Marketplace of the Marvelous (10 page)

Although Gall gets most of the credit, he was not the first to suggest that the brain, and particularly the cerebral cortex, might not be a single organ. In the fourth century bce, Hippocrates noted that injuries to one side of the head often resulted in weakness on the opposite side of the body, a significant insight, though one that psychologist and historian Stanley Finger cautions should be read with the understanding that physicians of the time knew almost nothing about how the brain worked. Hippocrates was less concerned with determining brain function than with elevating the status of the brain to the body's primary motor and emotional organ, a major shift from existing beliefs of a ruling heart.
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Several centuries after Hippocrates and nearly a century before Gall, Swede Emanuel Swedenborg suggested that different parts of the brain may control various physical and mental functions. Born in Stockholm in 1688, Swedenborg came to medicine from a background in mathematics, astronomy, and mining. He grew so entranced with decoding the mysteries of the human body that in 1736, he left his
job as the director of Swedish mines to devote himself to medicine and the study of the relationship between the body and the soul. He immersed himself in his studies as a purely intellectual pursuit with no interest in actually becoming a practicing doctor. He visited medical centers in France, Italy, and the Netherlands to shadow doctors and learn about the brain and the nervous system. From these experiences, Swedenborg theorized that the brain must be broken into areas with different purposes, because how else could humans function without mixing up their senses, such as the ability to see, taste, touch, and hear? As evidence of his theory, he noted that injuries to the brain did not affect all abilities equally. A head injury could cause visual loss while not affecting the sense of smell or hearing. Swedenborg's pioneering conjectures on the brain remained largely unknown, though, overshadowed by the mystical visions he reported experiencing in the 1740s that found him communing with Christ, spirits, demons, and angels. Scientists had a hard time taking seriously the ideas and observations of someone who also claimed to see things unseen. These visions led Swedenborg to abandon medicine for theology, a course on which he never looked back, and one that inspired and influenced such people as poet William Blake, writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, and nurseryman and folk legend Johnny “Appleseed” Chapman. Swedenborg's theories on the brain were not discovered until 1868 and not translated for decades more. So Gall came to lead the movement toward the theory of a functionally divided brain.
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Even without the mystical issues that relegated Swedenborg to the fringe, Gall struggled for acceptance in the scientific community. Much of the criticism focused on the validity of his research methods. Gall avidly collected heads and skulls for study but quickly threw out any that didn't fit his hypotheses. Worse, he sometimes contradicted himself to include particular examples that he liked. Gall's detractors also disparaged his focus on society's extremes: criminals and the insane on one end, and the most famous and intellectually gifted writers, thinkers, and artists on the other. Gall visited prisons and asylums to observe and collect material, studying the heads of five hundred robbers and murderers and attributing their misdeeds to enlarged organs of acquisitiveness and destructiveness, as well as a small organ for love. He did not just confine his observations to humans. He also looked out for unusual animals, collecting the skulls of dogs that ate only
stolen food or those that managed to navigate themselves home from great distances. Gall defended himself by claiming that the relationship between the body and brain could be more easily determined in these outlier cases. He was so sure of his belief that the cranium was an accurate cast of the brain that he stuck almost exclusively to skull shapes in making his pronouncements. By 1802, Gall had collected more than three hundred skulls from people with well-documented mental traits, ranging from the literary to the murderous.
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An excellent speaker and self-promoter, Gall took his theories on brains, heads, and personality on the road, lecturing widely throughout Europe in the early 1800s. His talks were something of a scientific circus. He traveled with a collection of human and animal skulls and cranial casts, as well as wax models of the brain and, for good measure if unclear reasons, two monkeys. Gall illustrated his theories with skulls and live dissections of the spinal cord where he traced the path of nerves. Though he considered himself a serious scientist, Gall availed himself of the same tricks used by patent-medicine sellers of the time, who often used music, drama, and other theatrics on their tours to attract an audience. Gall's lectures and writings made him a European celebrity.
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Yet it was his disciple, German physician Johann Spurzheim, who made phrenology a household word in the United States. Spurzheim first met Gall at one of his lectures in 1800, and the two began collaborating in 1804 after Spurzheim finished his medical training. Spurzheim even coined the name “phrenology” for the new science. The name combined two Greek words,
phren
, meaning mind, and
logos
for study or discourse, making phrenology literally a “discourse of the mind.” Gall never called it that, however. He preferred
cranioscopy
instead because phrenology seemed to focus on the mind, where he cared most about the brain. But Gall's name never caught on, and phrenology became the popular term for it, with Spurzheim its top marketer and public face.
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With Spurzheim's assistance, Gall published his monumental four-volume
Anatomy and Physiology of the Nervous System in General and the Cerebrum in Particular
between 1810 and 1820. This tome detailed his entire doctrine, which was, in part, a rebuttal of criticisms made by France's Académie des Sciences. Gall and Spurzheim had hoped to win the académie's approval as a mark of their standing in the world of science, but it was not to be. The commission assigned to
review his work rejected Gall's application and downplayed his anatomical contributions to medical science.
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Spurzheim and Gall soon found themselves at odds with each other, too. The disagreement over the name of their science was only a surface mark of a much deeper tension over the meaning and use of phrenology. Gall saw himself as a scientist, who defined phrenology specifically and narrowly as a science of the mind resting on dissection and anatomical research. Spurzheim, on the other hand, though trained as a physician, saw himself as a philosopher and reformer. Like many of his contemporaries, Spurzheim viewed the poverty, violence, and vice that had accompanied industrialization and urbanization with concern. He wanted to use phrenology to solve social problems and to empower individuals toward self-improvement.

