Empire of skulls, p.2
Empire of Skulls, page 2
The “symbolical head,” a widely reproduced image of scenes portraying phrenological organs and their location on the head
This emphasis on change gave practical phrenologists their most important idea, one that attracted millions to their cause: improvement. Because you had the power to exercise, or refrain from exercising, your organs, you also had the power to improve yourself and to help others become better people. Phrenological examinations in the United States usually included specific directions on how to improve your life—from career advice or the kind of person to marry to the management of the home, which activities to pursue, and more. In many ways, practical phrenology was an early iteration of what would become known later in the nineteenth century as the “self-help” movement. But phrenology’s goals were loftier than that name suggests. Self-help implies individual improvement, which was key to phrenology as well. But phrenologists also insisted that their science was the secret to improving families, communities, societies, and nations. Ultimately, phrenologists in the United States saw their work as the scientific underpinnings needed for a new nation to create heaven on earth.
As it turned out, this was exactly the message that Americans at the time wanted and needed to hear. Beginning around 1830, the United States entered what historians have dubbed the “era of reform,” a multifaceted, decades-long push to fix the problems of the nation that survived its founding. Painfully aware of the country’s sins, reformers got together and started movements to end slavery, to give women the right to vote, to curb the evils of alcohol, to eat only vegetables, to improve the care of prisoners and mental-health patients, to help the poor, to better educate children, to worship God in new and exciting ways, and more. The pulsating energy for change prepared the way for a new science of the human mind that sought widespread progress for the nation. Little wonder that many prominent reformers embraced phrenology—abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown, suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, intellectuals Henry Ward Beecher and Ralph Waldo Emerson, writers Horace Greeley, Edgar Allen Poe, and Walt Whitman, among many others. Because practical phrenology maintained that everyone could improve themselves and their communities, no matter where they started in life, reformers saw it as the ultimate scientific tool for lifting the downtrodden to a higher place in American society.8
But it wasn’t just notable reformers who embraced phrenology in the decades leading up to the Civil War; the science captivated ordinary Americans too. In cities and towns across the country, people flocked to lecture halls to hear about its wonders. They paid traveling phrenologists for a scientific reading of their character and advice on how to live. They bought books and periodicals for home study, which was increasingly prevalent at a time when literacy rates were rising and the cost of printed material was falling. They acquired skulls, busts, and casts of human heads to better understand what the science could do for their world. From the 1830s until at least the Civil War, and to a lesser degree in the decades beyond, phrenology flourished as a cultural and scientific phenomenon unlike America had ever seen. It was the right science for the right time—a time when an adolescent nation needed grounding, direction, and something to believe in. And it was thanks ultimately to the efforts of one family.9
THE FOWLERS WERE the preeminent proponents of practical phrenology. Their last name was inseparable from the science, and they were either celebrated or reviled, depending on one’s point of view, for spreading the mental philosophy to all corners of society. Millions of Americans knew them, and not just by reputation; many had their head examined by one of the family members or knew someone who sat for a phrenological reading and revelation of mental prowess.
The Fowlers were led by three siblings, all of whom were responsible for making practical phrenology a cultural phenomenon. The eldest sibling, Orson, was born in 1809 and the first to embrace the science. A serious young man and even more serious adult, Orson—or “O. S.” as he was known to family and friends—sported medium-length hair and a bushy beard that made him appear much older. Looking at the world through intense eyes and a tall forehead that signaled his intellect, he was a lofty dreamer, tireless worker, and shrewd entrepreneur who was convinced early on that phrenology was not just a new take on the human mind but something that could transform the world. Treating the science as gospel, he spread a message of salvation to all corners of the country and baptized multitudes into his church of progress.
Orson Squire Fowler (1809–1887)
Middle sibling Lorenzo, born in 1811, was the most scientifically astute of the family. More personable than his older brother, Lorenzo—or “L. N.”—had kind eyes, an easy smile, a large forehead, and a robust constitution. Like his brother, he sported medium-length hair and a bushy beard that aged him. For both Fowler brothers, who started their advocacy in the 1830s when they were in their early twenties, appearing older gave them a modicum of credibility as serious scientists.
Lorenzo Niles Fowler (1811–1896)
Third sibling Charlotte was born in 1814 and instrumental to the family’s success. She worked behind the scenes to balance the books, to grow the business, and to ensure that the lectures, writings, and examinations of her brothers happened without issue. Pretty, delicate, and kind, she also appeared matronly when still a young woman. That persona served her well in the long run; after her brothers left the family business around the time of the Civil War, Charlotte took control of the entire operation and had a long, distinguished career as a publisher and reformer.
Also crucial to the growth and success of practical phrenology in the United States were the spouses of the Fowler siblings. Orson’s wife, Eliza, whom he married in 1835, supported his wild scientific dreams, though she remained largely in the background. Lorenzo’s wife, Lydia, whom he married in 1844, was a scientific pioneer in her own right. Studying and promoting phrenology, especially for women and children, she became the second woman to earn a medical degree in the United States and the first female professor of medicine in the country’s history. She and Lorenzo formed the first power couple of phrenology. The other power couple was Charlotte and her husband, Samuel Wells, whom she married in 1845. Together, Charlotte and Samuel created one of the most influential American publishing firms of the mid-nineteenth century.
