Marketplace of the Marvelous (13 page)

Among the countless books, pamphlets, and other written material churned out by the Fowlers was the debut work of Walt Whitman,
Leaves of Grass
. Whitman published the first edition himself, but the Fowlers' office was one of only two retail outlets for the book. The second edition came out under the Fowlers' publishing imprint. Whitman had first developed a strong interest in the field in 1846, reading and commenting on phrenological articles in newspapers and journals and writing positive reviews of phrenological manuals. In 1849, Whitman received what he considered a highly favorable reading from Lorenzo Fowler. The analysis described a man who chooses to “fight with tongue and pen rather than with your fist,” who was “too open at times,” and without “enough restraint in speech.” “You are independent, not wishing to be a slave yourself or to enslave others,” dictated Lorenzo. “You have your own opinions and think for yourself.”
Whitman was a man who could “compare. illustrate. discriminate. and criticize with much ability.”
⁶⁵
The picture of the future poet, or “Printer” as Lorenzo noted of his occupation, was just what Whitman hoped to see in himself, an aspiring, individualistic poet. He credited phrenology with giving him the conceptual basis for
Leaves of Grass
, claiming to have used “phrenological methods for the interpretation of character” as he wrote. Many of his poems exemplified phrenological principles of individualism, optimism, self-improvement, and worship of the body. His many references to facial features, including his own, indicated the importance he placed on physiognomy as both a guide to living and an artistic source. He wrote honestly on taboo topics, including sex, because he shared the Fowlers' faith in the aphorism “know thyself” and their belief that any fear could be overcome through open discussion. Whitman's understanding of phrenology shaped his thinking on a variety of reform subjects, including education, women's rights, religion, and health. Believing, like the Fowlers, that a healthy body housed a healthy soul, he thought that perfection was attainable when the two merged on equal terms. Whitman quoted sections of his reading—“large hope and comparison”—time and again in his writings and published his phrenological chart in at least five publications, as if seeking to prove to readers that he was living up to his phrenological potential.
⁶⁶

The national obsession with head size and shape also infected daily conversation. Many modern phrases trace their roots to phrenology, including “highbrow” and “lowbrow,” “well rounded,” and “shrink” (as in “shrinking” certain undesirable qualities). “Getting your head examined” also has phrenological roots. Though generally considered an insult today, in the past, it was just what most people wanted.
⁶⁷

Phrenology had its skeptics, of course, and not least among them was Mark Twain. Twain's mock horror at the “humorless” hole found in his head by Lorenzo Fowler was but one example of the phrenological terms and concepts he wove into his stories. In a somewhat malicious character sketch of an acquaintance known as “Jul'us Caesar,” Twain writes that he “was a phrenological curiosity: his head was one vast lump of Approbativeness [vanity]; and though he was as ignorant and as void of intellect as a Hottentot, yet the great leveler and equalizer, Self Conceit, made him believe himself fully talented, learned and handsome as it is possible for a human being to be.”
⁶⁸
But Twain took phrenology more seriously in his own life, investigating
its claims of character detection and psychological guidance and continually submitting to head exams.
⁶⁹

For some, though, Twain's humorous skepticism did not go far enough. From its earliest days in Europe, phrenology faced plenty of criticism, mostly from doctors, scientists, religious leaders, and politicians. The Austrian government ordered Gall to stop lecturing in 1801 for fear that his talks would cause people to “lose their heads” and become materialists, believing only in the truths written on their skulls rather than those of God. Gall soon fled Vienna for France, but there, too, he faced a backlash that threatened his credibility. French scientist Marie-Jean-Pierre Flourens became one of Gall's most powerful adversaries. Flourens systematically tested Gall's theories on animals, removing portions of the brains of dogs, rabbits, and birds to examine how the remaining sections functioned. His experiments led him to conclude that Gall was wrong, that the brain acted as a whole unit and not as discrete parts. Damage to one area caused other parts to take over and perform the same function. He published his findings in two explosive exposés. The battle over the truth of phrenology didn't just occur in the lab. Flourens also tried to paint Gall as a crazed lunatic so driven to collect skulls that “every body in Vienna was trembling for his head, and fearing that after his death it would be put in requisition to enrich Dr. Gall's cabinet.”
⁷⁰

