Today’s social-media aficionados take a lot of personality tests that we know are pure rot, like “what your birth crystal says about the way you treat your pets” or “what your quarantine eating habits reveal about your financial investment patterns.” The bust pictured here reflects similarly outlandish claims from a century and a half ago, yet many people from the United States believed them. And here, I’m talking about phrenology.
Developed by the Austrian scientist Franz Joseph Gall in the late 18th/early 19th century, phrenology is the study of how the contours of the human skull match up with mental attributes. Words in common usage today, like “highbrow,” “lowbrow,” “well rounded,” and “shrink” come from this practice, which declined in popularity in Europe after 1840 (see the third image of a cartoon ridiculing phrenology), but kept up a steady pace in the USA through the turn of the twentieth century.
Many, many Americans cottoned to phrenology — the personality traits phrenology revealed captivated elites and middle-class alike by confirming hunches. (P.T. Barnum scored low on cautiousness! Aaron Burr’s treasonous skull showed a high degree of secretiveness and destructiveness!) The second photo that shows how a bad mother can be revealed by the shape of her skull.
But a deeply insidious outcome of American phrenologists was the way these ideas were used to support racism and justify policies that kept certain groups firmly in power. The skull shown in the first image belonged to Dr. Charles Caldwell, who started the University of Louisville School of Medicine. A slave-owning phrenologist, Caldwell argued that the skulls of African people had enlarged organs of cautiousness and veneration. Thus, he argued, these people needed to have masters. The phrenologist Samuel Morton argued that indigenous Americans were “slow in acquiring knowledge,” and therefore deserved to be kicked off their land.
It is easy to be smug about the pseudo-science of the distant past, but of course it is rife today, invisible to practitioners by its very nature. The Scientific Method and the study of history are two ways to redress this common default to confirmation bias.
Source(s): _The Atlantic_, “The Shaoe of Your Head and the Shaoe of Your Mind,” Erika Janik, Jan 6, 2014. _Smithsonian Magazine_, “Facing a Bumpy History,” Minna Scherlinder Morse, October 1997. @pages.vassar.edu, “Real Archaeology, Phrenology and ‘Scientific Racism’ in the 19th Century,” March 5, 2017, Kitowsky. @anatomicalmuseum, “Phrenology and Slavery,” July 13, 2018, Ruby Hann. _The Converaation_, “Neuroscientists put the dubious theory of ‘phrenology’ through rigorous testing for the first time,” Jan 22, 2018, Harriett Dempsey-Jones.
