Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Phrenology

Episode Date: February 15, 2024

In the 19th century, a new discipline swept over the medical and legal professions.  This belief held that a person’s personality could be determined by analyzing the contours or bumps on their head.  The belief had a surprising amount of sway among certain people, and it developed a large following before eventually being thoroughly discredited. Learn more about the pseudoscience of phrenology, how it was developed, and why it caught on on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors BetterHelp Visit BetterHelp.com/everywhere today to get 10% off your first month ButcherBox Sign up today at butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily to choose your free steak for a year and get $20 off."  Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the 19th century, a new discipline swept over the medical and legal professions. This belief held that a person's personality could be determined by analyzing the contours or bumps on their head. The belief had a surprising amount of sway among certain people, and it developed a large following before eventually being thoroughly discredited. Learn more about the pseudoscience of phrenology, how it was developed and why it caught on on this episode of Everything Everywhere daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? Throughline is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day and tonight. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast

from NPR. It might be hard to believe today, but phrenology was once a big deal. Then again, there are still people who believe in astrology, so perhaps it isn't that hard to believe. Like all pseudoscience, it had just enough vaguely-sci-looking things about it, a few nuggets of truth, and a whole lot of nonsense piled on top. The beginnings of phrenology can actually be traced back to a fact that is not controversial today, but was hotly debated in ancient history, that the brain was the organ of the body that was responsible for thought. This was not always believed to be the case. It was originally thought that the part of the body that was responsible for thought was the heart. Aristotle was one of the ancient philosophers who thought that the heart was the center

of intelligence. Early Greek physicians, such as alchmion of croton and Hippocrates, challenged the theory that the heart was the center of thought and consciousness. Their belief largely came from their working with dissection and noting the pathways of nerves, especially from the eye. In the second century, the Roman physician Galen again concluded that the brain was the center of human thought. Eventually, this belief became commonly accepted, and in the Renaissance and beyond, more physicians began conducting more in-depth studies of the brain. Anabist such as Leonardo da Vinci and Andreas Veselius began doing detailed sketches of the brain. In the 17th century, Thomas Willis, who was considered to be the father of neurology, did further investigation and discovered the

circle of Willis, which is a network of arteries that supports. applies blood to the brain. By the 18th century, it had been well established that the brain was the seat of intelligence, and that different parts of the brain were probably responsible for different things. So with what little we knew about the brain, so far so good. Any modern textbook will tell you that the brain is responsible for cognitive function, and without getting into too much detail, different parts of the brain are responsible for different things. However, there was another ancient belief known as physiognomy. Physiognomy is the study or practice of assessing a person's character or personality from their outer appearance, particularly their face.

And it was practice in ancient Greece and China. Physiognomy operated on the assumption that there were correlations between physical features and certain personality traits, moral characteristics, or even destiny. And this is something that many people still practice, at least informally. someone might say that somebody looks shifty or that somebody has an honest face. There is, of course, no correlation between personality and looks or any physical traits, but it's a belief that has held on for centuries. Eventually, the ideas of physiognomy were merged into the knowledge about the brain. The man who was credited with being the father of phrenology was the German physician Franz Joseph Gall.

Gaul believed that certain parts of the brain were responsible for certain behavioral characteristics. This was known as organology. Organology held that the brain was a collection of smaller organs, each of which was responsible for different aspects of someone's personality. Again, there's a broad truth that different parts of the brain are responsible for different things like speech. However, that wasn't what Gaul was saying. Gaul believed that there were parts of the brain responsible for personality traits, such as hope, compassion, secretiveness, acquisitiveness,

combativeness, and other attributes. In total, he identified 27 different personality traits associated with parts of the brain. Gaul believed that the relative size of these organs in the brain is what gave people their personality. Moreover, these areas of the brain were located on the surface of the brain. From his belief in organology, he was then led to develop a theory he called

called cranioscopy. Cranioscopy held that these regions on the surface of the brain, which determine personality traits, could be reflected in the shape and texture of the skull. One of his assistants, Johann Gospersheim, coined another term to describe this theory, phrenology. It was derived from the Greek words for mind and knowledge. In 1809, Gaul began working on his magnum opus, which would set the foundations for phrenology. His book was titled, and this is a mouthful, The Anatomy and Physiology of the Nervous System in general, and of the brain in particular,

with observations upon the possibility of ascertaining the several intellectual and moral dispositions of man and animal by the configuration of their heads. In it, Gaul set forward five main principles of phrenology. Number one, the brain is the organ of the mind. Number two, the brain is not a homogeneous unit, but an aggregate of mental organs with specific functions associated with various personality traits. Number three, the cerebral organs are in certain areas of the brain.

Number four, the relative size of any particular mental organ is indicative of the power or strength of that organ. And five, since the skull grows over the brain during infant development, external cranial logical methods could be used to diagnose the internal states of mental characteristics. Gall was more interested in developing the science of phrenology, and it was Spursheim who became its first major advocate. Gall and Spursheim had a falling out in 1812, and Spursheim began a career giving public lectures on the subject of phrenology. He traveled extensively through Europe over the next several years, where he found particular receptive audiences in England and France. However, not everyone was convinced.

In 1815, Dr. John Gordon, a Scottish physician and former president of the Royal Medical Society, published a debunking of phrenology. Gordon instead publicly supported the work of Johann Christian Reel, who was a pioneer in the discipline of psychiatry. Gordon called it, quote, A piece of thorough quackery from beginning to end. Gordon did a masterful job taking down the system created by Gaul and Spurton. However, it actually seems that he did too good of a job.