The backlash wasn't just confined to Europe. In Washington, DC, Professor Thomas Sewell rejected phrenology as a method for understanding the brain. He argued that brain injuries rarely affected bodily function in the way predicted by phrenology. Moreover, Sewell argued that the brain couldn't possibly be measured from the skull alone. Oliver Wendell Holmes took a similar line of criticism, though in typical Holmes form, it was far more snappy and clever than the others. He compared the skull to a safe that enclosed contents—the brain—unknowable from the outside:

The walls of the head are double, with a great air-chamber between them, over the smallest and most closely crowded “organs.” Can you tell how much money there is in a safe, which also has thick double walls, by kneading its knobs with your fingers? So when a man fumbles about my forehead, and talks about the organs of Individuality, Size, etc., I trust him as much as I should if he felt the outside of my strongbox and told me that there was a five-dollar or a ten-dollar bill under this or that particular rivet.
⁷¹

Holmes did not state outright that phrenology was wrong, but rather that there was no way to prove that it was right either, which made its status as a true science questionable.

Phrenology also floundered as a viable academic pursuit. The
American Journal of Phrenology
flopped as a magazine for professional phrenological researchers soon after it began. Many American doctors who had once praised phrenology denied ever having supported it when it became equated with other laughable “sciences” like astrology, Thomsonism, and palmistry in the late 1840s and 1850s. It didn't help phrenology's reputation that the Fowlers, no matter how much they claimed to truly believe in the science, had created a highly profitable venture for themselves. Their museum, promotional campaigns, and product line made them appear no different than those hawking mystical potions in the eyes of many regular doctors. American doctors Warren, Bell, and Caldwell, who had eagerly brought news of phrenology home with them from Europe in the 1820s, died with no mention of phrenology in their obituaries, even though Caldwell had written a landmark book on the subject. Phrenology had clearly passed beyond medical respectability by the mid-nineteenth century, dismissed entirely by many of its early proponents.
⁷²

The Fowlers' popularity invited special abuse from scientists, ministers, and even other phrenologists angling for business. By the 1840s, they were labeled quacks and their business denigrated as a humbug. Rival phrenologists often advertised themselves as superior to the Fowlers, while one took to impersonating Lorenzo and called himself L. N. Fowler. Orson Fowler fought back, especially against those practitioners whom he believed tainted the field by using phrenology as a swindle. The Fowlers never claimed to be doctors or scientists, only reformers who truly believed in their cause and its benefits to humanity.
⁷³

Even as phrenology fell out of favor in academic circles in the 1840s, it remained wildly popular and influential in American culture until late in the nineteenth century. More than perhaps any other nineteenth-century medical alternative, phrenology came to be about far more than just health and disease. In the absence of clear proof
of how the brain really functioned, phrenology's detractors struggled to expel it from the realm of science. It was much easier to say something was a legitimate science, as phrenology's proponents did, than to prove it was not. Phrenologists cited Isaac Newton, Galileo, and William Harvey as examples of scientists who challenged common ways of thinking and were rebuked in their own time before finding wide acceptance. Phrenologists urged people to observe and decide for themselves the truth of phrenology, and to not simply accept uncritically what they were told. That anyone could learn to do phrenology meant that anyone could also decide what was true or not true about it. The openness of phrenology's vision and practice proved vital to its spread and staying power. Popular attention only began to shift away from phrenology as other health movements rose to prominence and as new scientific discoveries captured the American imagination in the 1850s and 1860s.
⁷⁴

By the twentieth century, phrenology had mostly lost its scientific authority and much of its popular appeal. A few diehards, among them the children and grandchildren of the Fowlers, still practiced. The progress of medical science offered new and better tools for understanding the brain. To many Americans, phrenology now seemed old-fashioned and ridiculous.

