Books: The Couch & the Calipers

PHRENOLOGY: FAD AND SCIENCE (203 pp.)—John D. Davis—Yale ($3.75).

The modern egghead has his head candled by the light of psychoanalysis. The well-informed egghead of 1855 felt sure that everything depended on the shell, i.e., on a “phrenological” study of the size and shape of the skull.

In those pre-Freud days, the intellectual did not speak of the libido; he nattered about the Bump of Amativeness (at the base of the skull, down there at the sides). God had nothing to do with “oceanic feeling” or a “father image,” but could be found right up there at the top, where He belongs, in the Bump of Veneration.

Phrenology appealed to the optimism and confidence of 19th century man, just as psychoanalytical theory appeals to today’s pessimism and fear. In this disquieting account of the rise and fall of phrenological “science,” Author John D. Davis, onetime professor of history at Smith, has embedded a bale of fun among his footnotes. It is humbling stuff. If today’s Pundit Walter Lippmann may be heard announcing Freud as “among the greatest who have contributed to thought,” not so long ago President Garfield was having his “head read” and Walt Whitman was proudly reciting a poet’s phrenological endowments in the preface to Leaves of Grass. Karl Marx took phrenology seriously, as did Bismarck and Darwin.

Cure for the Enigma. The head-reading business began (the start seems somehow familiar) with a Vienna doctor who had some strange and original notions about the nature of man. He was Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828), who made the simple discovery that “character was the brain.” From this it was a simple step to decide that if one knew what went on on the surface of the brain, one would know what went on underneath. Before long there was a little chart dividing the brain into 37 faculties, each doing its little bit to help a man on his path to perfection—or to hinder him (as in the Bump of Destructiveness). By midcentury, in the U.S. and Britain, phrenologists were as prevalent as dandruff.

It was no use at all for the scientist to protest that if he cut the Bump of Amativeness right out of a pigeon’s brain, it went on billing and cooing and laying eggs just the same. Phrenology offered an easy clue to the enigma of human life. In the U.S., furthermore, phrenology took on a democratic tinge. Everyone had a head, and everyone with the aid of a little chart could understand what was going on in it. It was optimistic—the “good” organs, by exercise, would increase in size. Two men with heads as massive as Beethoven’s took the whole thing over. They were Lorenzo N. (“salesman extraordinary”) and Orson S. (“impresario and high priest”) Fowler. The brothers graduated phrenologists from their institute, published a Phrenological Journal (last issue, 1911), and had a bigger collection of skulls than a Sepik River tribe.

Spare the Rod. Historian Davis has unearthed some strange phrenological lore. There was, for instance, the man who picked horses by studying the shape of their skulls. Horace Greeley suggested that in the interests of safe train travel, brakemen should have the right-shaped head. There was even phrenological housing: Orson Fowler had built a mansion in the shape of an octagon, which started quite a fashion for octagonal houses.

As usual, reform made itself most felt among the helpless—notably criminals, lunatics and children. There were phrenological theories on how to run jails, cure madmen and bring up kids. U.S. schoolteachers testified that they no longer needed the rod because they conducted their classes on phrenological lines. Soon half the adolescents in the U.S. were guiltily fingering their Bump of Amativeness. Good men in a hundred small towns were prospecting their scalps for favorable bumps, or stealthily sliding over the depressions where the good green hills of spirituality should have been.

There were skeptics. One stunt of the road-show phrenologists was to “excite” veneration by massage of the relevant bump, whereupon the subject’s face “instantly assumed a solemn and beautiful expression.” Sober clergymen railed against this sort of thing, but the phrenologues answered by incorporating in their lectures a proof of God’s existence, to wit: the Bump of Veneration proved there should be Someone to venerate; God, in His turn, proved the existence of the Bump of Veneration. Just as a psychoanalyst may reason that a patient who dislikes analysis (“exhibits aggression”) is therefore all the more in need of it, so a 19th century citizen who would not have his head read probably had a criminal skull.

The moral seems to be that the couch cannot call the calipers black. In phrenological terms, the Bump of Causality remains as unobtrusive as a pitcher’s mound in Death Valley, while the Bump of Self-Esteem looms over it like Pike’s Peak.