Phrenology: A Brief History
Have you ever thought if your head is normal? If the shape and intricacies specific to the uppermost area of your body is different from your peers? Imagine if these idiosyncrasies branded us as slow learners or prone to commit crime in the future.
It sounds like lunacy — akin to predicting your future based on the lines in your palms — but in 1810, Franz Joseph Gall produced his seminal work on the discipline known as “phrenology”. Gall argued that enlargements in different parts of the brain would equate to bumps on the cranium. From these enlargements, he reasoned, we could gain insight into the effect that different cranial “bumps” had on the humans that they occupied. Essentially, Gall was saying that the brain was split into different “faculties” (pictured below) and that the shape of these affected our outward disposition.
Phrenology built on the ideas of eighteenth century theologian, Johann Lavater and his theory of physiognomy. Lavater’s physiognomy is built around the belief that we can get information of one’s inner workings from their physical appearance — in a sense, we could judge a book by its cover (this notion can be traced back to Ancient Greece and the writings of Aristotle).
A byproduct of phrenology was its contribution to the debate between free will and determinism[1]. If our personality is predetermined by our cranial shape, the legal and social implications would be boundless.
Unfortunately for Gall, the validity of phrenology was short-lived and by the 1840s most scientific circles deemed it as faulty science[2]. This was mainly the result of experiments showing the plasticity of the brain — when a part of an animal’s brain, which was attributed to have a specific outwardly function, was removed, the predicted loss of function did not occur.
Physiognomy did have a brief revival with Cesare Lombroso’s theory of criminal atavism (i.e., criminals have characteristic physical traits) but phrenology was doomed to fail because of its lack of empirical standing at its inception.
The theory of phrenology definitely had an effect on future psychological advancements, but on its own, it fails to stand up to our current knowledge of the effects our inner makeup has on our outer disposition.
[1] Parssinen, T. M. (Autumn 1974). “Popular Science and Society: The Phrenology Movement in Early Victorian Britain”. Journal of Social History 8 (1).
[2] McGrew, Roderick E. (1985). Encyclopedia of Medical History. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company.
