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Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894) was a Boston physician, a professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School, and a writer of prose and poetry for general audiences. He was also one of the most famous American wits of the nineteenth century and a celebrity not bashful about exposing costly, absurd, and potentially harmful medical fads. One of his targets was phrenology, and the current article examines how he learned about phrenology during the 1830s as a medical student in Boston and Paris, and his head-reading with Lorenzo Fowler in 1858. It then turns to what he told readers of the Atlantic Monthly (in 1859) and Harvard medical students (in 1861) about phrenology being a pseudoscience and how phrenologists were duping clients. By looking at what Holmes was stating about cranioscopy and practitioners of phrenology in both humorous and more serious ways, historians can more fully appreciate the "bumpy" trajectory of one of the most significant medical and scientific fads of the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Just a few weeks before his death in 1828, Franz Joseph Gall, the father of what others would later call phrenology, wrote a letter to an unknown person, presumably a fellow physician. The manuscript describes the case of girl, 19 months of age. The girl's skull showed marked deformations consistent with what would be called craniosynostosis or Crouzon('s) syndrome by physicians today. Gall related some clinical features of her case and suggested some treatment options. This case report is particularly interesting because it is almost 200 years old, predates Crouzon's description of the syndrome by 84 years, and shows that Gall was still involved with treating patients, even in his final year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), the American humorist and author better known as Mark Twain, was skeptical about clairvoyance, supernatural entities, palm reading, and certain medical fads, including phrenology. During the early 1870s, he set forth to test phrenology—and, more specifically, its reliance on craniology—by undergoing two head examinations with Lorenzo Fowler, an American phrenologist with an institute in London. Twain hid his identity during his first visit, but not when he returned as a new customer three months later, only to receive a very different report about his humor, courage, and so on. He described his experiences in a short letter written in 1906 to a correspondent in London, in humorous detail in a chapter that appeared in a posthumous edition of his autobiography, and in The Secret History of Eddypus, the World Empire, a work of fiction involving time travel, which he began to write around 1901 but never completed. All three versions of Twain's phrenological ploy are presented here with commentary to put his descriptions in perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a brief period in1826, George Cruickshank (1798–1878), already an established artist in political satire and book illustration, turned to phrenology. He produced one initial print (Bumpology), followed by a collection of six plates of 33 engravings, linked by an explanatory preface, under the title, Phrenological Illustrations or an Artist's View of the Craniological System of Doctors Gall and Spurzheim. It was published during what is regarded as "the phrenological craze" in Britain. The illustrations were also produced at the height of Cruickshank's staggering creative productivity. In 1873, as phrenology was making its exit from scientific credibility into history, Cruickshank's phrenological illustrations were reissued by popular demand. Yet in contrast to his other works, these illustrations have received little attention in modern scholarship. The ways and the extent to which his caricatures constitute a contribution to the history of phrenology deserve to be studied. Here they are analyzed together with his descriptions in the prefaces to both the 1826 and 1873 editions. They reveal a surprising knowledge of phrenology in relation to Spurzheim and Gall. Furthermore, their uniquely innovative features will be identified in the context of other contemporary caricatures, and the fundamental significance of Cruickshank's achievement and its impact will be evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Franz Joseph Gall's (1758–1828) proposal for a new theory about how to represent the mental faculties is well known. He replaced the traditional perception-judgement-memory triad of abstract faculties with a set of 27 highly specific faculties, many of which humans share with animals. In addition, he argued that these faculties are dependent on specific cortical areas, these being his organs of mind. After several years of presenting his new views in Vienna, he was banned from lecturing for what he considered absurd reasons. The edict enticed him to make a scientific journey through the German states, both to present his ideas to targeted audiences and to collect more cases. This trip, started in 1805, was extended to include stops in Denmark, Holland, and Switzerland before finally ending in Paris in 1807. For the most part, Gall was received with great enthusiasm in what is now Germany, but there were some individuals who strongly opposed his anatomical discoveries and skull-based doctrine. In this article, we examine the concerns and arguments raised by Johann Gotlieb Walter in Berlin, Henrik Steffens in Halle, Jakob Fidelis Ackermann in Heidelberg, and Samuel Thomas Soemmerring in Munich, as well as how Gall responded to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paul Broca surmised that the short and broad—brachycephalic—skulls of the earliest European settlers had become longer and narrower—dolichocephalic—in modern populations due to the blending of different races. Swedish anatomist Anders Retzius had two brachycephalic skulls said to be from contemporary Basque individuals, a claim suited to test Broca’s hypothesis. Broca worked with fellow anatomist and surgeon Pedro González Velasco, the founding father of Spanish anthropology, to gather a large number of Basque skulls. In its time, this was the most fascinating collection owned by the Anthropological Society of Paris. This article explains how Broca and Velasco were able to gather such a sizeable array of specimens, which they had collected at a location known at first by the code name of “Z.” Although Broca finally concluded that the origin of the Retzius skulls could not be determined, his research was to spark anthropologists’ interest in the language and origins of the Basque people. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Whereas some of Gall's critics were quick to assail his organology as materialistic and fatalistic, others questioned his methods and scientific assumptions, especially his craniological tenets. The idea that the skull does not faithfully reflect the features of small, underlying brain areas was repeatedly brought up in the scientific debates. Critics pointed to the frontal sinuses above the eye orbits as evidence for the interior and exterior plates of the cranium not being in parallel-hence, for several or many phrenological organs being unknowable. This article traces the origins of the frontal sinus arguments and how Gall, Spurzheim, and later phrenologists responded to it. It reveals how the two sides fought and remained divided about the significance of the sinuses throughout the nineteenth century-that is, on whether the frontal sinus "problem" was an insurmountable obstacle or one that was merely an inconvenience.

The history of phrenology in France has a number of unique features. It was in that country that F. J. Gall sought refuge; and it was, above all, in France that phrenology would subsequently attempt to establish its credentials as a new physiological science of the mind. Up until the 1840s, phrenology expanded rapidly in the country, a growth that coincided with attempts to provide this new field with the trappings of respectable scientific endeavor-courses of lectures, learned societies, journals, and so on. This ambitious intellectual project, despite its controversial nature, made a major cultural impact in the nineteenth century, both through its influence on the written word-from learned journals to the novel-and via its striking visual imagery (sculpture, anatomical diagrams and models, engravings, caricatures, and so on). However, as the scientific impact of phrenology declined, allusions to it lost much of their cultural force. On the borderline between respectable science and mere quackery, phrenology in France represented an attempt to construct a whole new intellectual universe based on scientific principles, and as such had a profound impact on its period.