Commonplace 183 George & Eugenics' Little Brother, Phrenology PART TWO
Phrenology is covered well in a number of websites, including this one click, John van Wyhe's Phrenology On The Web, which is a treasure trove - a fecking treasure trove! - of stuff.
One of the more bizarre aspects of the fad for the pseudo-science of phrenology was the way various religious groups took its claims as gospel, and latched on to the opportunity to categorise people into good and bad types... o, hang on, that's exactly what all religions do, isn't it? Silly me! Anyhoo, when Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) developed his system of reading the character, mind and personality via the brain and head, there were few takers in the international scientific community - those with the correct shape of the rational part of their brain were not convinced. In 1815, The Edinburgh Review published a scathing report on it. Gall's colleague and compatriot, JG Spurzheim fought back, making a very well-publicised rebuttal which, in the end did more to promote the cause of phrenology than any amount of books on the subject could have. At a time when the exploration of science was a discerning gentleman's hobby, any new-fangled theory about how the human body and mind worked was bound to attract amateur experts. Gall believed the brain contained 27 different organs which controlled various psychological, emotional, intellectual functions. Phrenology became a fashionable area of study, whilst enjoying a secondary life as a popular social activity. Mesmerism enjoyed a similar rise in public interest as an amusement as much as a medical tool.
In the late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, science was a whole world of entertainment and wonder to anyone with an enquiring mind or an interest in novelty and creepiness. There was something about a system that claimed to explain the mind that appealed to the Gothic mindset, in the days when psychological factors of human motivation were being explored. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein with its reanimated Creature thrilled all sectors of society. Ghosts, witches, public hangings, seances, the French Revolution and the horrors of the Napoleonic War, the upsurge in body-snatching for medical research, world-changing scientific discoveries and a public hunger for demonstrations of scientific experiments, was compounded by a world of uncertainty brought about by terrifying illnesses like syphilis and cholera which ensured there was always a market for weirdness. When phrenology became more than a parlour game and began to be taken seriously, some of its more sinister aspects were more akin to eugenics than psychology.
Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) kick-started the debate into how humans related to animals. Notions of Determinism, the philosophy that tells us that all things everywhere arise in answer to some sort of need, which means everything is predictable and inevitable, suggested human traits and characteristics also subscribed to limited, fixed states. Phrenology promoted the notion that the physiological explains the psychological. The down side to this is that these simplistic views can be manipulated into a system that compares racial features and by loading these with negative attributes and meanings, can claim to provide evidence that some races are irrefutably better than others. Utter tosh, but there we are. Phrenology maintained that there was an ideal 'healthy' type (obviously a white, British middle class male etc etc) that all others should be judged by. The ideal Brit was intelligent, noble, resilient, creative, industrious... all the good things - again, people can be judged by it. If you can plot these characteristics to various parts of the skull - intelligence to the forehead - then any measurements deviating from the norm will be deficient or the opposite: for example, a high brow means intelligence, a low one means idiocy.
In fact, the pseudo-science of phrenology probably did more to promote racial, gender, and class stereotyping that any branch of study, and still informs racists who think in primitive, uneducated, reductive ways. For example, even the title of this one makes the flesh crawl: Combe's Popular Phrenology, Exhibiting The Exact Phrenological Admeasurements (sic) of Above Fifty Distinguished and Extraordinary Personages, of Both Sexes With Skulls of the Various Nations of the World click. It reminds us there was a time when perfectly sane usually men collected the skulls of different peoples of the world to exhibit in their drawing rooms as conversation piece curios to promote chitchat with guests. I refer you here click to boggle your mind. And here click.
In How To Read Character: A New, Illustrated Hand-book of Phrenology and Physiognomy For Students and Examiners by Samuel R Wells (1870) click is a particularly odious example of the kind of book published on the subject. Even when phrenology was being dismissed as errant claptrap, Wells was selling the sort of guff that claimed to be able to reduce people to types of mainly good vs bad, attractive vs unattractive qualities. When Professor Joseph Blackburne delivered his temperance talks with a phrenology twist, he did so with utter sincerity and good-intention. Any new medical theory put together by sincere persons who want to offer the human race a bit of help. even when it works out to be rubbish, is worth consideration. Unfortunately, phrenology lends itself well to being abused by charlatans who seek to exploit the desperate and vulnerable, or those who simply place their faith in science.
The full results of George's test by Professor Blackburne can be found at the Beinecke Library at Yale University under this heading:
...it observed that the boy was fit to make a good officer, a good doctor or to take up chemistry. He also deduced George would always be something of a social misfit, restless and fond of travel, he would not always be a good judge of his own conduct, but would always have a strong sense of justice. Not sure about the 'strong sense of justice' part. I would love to know what the biography has redacted - did it mention George's propensity for self-delusion, petty-mindedness, vengeance, secrecy, self-pity, cruelty.... I could go on, but I won't.
