Marketplace of the Marvelous (9 page)

For all his failings, though, Thomson's anti-elitist and entrepreneurial
spirit had satisfied the needs of many like-minded Americans. He effectively articulated the problems that many people had with regular medicine and provided the folksy language and democratic rationale that many other irregular healers would take up in the fight against regular medicine. More than just disagreeing, though, Thomson offered an alternative, presenting a theory and therapeutic solution in simple and direct language that anyone could—and millions did—understand. At his height, Thomson claimed to have converted more than three million Americans to his natural healing method. Although he probably exaggerated his influence, Thomson still achieved a high level of support that few Americans, particularly not those practicing regular medicine, could fail to ignore.
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Thomson hit on the marketing gold of selling natural ingredients for superior health nearly two centuries before it became commonplace. References to “nature,” “natural,” and following nature's plan appear throughout Thomson's
New Guide to Health
. He decried regular medicine's use of drugs like mercury and arsenic as “directly opposed to nature,” and replaced them with plants and herbs that produced nearly identical results. “There cannot be the least doubt but there is medicine enough grows in our country, to answer all the purposes necessary in curing every disease,” wrote Thomson. The “common people are kept back from a knowledge of what is of the utmost importance for them to know” by the power and profit motive of regular doctors. Thomson marketed his system as harmonious with nature and proclaimed his ingredients as pure, familiar, and as harmless as the trees and flowers growing around his followers' homes. All of the ingredients in his products were relatively pronounceable and recognizable, made by nature because nature knew best. Thomson's promotion of locally sourced, natural ingredients would scarcely seem out of place today.
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Thomson also used highly innovative administrative and organizational skills to sell his system. Thomson was exceptionally energetic and diligent in patenting and commercially distributing his methods throughout the country. His medical patent, a strategic move, was rare even in an era where patent medicines had becoming increasingly common. The number of valid patents granted by the federal government for medicines was small; many just used the term “patent medicine” to mean “secret” or “proprietary” without having secured
exclusive rights from the government for production and sale of their products. This business and institutional savvy sharply differentiated Thomson from the mass of itinerant healers roaming the country's back roads and gave him a leg up in his attacks on the dominance of regular medicine.

Perhaps the most impressive and groundbreaking of all of Thomson's tactics, though, was his system of distribution. More than a century before McDonald's, Thomson established his own medical franchise system. In theory, visits with any Thomson agent were roughly equivalent, whether in Ohio, South Carolina, or Maine. This franchise system was perhaps the most American thing about Thomson, as he seized on the possibilities of the nineteenth-century capitalist marketplace to create an effective and efficient business model for selling medicine.

In 1838, five years before his death, Thomson agreed to have his head “read” by the famous American phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler. For a man with little praise for medical theory, not to mention regard for any idea that differed from his own, Thomson's willingness to submit to a reading is one measure of phrenology's growing popularity and influence; Thomsonism was no longer the only, nor even the most popular irregular medical system in the country. Consumers had more options. New irregular systems offered people an expanded range of medical alternatives. Premade medicines had become increasingly available and affordable, first in urban areas and then slowly moving out to the frontier. Fewer people needed, much less wanted, to make their own remedies at home.

Examining Thomson, Fowler found the sixty-nine-year-old's head “very uneven,” suggesting a strong personality that “would make some noise in the world.” His cranial organs suggested that he “courted opposition” and angered quickly. “To say that he was obstinate, even to mulishness,” wrote Fowler, “is strictly correct.” Thomson considered no challenge too great, and he found difficulties stimulating rather than dispiriting. His social organs suggested a polarizing personality that inspired either fierce love or extreme hatred. Fowler concluded that Thomson had little regard for the “old or the sacred” and that the “general, cast, tone, and tenor of [Thomson's] genius, was that of a plain, practical, common-sense man.”
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Whether Fowler determined Thomson's true character from his meticulous head reading or from what he already knew of Thomson
did not much matter. Thomson, the “American Hippocrates,” had left his mark on both American health and the business of medicine, paving the way for irregular systems that would continue to revolutionize the way Americans thought about health and wellness, and giving notice to regular medicine that something had to change.

Only the second woman to receive a medical degree in the United States, Lydia Folger devoted her life to improving women's health through teaching, writing, and lecturing on the benefits and uses of phrenology. Her marriage to renowned phrenologist Lorenzo Fowler in 1844 gave this intelligent and well-spoken woman a larger platform for her work. (National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD)

 

Lorenzo Fowler knew he'd found the woman for him after feeling the bumps on the head of Lydia Folger. The two first met just weeks before, in March of 1844, when Fowler examined the head of Folger's uncle Walter, a man known to his neighbors as something of an eccentric, as “odd as huckleberry chowder,” as some put it.
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Less than a month later, Fowler was back to take a reading of the woman who had caught his eye on his first trip, perhaps concerned that fools might run in the family. With Lydia Folger, he had nothing to fear. Nearly eleven years Fowler's junior, Folger was well spoken, intelligent, and charming with a commanding presence even in her early twenties. Her scholarly and scientific interests would later lead her to become a lecturer, writer, educator, and only the second woman to receive a medical degree in the United States. But first she had to submit to a head reading, one that served as both a personality test and courtship ritual.
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Fowler passed his fingertips over her skull and adjusted his craniometer, a caliper-like device that spanned the head. His instruments allowed him to construct a topographical map of Folger's head, capable of revealing her intelligence, personality, and character. He found Folger's brain to be of “full size” and her mind agile and active. Not merely book smart, Folger learned “from everything she sees, hears, or read.” She wasn't all brains: she also had all the makings of a good wife, with “strongly developed” social and domestic natures and
“strong parental feelings.” Fortunately for Fowler, he also discovered that she was unable to “enjoy herself without mate or companion.”
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The reading complete, Fowler must have made a good impression on Folger as well. The two married less than six months later on Nantucket. In Folger, Fowler found a phrenologically suitable wife—a not unimportant factor in the “head conscious” 1840s—as well as a mate whose intelligence and skill would prove vital to his family's effort to build and sustain phrenology's popularity in the United States.

