’s Book declared phrenology would do away “with all doubt and misgiving” in love as potential mates could now “woo by the book.”⁵⁶

Countless public figures had their heads examined by the Fowlers, whether out of curiosity, hope, or belief, and the results were often published in the Fowlers’ American Phrenological Journal. Showman P. T. Barnum, abolitionist John Brown, newspaperman Horace Greeley, future president James Garfield, and poet Walt Whitman all offered their heads for examination. Statesman Daniel Webster received the flattering report that his skull was to ordinary heads “what the great dome of St. Peter’s is to the small cupolas at its side.”⁵⁷ Women’s rights advocate Susan B. Anthony was, at first, rather obliquely described as “an original character” but the reading went on to praise her: “those who look for a passive and submissive spirit will not find it here; but they will find a brave, resolute, vigorous, and willing worker.” Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross, was said to have picked her career based on a reading by Lorenzo Fowler. He examined her head in the mid-1830s and advised her mother to “throw responsibility” upon the then-fifteen-year-old Barton, for she had the mind of a great teacher.58 Lorenzo also read the head of the then-unknown Allan Pinkerton and declared he “would make a capital detective; he would smell a rogue three miles [away].” Pinkerton later went on to found the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which became one of the most famous agencies of its kind, in part for foiling an assassination attempt against President Lincoln in 1861.⁵⁹ Legend has it that President Ulysses S. Grant also chose his military career based on a head reading.⁶⁰

Phrenological ideas traveled far and wide and through every profession in the United States, including politics. After an 1842 visit to Washington, DC, writer Charles Dickens reported that he was asked his impression of the nation’s political heads. They didn’t mean “their chiefs and leaders,” wrote Dickens in wonderment, “but literally their individual and personal heads, whereon their hair grew, and whereby the phrenological character of each legislator was expressed.”⁶¹ Phrenology offered politicians a powerful means to affirm the quality of their character or, in other instances, to redeem reputations gone awry. After Vice President Andrew Johnson gave a drunken speech to the Senate at President Lincoln’s inauguration in March of 1865 (suffering from typhoid fever, Johnson consumed several glasses of whiskey to give him strength before the event), Johnson had been dogged by accusations that he was a drunkard and unfit for political office. In 1866, the New York Times published a profile of Johnson that included his phrenology. He’s “a man of warm impulses, indomitable will and courage, upright and philosophical, patriotic,” and most important of all, “strictly temperate.” The writer concluded that the rumors of Johnson’s drinking habits could not possibly be true based on his healthy appearance and upstanding head bumps.⁶²

Writers seized on phrenology as a creative decoder for revealing knowledge about themselves and their characters. Phrenology as psychology was taken seriously and permeated the literature and novels of the day. Louisa May Alcott, William Cullen Bryant, Stephen Crane, William Dean Howells, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell were among the many writers to submit to phrenological exams to understand themselves better. Other writers incorporated phrenology into their stories. Edgar Allan Poe used phrenology as a tool to analyze human nature in short stories such as “The Imp of the Perverse,” “The Business Man,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” In a short story titled “A.D. 3000,” by an unnamed author in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, a Rip Van Winkle-esque man awakes to find himself in a future where a State Phrenological Commission examines the heads of fifteen-month-old babies to determine their future vocation. On leaving the room, “each infant has a ticket pasted on its person, bearing the name of the trade or profession to which it is destined.”63 Even the white whale in Moby Dick cannot escape having his head read, or, more accurately, his spine, since his brain is too small to be “adequately charted.” A thorough reading of the facial bumps and vertebrae of the whale leads Ishmael to aptly conclude that the whale has an unusually large “organ of firmness or indomitableness.” Melville also compares Queequeg’s head favorably with that of George Washington, though Queequeg “was George Washington cannibalistically developed.”⁶⁴ Phrenology also made frequent appearances both serious and satirical in the Editor’s Drawer column of Harper’s.