In the process of debunking phrenology, he provided a very concise summary of what phrenologists believed. His summary was so good that phrenologist used it to spread phrenology to a wider audience. Despite the debunking done by Dr. Gordon, phrenology kept spreading, finding a receptive audience. One of the main evangelists of phrenology was a Scotsman by the name of George Combe, who had heard spurred. Beresheim rebut Gordon's debunking in Edinburgh in 1816. Colman's brother founded the Phrenological Society of Edinburgh, the first such organization dedicated to phrenology. One of the reasons why phrenology became so popular is because it appeared to so many

people to be scientific. Spursheim had extended the 27 areas of the brain that Gaul had identified. Science and the scientific method were still being developed at this time, so the difference between legitimate science and pseudoscience still wasn't well understood. George Combe turbocharged the spread of phrenology by publishing short pamphlets, of which he sold over 200,000 copies. By 1840, there were 28 phrenology societies in London that had over 1,000 members. Despite the popularity of phrenology in some circles,

it had been largely discredited by the 1840s. One of the reasons why it was so discredited is because the phrenology practice petitioners couldn't agree amongst themselves just how it was supposed to work. The number of brain sections range from anywhere from 27 to 40, and what each section was supposed to represent was different depending who you talk to. Moreover, phrenology was primarily practiced by people who engaged in public exhibitions for money, not by actual researchers. Furthermore, the French physiologist Jean-Pierre Florens did experiments with the brains of animals, which disproved almost all of phrenology.

He was able to remove parts of the brains of pigeons, and the pigeons either didn't lose function or did so in a way that was not predicted by phrenology. Despite being discredited in serious medical circles, it still didn't disappear. It ended up getting attached to other theories and beliefs. The British heart and lung specialist John Eliotson became a devoted phrenologist and married it to mesmerism, or what we would call today, hypnosis. However, the thing that gave phrenology a second life was Charles Darwin and his theory of natural selection. Phrenology and natural selection put a scientific veneer on those who believe the superiority of people based on race, sex, or social class.

Phrenologists claim that the skulls of African Americans and other non-European ethnic groups exhibited features that indicated inferior intellectual capabilities and personality traits. and such pseudoscientific assertions were used to justify slavery and racial segregation in the 19th century. Phrenology was also used to reinforce gender stereotypes and justify the subjugation of women. Phrenologists posited that women had smaller skulls than men, suggesting this was evidence for women's inferior intellectual capabilities and their predisposition towards nurturing roles rather than intellectual or leadership positions. Phrenologists often link certain skull shapes to criminal tendencies, suggesting that, people from lower socioeconomic background were more likely to have these features, and thus were more predisposed to criminal behavior. And this led to discriminatory practices in law enforcement and the justice system, where individuals could be judged based on their

physical appearance, rather than what they actually did. All of these arguments barely even used the original phrenology developed by Gaul and Spursheim. They just used different physical differences to justify what they already believed. Many of the phrenologists who adopted these views were also some of the very first advocates of eugenics. By the late 19th century, phrenology had fallen out of fashion even as a pseudoscience. Developments in psychiatry and neurology have conclusively debunked most of the claims of phrenology.

If you remember back to my episode on Phineas Gage, he was a railroad construction worker in the 19th century who had a three-foot, iron rod blown through his skull in an explosion and survived. Gage, by all accounts, had all of his faculties, and doctors considered him to be fully recovered four years after his accident. It was considered by physicians to be a rare and freak occurrence that conclusively disproved phrenology. Of course, the case was also used by practitioners of phrenology to support their theories as well. Phrenology had a brief resurgence in the early 20th century. The biggest proponent was a British psychologist named Bernard Hollander.

He tried to take a statistical approach to measuring the skull, but his data proved nothing. Believe it or not, there are still some people who believe in phrenology in the 21st century, although the number is incredibly small. Despite the complete lack of evidence for phrenology and the lack of a coherent system that all phrenologists even could agree on, no one ever bothered to do a comprehensive neurological test of phrenology until, 2018. A team of researchers from Oxford University actually went and looked for a statistical correlation between 23 different personality traits and contours of the skull. They found nothing.

Moreover, based on magnetic resonance imaging of the human brain and skull, they found no connection between the curvature of the brain and the contours of the skull. And this, of course, makes perfect sense. The brain is soft and your skull is made out of bone. Your brain isn't pressing against your skull, causing it to deform. Whatever contours your skull might have is been due to bone growth, skin, hair, and maybe bumps you might have taken on your head. Phrenology is a classic example of a pseudoscience. It had many of the trappings of science with grand theories, explanations for observed behavior,

and measurements, but in the end, there was really nothing there. Not only could it not predict human behavior, but it was used to justify some of the worst behaviors and beliefs that were ever held by humans. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Peter Bennett and Cameron Kiefer. I have a couple of short reviews for you today. The first review comes from listener Margaret C.A. over on Apple Podcasts in the United States.

They write, love heart emoji. This is one of my favorite podcasts. Short, sweet, and to the point while being entertaining and informative. The next review comes from 91 Miles also on Apple Podcasts in the United States. They write, wonderful, very informative, keep it coming, great job. Thanks, Margaret and 91 Miles. I'm glad you were both enjoying the show and thank you for the reviews. And remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostogram, you too can have it read on the show.