Phrenology: Bunk Science, But It Had Its Good Points

The editors of The Weekly Standard slapped the title “The New Phrenology” on Andrew Ferguson’s cover article debunking liberal psychopundits who claim conservatism is a DSM-grade mental disorder. Actually, Chris Mooney et al. are technically the New New New New Phrenologists, having been beaten to the original title by such disciplines as Freudianism, MRI scanning, public-opinion polling, and standardized testing. But maybe being “the new phrenology” is like being the Fifth Beatle, with multiple claimants having relatively coequal status. The more important point is that “phrenology” is still being used as a byword for pernicious pseudoscience. The pseudoscience part is undeniable, the pernicious part less so.

A modern defense of phrenology should stop well short of rehabilitating it completely. A person might get away with resurrecting it, even today — I’m sure that a caliper-wielding bumpologist could make a nice haul by fleecing steampunk-sympathizers in, say, Brooklyn — but it would be a form of retro-tinged fortune-telling: highly entertaining and thoroughly dishonest.

On the other hand, it’s just as dishonest to discount phrenology entirely. There are two main slanders from which it needs to be rescued, one scientific and one social-scientific. The first misconception claims that phrenology had no evidence behind it, no qualified scientists among its adherents, and no medical advances to its credit. The second puts phrenology in the same genealogy as eugenics, Social Darwinism, and white supremacy — ideas that are both discredited and evil.

Phrenology’s legitimate claims to medical credibility are mostly attributable to its original inventor, Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828), a German physiologist and anatomist. At a time when the brain was thought to be an indivisible organ, like the spleen, Gall theorized that the various faculties of man (e.g., Kindness, Circumspection, Secretiveness) were governed by specific cerebral regions in configurations corresponding to different personality types (e.g., Neurotic, Maternal, Criminal). He wasn’t far wrong, and “in hindsight the needed corrections were surprisingly small (though not minor),” as psychology professor Harry Jerison explains :

For “faculties” read “functions” in a more modern sense (e.g., “vision” or “hearing” rather than “benevolence” or “spirituality”); for “individuals” read “species” (a hard move for a pre-Darwinian scientist); for “types” read “adaptations” or “behavioral adaptations.”

Any comparative neurologist today will tell you that brain structure does tend to differ between species in ways that vindicate Gall’s basic idea, if not his actual funny diagrams . And even his funny diagrams got at least one thing right — the location of language function, which Gall correctly placed in Broca’s area before Paul Broca was even born. He had a stupid reason for locating it there — his most verbal friends all seemed pop-eyed to him, and he concluded that enlarged frontal lobes were squeezing their eyeballs — but at least he tested his theory empirically. He had a patient, a fencer, who had taken an epée through the eye and wounded that particular region. By heaven, aphasia resulted . Q.E.D.

But intellectual fads don’t get pariah status for flunking neuroanatomy. They get it for flunking respectable opinion. The caricature artists of the 19th century, with their neanderthal Africans and prognathous Irishmen, have done more to discredit phrenology than any brain scan. The racist blot on phrenology’s legacy probably ranks somewhere between birth control’s and anthropology’s, with further points deducted because the movement was too short-lived to grow out of it. But outside the universities, there were basically two kinds of people interested in phrenology: hucksters trying to sell something and reformers trying to accomplish something. In neither case was racism really part of the program, however present it might have been in the back of people’s minds.

There’s hardly a reform movement in the mid-nineteenth century that didn’t receive at least indirect support from phrenology. Its leaders gave personal endorsements to such causes as temperance, sex education, health food, physical culture, and the campaign against corsets, but its biggest and most direct contributions were in three main fields: education, penology, and treatment of the insane. In education, phrenologists claimed that, because the brain was a combination of many functional organs — ” a piano, not a trumpet ” — there were many different ways of being intelligent, and children who might be written off as dullards simply needed an education more suited to their strengths. Horace Mann was a big supporter. (To be fair, in his case it might have been self-interest — you might believe in phrenology too if you had a big honking skull like his.) Phrenology’s contribution to prison and asylum reform was its emphasis on rehabilitation over punishment or mere warehousing. Among asylum reformers, Dorothea Dix was practically the only one who didn’t rely on phrenological evidence, and that was largely because her concerns were more humanitarian than medical.

But it wouldn’t be fair to judge phrenology by its saints, so we have to consider the itinerant charlatans who did so much to make phrenology disreputable even in its own time. These men were hawking something not much more scientific than astrology, but apart from that, they were almost entirely benign. The typical “practical phrenologist” would roll into town, rent an auditorium, and stage a free demonstration of his expertise — reciting anecdotes of success stories, “reading” volunteers from the crowd, etc. He made his money by selling pamphlets on how to use phrenological principles to achieve fame and fortune and by charging a fee for private consultations. He was “a combination of the Yankee missionary and Yankee peddler, dispensing hortatory zeal to whoever would listen and useful wares to whoever would buy.”

That description comes from a book by historian John D. Davies called Phrenology, Fad and Science: A 19th-Century American Crusade . In his introduction, Davies explains, somewhat bashfully, why on earth a respected professor at Smith College would write a book on such a frivolous topic:

It is the thesis of this study that phrenology is deserving of detailed analysis, not “amused attention.” That it is classified with alchemy and astrology today does not mean it was merely a fad, appealing only to eccentrics. No one denies that the science of one generation is the pseudoscience of the next: today the “science” of public-opinion polls has already been compared to phrenology, and who can say what the reputation of Freud will be in the 21st century?

That was written in 1955, when the Freudianism reference was rather apt. Today, the appropriate comparison might be self-help literature. I have no idea whether faddish concepts like “the inner child” and “visualization” deserve more respect than they get from the psychological establishment — I doubt it — but I do know that very smart people like David Foster Wallace and Aaron Sorkin have been willing to defend self-help, especially the branch that deals with addiction. Otto von Bismarck wrote phrenological profiles of the people he worked with, and Metternich was not just a believer in Dr. Gall’s theories but a personal friend of his in Vienna. These two statesmen were renowned for their ability to read people, and if phrenology lent a helpful framework to their native talents, we should be reluctant to condemn that. There are many ways to judge a theory a failure. In the case of phrenology, the theory failed by just about any standard you could name. But not without exception.