Among the countless books, pamphlets, and other written material churned out by the Fowlers was the debut work of Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass. Whitman published the first edition himself, but the Fowlers’ office was one of only two retail outlets for the book. The second edition came out under the Fowlers’ publishing imprint. Whitman had first developed a strong interest in the field in 1846, reading and commenting on phrenological articles in newspapers and journals and writing positive reviews of phrenological manuals. In 1849, Whitman received what he considered a highly favorable reading from Lorenzo Fowler. The analysis described a man who chooses to “fight with tongue and pen rather than with your fist,” who was “too open at times,” and without “enough restraint in speech.” “You are independent, not wishing to be a slave yourself or to enslave others,” dictated Lorenzo. “You have your own opinions and think for yourself.” Whitman was a man who could “compare. illustrate. discriminate. and criticize with much ability.”65 The picture of the future poet, or “Printer” as Lorenzo noted of his occupation, was just what Whitman hoped to see in himself, an aspiring, individualistic poet. He credited phrenology with giving him the conceptual basis for Leaves of Grass, claiming to have used “phrenological methods for the interpretation of character” as he wrote. Many of his poems exemplified phrenological principles of individualism, optimism, self-improvement, and worship of the body. His many references to facial features, including his own, indicated the importance he placed on physiognomy as both a guide to living and an artistic source. He wrote honestly on taboo topics, including sex, because he shared the Fowlers’ faith in the aphorism “know thyself” and their belief that any fear could be overcome through open discussion. Whitman’s understanding of phrenology shaped his thinking on a variety of reform subjects, including education, women’s rights, religion, and health. Believing, like the Fowlers, that a healthy body housed a healthy soul, he thought that perfection was attainable when the two merged on equal terms. Whitman quoted sections of his reading—“large hope and comparison”—time and again in his writings and published his phrenological chart in at least five publications, as if seeking to prove to readers that he was living up to his phrenological potential.⁶⁶

The national obsession with head size and shape also infected daily conversation. Many modern phrases trace their roots to phrenology, including “highbrow” and “lowbrow,” “well rounded,” and “shrink” (as in “shrinking” certain undesirable qualities). “Getting your head examined” also has phrenological roots. Though generally considered an insult today, in the past, it was just what most people wanted.⁶⁷

Phrenology had its skeptics, of course, and not least among them was Mark Twain. Twain’s mock horror at the “humorless” hole found in his head by Lorenzo Fowler was but one example of the phrenological terms and concepts he wove into his stories. In a somewhat malicious character sketch of an acquaintance known as “Jul’us Caesar,” Twain writes that he “was a phrenological curiosity: his head was one vast lump of Approbativeness [vanity]; and though he was as ignorant and as void of intellect as a Hottentot, yet the great leveler and equalizer, Self Conceit, made him believe himself fully talented, learned and handsome as it is possible for a human being to be.”⁶⁸ But Twain took phrenology more seriously in his own life, investigating its claims of character detection and psychological guidance and continually submitting to head exams.69

For some, though, Twain’s humorous skepticism did not go far enough. From its earliest days in Europe, phrenology faced plenty of criticism, mostly from doctors, scientists, religious leaders, and politicians. The Austrian government ordered Gall to stop lecturing in 1801 for fear that his talks would cause people to “lose their heads” and become materialists, believing only in the truths written on their skulls rather than those of God. Gall soon fled Vienna for France, but there, too, he faced a backlash that threatened his credibility. French scientist Marie-Jean-Pierre Flourens became one of Gall’s most powerful adversaries. Flourens systematically tested Gall’s theories on animals, removing portions of the brains of dogs, rabbits, and birds to examine how the remaining sections functioned. His experiments led him to conclude that Gall was wrong, that the brain acted as a whole unit and not as discrete parts. Damage to one area caused other parts to take over and perform the same function. He published his findings in two explosive exposés. The battle over the truth of phrenology didn’t just occur in the lab. Flourens also tried to paint Gall as a crazed lunatic so driven to collect skulls that “every body in Vienna was trembling for his head, and fearing that after his death it would be put in requisition to enrich Dr. Gall’s cabinet.”⁷⁰

The backlash wasn’t just confined to Europe. In Washington, DC, Professor Thomas Sewell rejected phrenology as a method for understanding the brain. He argued that brain injuries rarely affected bodily function in the way predicted by phrenology. Moreover, Sewell argued that the brain couldn’t possibly be measured from the skull alone. Oliver Wendell Holmes took a similar line of criticism, though in typical Holmes form, it was far more snappy and clever than the others. He compared the skull to a safe that enclosed contents—the brain—unknowable from the outside:

The walls of the head are double, with a great air-chamber between them, over the smallest and most closely crowded “organs.” Can you tell how much money there is in a safe, which also has thick double walls, by kneading its knobs with your fingers? So when a man fumbles about my forehead, and talks about the organs of Individuality, Size, etc., I trust him as much as I should if he felt the outside of my strongbox and told me that there was a five-dollar or a ten-dollar bill under this or that particular rivet.⁷¹

Physician Oliver Wendell Holmes was critical of all irregular health systems, including homeopathy and phrenology. (National Library of Medicine)

Holmes did not state outright that phrenology was wrong, but rather that there was no way to prove that it was right either, which made its status as a true science questionable.