Phrenology is covered well in a number of websites, including this one click, John van Wyhe's Phrenology On The Web, which is a treasure trove - a fecking treasure trove! - of stuff.
One of the more bizarre aspects of the fad for the pseudo-science of phrenology was the way various religious groups took its claims as gospel, and latched on to the opportunity to categorise people into good and bad types... o, hang on, that's exactly what all religions do, isn't it? Silly me! Anyhoo, when Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) developed his system of reading the character, mind and personality via the brain and head, there were few takers in the international scientific community - those with the correct shape of the rational part of their brain were not convinced. In 1815, The Edinburgh Review published a scathing report on it. Gall's colleague and compatriot, JG Spurzheim fought back, making a very well-publicised rebuttal which, in the end did more to promote the cause of phrenology than any amount of books on the subject could have. At a time when the exploration of science was a discerning gentleman's hobby, any new-fangled theory about how the human body and mind worked was bound to attract amateur experts. Gall believed the brain contained 27 different organs which controlled various psychological, emotional, intellectual functions. Phrenology became a fashionable area of study, whilst enjoying a secondary life as a popular social activity. Mesmerism enjoyed a similar rise in public interest as an amusement as much as a medical tool.
In the late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, science was a whole world of entertainment and wonder to anyone with an enquiring mind or an interest in novelty and creepiness. There was something about a system that claimed to explain the mind that appealed to the Gothic mindset, in the days when psychological factors of human motivation were being explored. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein with its reanimated Creature thrilled all sectors of society. Ghosts, witches, public hangings, seances, the French Revolution and the horrors of the Napoleonic War, the upsurge in body-snatching for medical research, world-changing scientific discoveries and a public hunger for demonstrations of scientific experiments, was compounded by a world of uncertainty brought about by terrifying illnesses like syphilis and cholera which ensured there was always a market for weirdness. When phrenology became more than a parlour game and began to be taken seriously, some of its more sinister aspects were more akin to eugenics than psychology.
Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) kick-started the debate into how humans related to animals. Notions of Determinism, the philosophy that tells us that all things everywhere arise in answer to some sort of need, which means everything is predictable and inevitable, suggested human traits and characteristics also subscribed to limited, fixed states. Phrenology promoted the notion that the physiological explains the psychological. The down side to this is that these simplistic views can be manipulated into a system that compares racial features and by loading these with negative attributes and meanings, can claim to provide evidence that some races are irrefutably better than others. Utter tosh, but there we are. Phrenology maintained that there was an ideal 'healthy' type (obviously a white, British middle class male etc etc) that all others should be judged by. The ideal Brit was intelligent, noble, resilient, creative, industrious... all the good things - again, people can be judged by it. If you can plot these characteristics to various parts of the skull - intelligence to the forehead - then any measurements deviating from the norm will be deficient or the opposite: for example, a high brow means intelligence, a low one means idiocy.
In fact, the pseudo-science of phrenology probably did more to promote racial, gender, and class stereotyping that any branch of study, and still informs racists who think in primitive, uneducated, reductive ways. For example, even the title of this one makes the flesh crawl: Combe's Popular Phrenology, Exhibiting The Exact Phrenological Admeasurements (sic) of Above Fifty Distinguished and Extraordinary Personages, of Both Sexes With Skulls of the Various Nations of the World click. It reminds us there was a time when perfectly sane usually men collected the skulls of different peoples of the world to exhibit in their drawing rooms as conversation piece curios to promote chitchat with guests. I refer you here click to boggle your mind. And here click.The full results of George's test by Professor Blackburne can be found at the Beinecke Library at Yale University under this heading:
Blackburne, phrenologist. "The Phrenological Sketch of Master
[George] Gissing 13," Wakefield. Autograph manuscript. Accompanied by
a phrenological chart and register of George Gissing, 1870 Oct and a printed form
filled in by Professor Blackburne.
The first volume of the Coustillas biography has an extract:...it observed that the boy was fit to make a good officer, a good doctor or to take up chemistry. He also deduced George would always be something of a social misfit, restless and fond of travel, he would not always be a good judge of his own conduct, but would always have a strong sense of justice. Not sure about the 'strong sense of justice' part. I would love to know what the biography has redacted - did it mention George's propensity for self-delusion, petty-mindedness, vengeance, secrecy, self-pity, cruelty.... I could go on, but I won't.
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| A visual aid phrenology teaching set click |
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