Charlotte Fowler (Wells) (1814–1901)
Orson, Lorenzo, and Charlotte, along with Lydia and Samuel, worked shrewdly to make phrenology central to the nation’s consciousness. They did so by delivering thousands of lectures in America’s biggest cities and smallest towns; by examining the heads of an untold number of people and giving them directions on how to create a better version of themselves; by publishing wildly popular books on a host of topics—phrenological and otherwise—and creating one of the most influential periodicals of the day, The American Phrenological Journal; by connecting their ideas with the work of countless other reformers, thereby positioning phrenology as the scientific basis for social change; by showing how their work could explain everything from murder, rape, and insanity to wealth, power, and celebrity or race, gender, God, and more. Along the way, newspapers heralded their work for astonishing “multitudes by the almost unerring accuracy” of their readings; for “exciting inquiry and securing converts” to their science; and for becoming “the best known and most popular speakers and writers upon the human system” anywhere on the planet. “Go WHEREVER the English language is spoken,” Orson boasted in the early 1870s, after having championed phrenology for almost forty years, “and you will not talk long among intelligent persons about O. S. and L. N. Fowler, without hearing some one of them tell of some remarkable phrenological hit made by one of these phrenological brothers on some ancestor or acquaintance of somebody.”10
Beyond championing phrenology’s message of improvement, the Fowlers used the science adeptly to navigate an age-old question that seems to captivate every generation: What makes us who we are, nature or nurture? The question had been debated since ancient Greece and became especially pressing in the Enlightenment amid the rise of empiricism as thinkers grappled over whether our inner being or our environment played the largest role in our development. For many religious believers, the answer was that God created us to be who we are (nature). For others, especially as the era of observational science spread across the Western world, the answer was that people become who they are through their upbringing (nurture). The Fowlers came along and offered practical phrenology as proof that both nature and nurture shape us and are ultimately inseparable. People have natural endowments; they’re born with a particular set of mental faculties. But everyone can change those faculties through hard work, turning their faculties into something new, something better, something stronger. As Orson declared in his magnum opus Human Science, a summary of his life’s work published in 1870, “Nature rewards its improvement with the richest bounty possible to receive.” With this answer to the age-old debate, Americans had a clear, hopeful, scientifically structured path forward.11
Another reason millions of Americans embraced practical phrenology was because the Fowlers tapped into the widespread, long-standing impulse to measure ourselves scientifically. When ordinary Americans visited the Fowlers for a phrenological reading, they came away with a chart that listed their thirty-seven phrenological organs, each one assigned a number ranging from one to seven. Taken together, the numbers constituted a trustworthy map of character, a numerical encapsulation of what lay inside them, which was inaccessible at the time to any medical procedure or psychological probing. The only true way to get inside us, the Fowlers maintained, was through their science. As a result, the piece of paper generated from a phrenology exam often became a prized possession, handed down to children at the end of life. The chart defined people not as a haphazard stream of experience or a ceaseless swing of emotions but as a specific, quantified, scientifically delineated mind, which could grow and improve through concerted effort.12
In point of fact, we do much the same thing today, hoping to measure ourselves scientifically and better know who we are. We take IQ tests to quantify our intelligence, Myers-Briggs and Enneagram tests to categorize our characters, and at-home DNA tests to chart the very fabric of our being. Indeed, when you spit into a tube and mail it to a testing company, you will receive online access to a chart that details your genetic heritage, your health tendencies, your aptitudes, and more. Numbers, charts, and graphs about ourselves, which we pay for willingly and gladly, provide us a measure of identity that points the way forward. The impulse that led millions of Americans to embrace practical phrenology is, ultimately, the same impulse that drives us to acquire data about ourselves today.
DESPITE THE FOWLERS’ incredible success and widespread social, cultural, and scientific influence in the nineteenth century, few people remember them today, the result of the ways we tend to talk about phrenology. In general, phrenology is considered either a punchline about foolish theories of the past or a racist pseudoscience that occupies a lamentable place in our collective history. Both ways of talking about phrenology have validity, but they ultimately gloss over a rich, strange, complicated history that echoes around us to this day.
As a punchline, phrenology appears regularly in popular culture. You’ve no doubt seen remnants of the Fowler empire in the form of an image depicting a person’s head in profile with different areas marked off and labeled. These areas and labels, which people often change to humorous effect, supposedly represent the mind underneath the head in profile. This image is a play on a famous engraving that the Fowlers created and used in numerous publications. Then there’s the phrenological bust, a plaster or porcelain head also with different areas marked off and labeled to show the location of the various phrenological organs. The bust, which was created and popularized in the United States by Lorenzo Fowler, appears regularly in movies, TV shows, cartoons, and scenes designed to portray vaguely medical yet ultimately comical settings.