That's not to say that the phrenologists hadn't gotten some things right. Gall placed the brain at the center of all cognitive and emotional functions at a time when some physicians still located some of the “passions” elsewhere, such as the heart and liver. Although he wasn't the first to suggest it, Gall made the brain the foundation of his system, which brought increased attention to the theory.

Gall based his conjectures on his expert anatomical observations. From his work in comparative anatomy, Gall knew that the nervous systems in many lower animals consisted essentially of a spinal cord without much of a brain. More sophisticated animals, however, had larger, more developed brains, particularly the cerebral cortex. From these observations, Gall suggested that the cortex must be the highest-functioning part of the nervous system and that more sophisticated animals developed larger brains. This view of the nervous system was relatively new at the time, as most contemporary anatomists thought of the spinal cord as simply the “tail” of the brain. Gall also suggested functional differences between gray and white matter in the brain and
described a host of features of the cranial nerves, concepts foundational to modern neuroscience.
⁷⁵

Gall's fundamental idea of a brain composed of faculties with different specializations ultimately proved correct, though the direction in which phrenology went with this insight was not. Gall was the first to make the strong case for the possibility of brain function emerging from spatial organization. Although Flourens's findings and smear campaign worked to marginalize Gall in scientific circles, localization resurfaced again and again throughout the nineteenth century. In 1861, French surgeon and anthropologist Paul Broca showed that damage to one area of the brain can make a person unable to speak coherently without affecting the ability to understand others. His findings seemed to vindicate the brain localization idea behind phrenology, but because phrenology had fallen into such disrepute, Broca was careful to draw distinctions between his work and Gall's. Holding phrenology at arm's length, Broca described his own theory of cortical localization in the part of the brain that came to be called “Broca's area” as different from the cranial localization of Gall. It seems fair to think of Gall as a visionary with the right idea but faulty logic and a flawed methodology. His chief antagonist, Flourens, on the other hand, used a more scientific method to test phrenology but reached the wrong conclusion. Later in the nineteenth century, British neurologist David Ferrier created maps of the motor and sensory functions in the cerebral cortex that owed a clear debt to phrenology.
⁷⁶
More recently, in 2002, scientists in the Brain Mapping Division at the University of California, Los Angeles, announced the creation of a “large-scale computational brain atlas” to “visualize” brain structure and function, and to store “information on individual variations in the brain structure and their inheritability.” Gall could have made a similar announcement two centuries earlier, though with far more primitive tools.
⁷⁷

The nineteenth-century fascination with the brain isn't all that far removed from our modern obsession with the mind. We have once again elevated the brain to cultish status, celebrating and perhaps even aggrandizing its power and purpose to shape the world. Everything and every field now seems to have a “neuro” component, from neuromarketing to neuroeconomics, a transmutation of language strikingly similar to that which occurred in the nineteenth century
as phrenological terms passed from the laboratory to daily conversation. Brain science often seems less a hard science than a means of fortune-telling. Colorful and detailed PET and fMRI images of the brain appear in magazines and newspapers, on television and online, encouraging us to think of almost everything through its effect on the brain. These images have become the modern equivalent of the phrenological charts that adorned the walls of pharmacies and general stores and were featured in the pages of magazines and books. Many of us continue to hope, as the phrenologists did, that mapping the brain will reveal the secrets of human nature that, once known, will allow for its manipulation and transformation, and ultimately for personal improvement. Popular neuroscience seems to suggest that concentrated efforts to improve the brain will make us smarter, faster, and more efficient, and maybe even lead to perfection. Headlines and book titles like
Super Brain Power, Brainfit, Use Your Brain to Change Your Age, Coaching with the Brain in Mind
, and
Rewire Your Brain for Love
scream that the key to life—a better job, better health, better love, better children, better looks—is the brain, no matter the improvement sought and regardless of how little we actually know about how the brain works. It's the phrenology of the twenty-first century, and Americans are as ravenous for it today as they were in the nineteenth century.
⁷⁸