Phrenology also floundered as a viable academic pursuit. The American Journal of Phrenology flopped as a magazine for professional phrenological researchers soon after it began. Many American doctors who had once praised phrenology denied ever having supported it when it became equated with other laughable “sciences” like astrology, Thomsonism, and palmistry in the late 1840s and 1850s. It didn’t help phrenology’s reputation that the Fowlers, no matter how much they claimed to truly believe in the science, had created a highly profitable venture for themselves. Their museum, promotional campaigns, and product line made them appear no different than those hawking mystical potions in the eyes of many regular doctors. American doctors Warren, Bell, and Caldwell, who had eagerly brought news of phrenology home with them from Europe in the 1820s, died with no mention of phrenology in their obituaries, even though Caldwell had written a landmark book on the subject. Phrenology had clearly passed beyond medical respectability by the mid-nineteenth century, dismissed entirely by many of its early proponents.72

The Fowlers’ popularity invited special abuse from scientists, ministers, and even other phrenologists angling for business. By the 1840s, they were labeled quacks and their business denigrated as a humbug. Rival phrenologists often advertised themselves as superior to the Fowlers, while one took to impersonating Lorenzo and called himself L. N. Fowler. Orson Fowler fought back, especially against those practitioners whom he believed tainted the field by using phrenology as a swindle. The Fowlers never claimed to be doctors or scientists, only reformers who truly believed in their cause and its benefits to humanity.⁷³

Even as phrenology fell out of favor in academic circles in the 1840s, it remained wildly popular and influential in American culture until late in the nineteenth century. More than perhaps any other nineteenth-century medical alternative, phrenology came to be about far more than just health and disease. In the absence of clear proof of how the brain really functioned, phrenology’s detractors struggled to expel it from the realm of science. It was much easier to say something was a legitimate science, as phrenology’s proponents did, than to prove it was not. Phrenologists cited Isaac Newton, Galileo, and William Harvey as examples of scientists who challenged common ways of thinking and were rebuked in their own time before finding wide acceptance. Phrenologists urged people to observe and decide for themselves the truth of phrenology, and to not simply accept uncritically what they were told. That anyone could learn to do phrenology meant that anyone could also decide what was true or not true about it. The openness of phrenology’s vision and practice proved vital to its spread and staying power. Popular attention only began to shift away from phrenology as other health movements rose to prominence and as new scientific discoveries captured the American imagination in the 1850s and 1860s.74

By the twentieth century, phrenology had mostly lost its scientific authority and much of its popular appeal. A few diehards, among them the children and grandchildren of the Fowlers, still practiced. The progress of medical science offered new and better tools for understanding the brain. To many Americans, phrenology now seemed old-fashioned and ridiculous.

That’s not to say that the phrenologists hadn’t gotten some things right. Gall placed the brain at the center of all cognitive and emotional functions at a time when some physicians still located some of the “passions” elsewhere, such as the heart and liver. Although he wasn’t the first to suggest it, Gall made the brain the foundation of his system, which brought increased attention to the theory.

Gall based his conjectures on his expert anatomical observations. From his work in comparative anatomy, Gall knew that the nervous systems in many lower animals consisted essentially of a spinal cord without much of a brain. More sophisticated animals, however, had larger, more developed brains, particularly the cerebral cortex. From these observations, Gall suggested that the cortex must be the highest-functioning part of the nervous system and that more sophisticated animals developed larger brains. This view of the nervous system was relatively new at the time, as most contemporary anatomists thought of the spinal cord as simply the “tail” of the brain. Gall also suggested functional differences between gray and white matter in the brain and described a host of features of the cranial nerves, concepts foundational to modern neuroscience.75