Spurzheim didn't disagree with Gall's main premise that the shape of the skull reflected the development of the brain organs responsible for specific functions. Where he differed was in the moral value given to functions of the brain. Gall's classification of some faculties as evil did not fit with Spurzheim's evolving ideas of a basic human benevolence. He did not believe that any faculties were by necessity good or bad; it was simply an imbalance of these attributes that led to sinful words and actions. Spurzheim further argued that naming faculties after a single mode of conduct, as Gall had done, failed to encompass all of the behaviors that each could produce. Seeking greater latitude for the kinds of activities governed by a particular attribute, Spurzheim renamed several of the functions with more neutral titles. Murder, for example, became destructiveness to illustrate the variety of manifestations violent tendencies could take. Others, like cunning, religion, and poetry, were given suffixes like “-ive” or “-ness” to suggest a range of possible outcomes. In Spurzheim's scheme, writing a poem was only one possible result of having a large organ for poetic-ness. Spurzheim also added new organs, including hope and moral sense, increasing Gall's original twenty-seven faculties to thirty-three.
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Perhaps more important for phrenology's growth, Spurzheim believed that people could change. It was this potential for individual betterment that intrigued him the most about phrenology. Through training and education, Spurzheim argued that people could strengthen their positive brain organs. Like weightlifting builds muscle mass, the brain was an organ to be exercised. The phrenologist acted as the brain's personal trainer, advising patients on the best
course of activity based on their cranial reading. Spurzheim's views starkly contrasted with those of Gall, who was less optimistic about human nature and potential for improvement. Seeing depravity all around him, Gall attributed evil acts to the very makeup of humans. He argued that traits, good or bad, were inherited and therefore somewhat fixed. Spurzheim, however, believed that phrenology offered the tools people needed to learn about themselves and to apply that knowledge to make the world a better place.
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Here was a “practical system of mental philosophy,” he claimed, that would improve the education of children, the reformation of criminals, and the treatment of the insane.
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Eloquent and dashing, with sideburns that zigzagged down his cheeks from his upswept brown hair, Spurzheim and his message of hope, self-knowledge, and social improvement proved to be exactly what Americans wanted, and packed lecture halls greeted him on his 1832 tour of New England.

This wasn't the first time phrenology had come to the United States. American physicians John Warren, John Bell, and Charles Caldwell had learned about phrenology in Europe in the 1820s and returned home eager to spread the word. Caldwell became one of phrenology's most ardent and well-known advocates in American medicine. Known as the “American Spurzheim,” he went on to write the first American book on the subject.
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Regular doctors responded favorably to phrenology at first because they hoped that it would open up the mysteries of the mind, transforming what had long been abstract concepts into something concrete that might aid in diagnosis. But throughout the 1820s, phrenology remained primarily an academic pursuit, followed by some regular doctors but not many others outside of medicine and science. Spurzheim's lecture tour brought phrenology to the masses in the 1830s.
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While phrenology became very popular in Europe, it was in the United States that it found its most devoted audience. One reason phrenology attracted so many followers was that it seemed to provide the toolbox for the American dream. No matter how humble your beginning, anyone could learn about him- or herself using phrenological principles and then use that knowledge to strengthen desired qualities through personal initiative and perseverance. Phrenology affirmed core nineteenth-century American values about an individual's unlimited potential for growth and development. The prospect
of consulting science for answers rather than the traditional received wisdom of religious and political leaders appealed to an American society with a strong anti-authoritarian and anti-elitist bent. People could reach their highest potential simply by paying close attention to their physical and mental attributes and those of their potential mates. Phrenology seemed to provide what the strict Calvinist religion of Puritanical America had not: a way to better what God gave you, empowering individuals to help shape their own future, and making man the master of his own mind.

Spurzheim's whirlwind lecture tour triggered phrenology's explosive growth in North America—unfortunately, it also killed him six months later, when he caught a cold and died a short time later. Spurzheim remained committed to his cause until the end, though, claiming only the desire “to live as long as I can for the good of science.” Fittingly for his chosen field, Spurzheim's brain and skull became part of a phrenological collection, given first to the Boston Athenaeum and then to the Boston Phrenological Society.
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The man who prepared Spurzheim's skull for display declared it “conspicuous, with its ideal facial angle as an example of a highly cultivated and intellectual type.” Several years later, in 1840, Spurzheim's skull was joined by that of James Roberton, an admirer who asked to be displayed alongside his hero forever, a request largely honored to this day as both reside in the Warren Museum Exhibition Gallery at Harvard University.
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Thousands came out to watch Spurzheim's funeral procession to Boston's Mount Auburn Cemetery, including the entire medical faculty of Harvard and all of the members of the Boston Medical Association. The service included a stirring performance of “Ode to Spurzheim,” composed after his sudden death by poet John Pierrepont and sung by the city's Handel and Haydn Society. “For the stores of science brought us, / For the charm thy goodness gave, / To the lessons thou has taught us, / Can we give thee but the grave?” implored one stanza.
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That Spurzheim's funeral attracted such a wide and distinguished audience attests to the great interest and credibility given phrenology by Americans in its early days. His was hardly the funeral of someone thought a quack.

The
New England Magazine
reported soon after his death that Spurzheim had remarkable success in attracting converts to phrenology, “not only from among mere lecture-goers and literary triflers, but
from the most scientific and learned in various professions: Physicians, Surgeons, and Lawyers, of great present eminence.”
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The Massachusetts Medical Association proclaimed his death “a calamity to mankind.” English writer Harriet Martineau, who visited the United States the same year as Spurzheim, reported that “the great mass of Americans became phrenologists in a day.” Ralph Waldo Emerson hailed him as one of the greatest minds in the world, while the
American Journal of Medical Sciences
declared, “[T]he prophet is gone.”
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