To anyone who has ever shaved his or her head and been horrified by the lumps and dents hidden beneath, the idea that those bumps said anything about a person's character might be unsettling. But for millions of Americans in the nineteenth century, phrenology provided comfort and insight, a way to know and understand behavior and personality with seemingly scientific precision. Why do we act the way we do? What determines the patterns of our behavior? How can we be better people? Every generation seeks answers to these questions, and in the mid-nineteenth century, phrenology provided one incredibly popular and influential explanation.

With phrenology, doctors could easily determine not only that someone thought, felt, and coped with life in a particular way, but
why
. Its advocates hoped phrenology would become a new diagnostic tool for mental health and a way to understand the brain and its function. But phrenology quickly spread beyond the doctor's office to become a whole cultural and social system largely divorced from its roots.

Physician Franz Joseph Gall first developed his theories on the anatomy and function of the brain in eighteenth-century Vienna, where Sigmund Freud would later foster another science of the mind, psychoanalysis, in the late nineteenth century. Born in Tiefenbrunn, Germany, in 1758, Gall grew fascinated by the physical structure of the body as a medical student, first in Strasbourg and then Vienna. As a physician, he became a skilled anatomist who learned to dissect the brain to show the origins and pathways of cranial nerves. Gall's initial question came from something he'd observed in childhood: classmates who excelled at memorization also tended to have large protruding eyes. Theorizing about the connection, Gall suggested that the part of the brain located behind the eyes must be associated with verbal memory. Since all those bulging eyes indicated a shared
talent for memorization, Gall supposed that that part of the brain must be more developed, which caused the eyes to bug out. This anecdotal observation and his later anatomical work on the structure of the brain led Gall to formulate his new science of the mind.
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Gall conceived of the brain not as a single organ, as most believed at the time, but as a mosaic of many specialized organs that each governed a particular mental or emotional function—an idea now thought to be mostly correct. He certainly wasn't the first to try to locate personality in body organs. For centuries, philosophers and scientists had proposed locations for the source of human emotions and character traits. Aristotle, for instance, had suggested that anger came from the liver, a belief still common today in traditional Chinese medicine. Plato took a sunnier view of the liver, describing it as the source of joy and desire while placing anger in the heart. During Gall's time, prevailing theory held that the brain was the center of immediate mental processes but that feeling and personality came from the soul. Gall was one of the first to hypothesize that all mental and emotional activity occurred in the brain.
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Through his study, Gall came to believe that the brain was the organ of the mind, and its shape a reflection of the mental composition of its owner. He also asserted that the shape of the skull matched the shape of the brain within it, so that studying the bumps and indentations of the skull could reveal information about the size, structure, and function of the brain areas beneath it. A large brain organ correlated with a bump on the skull, and vice versa. At the time, before X-rays and CT scans, observing head shape presented the only way to study the living brain.
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While head size could indicate overall mental power, Gall didn't believe that its overall size revealed anything about how the mind was actually organized and functioned, the idea that became the heart of phrenology. That knowledge could only come by studying the individual parts of the skull.
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Gall tested his theory on the heads of psychiatric patients, artists, and criminals—people with extreme character traits he hoped to find written on their skulls. Even better than just examining heads, Gall also liked to collect skulls for further study and demonstrations. Gall's friendship with the deputy chief of police in Vienna helped to enrich his collection as the officer likely had easier access to the criminal minds Gall sought. For those heads still in use by their owners,
Gall made plaster casts. By 1792, on the basis of hundreds of these head studies, Gall concluded that there were twenty-seven innate human faculties (Gall's word for mental or emotional traits or abilities) located in the brain.
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The size and development of these areas implied a greater or lesser amount of each trait. These faculties included everything from reproduction and affection to vanity and musical ability. Each was associated with a discrete part of the brain, which Gall called organs, and a detectable bump on the skull. Not all traits were positive. Gall classified murder and thievery as “evil” and “bad.” Other traits, such as the sexual instinct, were only beneficial in moderation. Gall believed that knowledge of these immoral traits would help individuals keep them suppressed. Of these twenty-seven traits, humans shared nineteen with animals, including reproductive instincts and a sense of sound. Some of Gall's critics found this animal/human convergence to be particularly offensive. They did not see any connection between the mental and emotional worlds of animals and humans. Gall located all of the specifically human functions, which included religiosity, wit, and moral sense, in the cerebral cortex because he knew from his work in comparative anatomy that it was noticeably larger in humans than animals.
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