Gall’s fundamental idea of a brain composed of faculties with different specializations ultimately proved correct, though the direction in which phrenology went with this insight was not. Gall was the first to make the strong case for the possibility of brain function emerging from spatial organization. Although Flourens’s findings and smear campaign worked to marginalize Gall in scientific circles, localization resurfaced again and again throughout the nineteenth century. In 1861, French surgeon and anthropologist Paul Broca showed that damage to one area of the brain can make a person unable to speak coherently without affecting the ability to understand others. His findings seemed to vindicate the brain localization idea behind phrenology, but because phrenology had fallen into such disrepute, Broca was careful to draw distinctions between his work and Gall’s. Holding phrenology at arm’s length, Broca described his own theory of cortical localization in the part of the brain that came to be called “Broca’s area” as different from the cranial localization of Gall. It seems fair to think of Gall as a visionary with the right idea but faulty logic and a flawed methodology. His chief antagonist, Flourens, on the other hand, used a more scientific method to test phrenology but reached the wrong conclusion. Later in the nineteenth century, British neurologist David Ferrier created maps of the motor and sensory functions in the cerebral cortex that owed a clear debt to phrenology.⁷⁶ More recently, in 2002, scientists in the Brain Mapping Division at the University of California, Los Angeles, announced the creation of a “large-scale computational brain atlas” to “visualize” brain structure and function, and to store “information on individual variations in the brain structure and their inheritability.” Gall could have made a similar announcement two centuries earlier, though with far more primitive tools.⁷⁷

The nineteenth-century fascination with the brain isn’t all that far removed from our modern obsession with the mind. We have once again elevated the brain to cultish status, celebrating and perhaps even aggrandizing its power and purpose to shape the world. Everything and every field now seems to have a “neuro” component, from neuromarketing to neuroeconomics, a transmutation of language strikingly similar to that which occurred in the nineteenth century as phrenological terms passed from the laboratory to daily conversation. Brain science often seems less a hard science than a means of fortune-telling. Colorful and detailed PET and fMRI images of the brain appear in magazines and newspapers, on television and online, encouraging us to think of almost everything through its effect on the brain. These images have become the modern equivalent of the phrenological charts that adorned the walls of pharmacies and general stores and were featured in the pages of magazines and books. Many of us continue to hope, as the phrenologists did, that mapping the brain will reveal the secrets of human nature that, once known, will allow for its manipulation and transformation, and ultimately for personal improvement. Popular neuroscience seems to suggest that concentrated efforts to improve the brain will make us smarter, faster, and more efficient, and maybe even lead to perfection. Headlines and book titles like Super Brain Power, Brainfit, Use Your Brain to Change Your Age, Coaching with the Brain in Mind, and Rewire Your Brain for Love scream that the key to life—a better job, better health, better love, better children, better looks—is the brain, no matter the improvement sought and regardless of how little we actually know about how the brain works. It’s the phrenology of the twenty-first century, and Americans are as ravenous for it today as they were in the nineteenth century.78

The Fowlers remained dedicated to phrenology for the rest of their lives, and continued to live colorful lives despite phrenology’s declining status. Orson Fowler continued to offer phrenological exams but left the family business in the 1850s to concentrate on publishing and on promoting radical reforms in the areas of marriage, parenting, and sex. His publications on sex shattered his reputation in the straitlaced Victorian era, and he died in relative obscurity in 1887. Lorenzo and Lydia Fowler moved to England in 1863 and opened a branch of their firm on London’s Fleet Street, near Ludgate Circus, bringing phrenology back to the home country of their mentor, George Combe. The Fowler Phrenological Institute flourished abroad, offering classes on phrenology, displaying casts and busts, and selling publications. Their lectures led to the creation of new phrenological societies just like those that tours by Spurzheim and Combe had inspired decades earlier. Lorenzo founded the British Phrenological Society, the last organization to form in the movement, in 1886, and it continued to meet and promote phrenological ideas, with only limited interruptions, until 1967.79 Never ones to stand on the sidelines, the Fowlers also advocated for other forms of healing, entranced by the ever-flowing stream of exciting new medical theories. In the late 1840s, they added the official periodical of hydropathy, the Water-Cure Journal, to their stable of publications. They believed that hydropathy was destined to “not only surpass, but to swallow up or wash away, every other medical system now existing among men,” releasing humanity from its dependence on the “drugopathic system.”⁸⁰