Brains, Minds and Heads: Phrenology in the Nineteenth Century

1. Brains, Minds and Heads:Phrenology in the Nineteenth Century

2. Zoonomia, or, The Laws of Organic Life (1794-1796) Erasmus Darwin 1792 Portrait by Joseph Wright

3. Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) Neuroanatomist and Craniologist

4. Faculty PsychologyThomas Reid (1710-1796) Active Powers: self-esteem, friendship, sexual affection, emulation, duty, veneration, beauty, imagination—35 in all Intellectual/Cognitive Powers: five senses, perception, size and novelty, memory, judgment and reason, abstraction, conception and moral taste.

5. Johann Caspar LavaterEssays on Physiognomy, designed to promote the knowledge and the love of mankind Published in German (1789-98)

6. Lavater’s physiognomy of the four temperaments

7. Gall’s Craniology “On the Functions of the Brain and Each of its Parts: With Observations on the Possibility of Determining the Instincts, Propensities, and Talents, or the Moral And Intellectual Dispositions of Men and Animals, by the Configuration of the Brain and Head”

8. Gall’s Principles • That moral and intellectual faculties are innate. • That their exercise or manifestation depends on organization. • That the brain is the organ of all the propensities, sentiments and faculties. • That the brain is composed of as many particular organs as there are propensities, sentiments, and faculties, which differ essentially from each other. (Gall, Vol. 1, p. 55)

9. Dr. Gall’s Lecture Depicted by Thomas Rowlandson, 1756-1827

10. A Selection of Gall’s 27 Faculties the instinct of generation (sexual instinct) love of offspring (philoprogenitiveness), attachment, self-defense, carnivorous instinct--likened to a disposition to murder, cunning, sense of property, pride, vanity and ambition, cautiousness, memory of things, sense of locality, recognition of persons, verbal memory, color-sense, talent for music, numerical ability, comparative ability, metaphysical abilities, wit, poetry, goodness, religious sensibility, and others.

11. Jean-Marie Pierre Flourens (1794-1867) Contested Gall: conducted experiments to show that the brain acted as a whole

12. Phrenological Head With Illustrated Faculties

13. Phrenology’s Popularizers: Johannes Gaspar Spurzheim Toured England, 1814 Toured America, 1832 Orson and Lorenzo Fowler, Phrenological Cabinet, NYC, 1836

14. Diagram from W. Mattieu Williams, A Vindication of Phrenology. London, 1894. from http://pages.britishlibrary.net/phrenology/images.html

15. Partial List of Fowler’s 37 Faculties Chart of the relative size of organ and table of references. 1846

16. FOWLER’S HEAD Fowler’s Practical Phrenology 1846

17. Intellectual female Well-balanced Head War Chief, Miami Indian Murderer Fowler, 1846

18. Indian Chiefs Engineer Cunning and Roguish Cat Thief and a Liar Hyena

19. Fowler’s Phrenological Head

21. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick 1851 “It is plain then, that phrenologically the head of this Leviathan, in the creature’s living intact state, is an entire delusion. As for his true brain, you can then see no indications of it, nor feel any. The whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the common world.” Chapter 80

23. Honoré Daumier, 1845 The Philanthropy of the Day “Monsieur est trés voleur”

24. Rare Specimens of Comparative Craniology: An old Maid’s Skull Phrenologized

26. Bumpology: “Pores o’er the Cranial map with learned eyes: Each rising hill and bumpy knoll descries, Here secret fires, and there deep mines of sense His touch detects beneath each prominence.”

27. Bless Me, What a Bump! William Heath 1795-1840

28. Localizing Phrenological Organs in Convolutions

29. Jerry Fodor The Modularity of Mind, 1983 Cognitive Psychology