Case in point, an old episode of The Simpsons (season 7, episode 8, to be precise) includes a wonderful phrenology gag. Sitting in his cavernous office at the nuclear plant, Mr. Burns talks with a couple of FBI agents, who appear to be straight from Dragnet, about a woman he recently saw in the post office. Thirty years prior, Burns believes, this woman (who happens to be Homer Simpson’s long-lost mother) destroyed some of his germ-warfare research.
One of the FBI agents holds up an old wanted poster and asks, “Are you sure this is the woman you saw in the post office?”
“Absolutely!” Burns exclaims. Without missing a beat, he lifts a phrenology bust from under his desk and measures it with an old set of calipers. “Who could forget such a monstrous visage? She has the sloping brow and cranial bumpage of the career criminal.”
Waylon Smithers, Burns’s trusty assistant, then chimes in sheepishly: “Ah, sir, phrenology was dismissed as quackery 160 years ago.”
“Of course you’d say that,” Burns retorts, now using the calipers on Smithers’s head. “You have the brain pan of a stage-coach tilter!”
This scene is part of a running joke about how old Mr. Burns really is. It’s also about our collective scientific gullibility. Science of the past looks silly today, allowing us to wonder smugly how people could have believed such foolishness. They were either dumb or duped, taken in by hucksters who wanted to empty their pockets with dreams of cranial bumps and personal improvement.
But there’s a more troubling way we talk about phrenology today. Even a quick search online will reveal that the Fowlers’ science is the poster child of scientific racism. With phrenology, reports one article, “promoters of anti-Black racism and white supremacy . . . co-opted the authority of science to justify racial inequality.” According to another article, phrenology is the story of “racial characteristics used to motivate policy and cultural shifts that privileged certain whites and oppressed or marginalized peoples of color and other whites.” The ill-gotten goods of these scientific racists, we are told, are now preserved in museums and universities, a shameful part of our past. There’s even an article on the Fowlers specifically with the provocative title, “How Profit and Prejudice Built a Family’s Human Skull Collection.” Then there’s a story in The New York Times about how the Fowlers’ “racially tinged” history prompted one Manhattan restaurant to change its name from Fowler and Wells to Temple Court. The original name came from the fact that the restaurant is located on the site of the Fowlers’ old Phrenological Cabinet; the new name is designed to distance the restaurant from promoters of racial division.13
There is no question that phrenology has a problematic past when it comes to race. Some of its supporters were slaveholders and bigots who used the science to justify the subjugation of people who weren’t white, formulating a racial hierarchy that placed Caucasians at the top, duty-bound to rule over other races for the sake of humanity. But to peg phrenology as only a racist pseudoscience misses the point of an intellectual movement aimed squarely and earnestly at progress, including for people of color. No doubt the movement fell short of its own ideals. No doubt phrenology’s proponents said, wrote, and did things that were abhorrent when it came to other human beings. No doubt the racial imagination of many phrenologists was harmful, and we certainly shouldn’t look to phrenology today for any insights on race, progress, or justice.
But the story of phrenology isn’t just a story of racial subjection; it’s more complicated than that, especially when it comes to the Fowlers. At times both Orson and Lorenzo issued painfully sweeping generalizations about different races (for example, “African skulls are usually thicker than Caucasian” due to lesser brain activity), and they reverted to old racist tropes (for example, Jews are “remarkable first for their love of money”). Yet they adamantly opposed slavery, affirmed the scientific value of race mixing, and argued for the unity of the races at a time when other scientists believed that races had different origins. These contradictions were quite common at the time, and certainly not limited to the Fowlers, which is not to diminish the real problems of their writings. But it’s crucial to understand their ideas in the context of pre–Civil War America and in the matrix of other conceptions of the world then swirling around.14
The Fowlers and their supporters—white and Black—embraced phrenology specifically because it promoted equality and liberation and was a step ahead of other scientific frameworks of the day. Because everyone could improve himself or herself, no matter where he or she started in life, everyone could become a better version of himself or herself. There was real hope in that view, which was why the Fowlers drew together reformers who saw phrenology’s potential to help liberate enslaved people, to advance the place of women in society, to educate all Americans, to abolish the death penalty, to curb the evils of alcohol, to make prisons more humane, and much more. Simply put, applying the label “racist pseudoscience” to phrenology encourages us to gloss over a complicated movement that was ultimately more progressive, even radical, than we typically consider.
Even using the word pseudoscience to discuss phrenology, as often happens, is misleading and ultimately unhelpful. Today, we know that phrenology is not a scientifically accurate characterization of the brain and the mind; neuroscientists at the University of Oxford conclusively proved as much in 2018 using MRI scans. Even in the nineteenth century, many scientists understood the shortcomings with the theory. What’s more, the term pseudoscience was actually coined as a characterization of phrenology. In 1859, the famous physician and man of letters, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., sat for a phrenological reading and heard nothing but flattery of his character, which, he concluded, was a big reason people supported it. In an article in The Atlantic prompted by this experience, Holmes proposed the term Pseudo-science as a nomenclature for “a self-adjusting arrangement, by which all positive evidence, or such as favors its doctrines, is admitted, and all negative evidence, or such as tells against it, is excluded.” According to Holmes, phrenologists accepted whatever “data” supported their work and dismissed the mountain of data that proved them wrong.15
