Imagine this. You’re guiding a horse down a dirt path through rural Louisiana, which has been a state for less than two decades. You’re even younger yourself, and as you weave through the towering cypresses and magnolias, you daydream about what you will do with your life. You want your life to be great, adventurous. But who are you really? Fisherman? Blacksmith? Preacher? There’s adventure on the steamboats of the Mississippi. Yet if you stay, your prospects for marriage—which you’re beginning to equate with happiness—would be better. Many of those who leave, never return and who knows what happens to them? Up ahead, a silhouette appears on the path. The man calls to you. He asks how far to town, but before you answer, he says, oddly, that you have a finely shaped head. He tells you he can read your head. Scientifically. He can tell you what your strengths are—what sort of work you’re best suited for, what sort of person you should marry. In other words, your destiny. Only a dollar, he says. This is all the money you have in your pocket, nearly all the money you have to your name. You pat the neck of your blindered horse. The silver coin weighing heavily on the top of your thigh—do you take it from your pocket?
Before Huey P. Long ever crisscrossed Louisiana selling vegetable oil door-to-door, itinerant phrenologists went across the state city-to-city trying to spread the word about the new science of phrenology. They lectured on this new theory of the mind, begun in Vienna by Franz Joseph Gall, who believed that the brain was compartmentalized into various organs—or “faculties”—which performed separate functions. These itinerant phrenologists were generally practical phrenologists, which meant they believed the size differences of the various organs of the mind could be determined by feeling the variations in a person’s skull and also that knowledge of these differences, once known, were of practical use. For a fee, they would phrenologize the heads of the willing. A large protrusion of the occipital ridge at the base of the skull indicated a large organ of Amativeness, or Love. A person with an overly large protrusion in this area was at risk of falling in love too easily. On the other hand, a person whose organ of Amativeness was too small might feel no desire to marry.
For a fee, they would phrenologize the heads of the willing.
In 1835, two itinerant phrenologists rode down the Mississippi peddling their trade all the way to New Orleans. The first of these was Lorenzo Niles Fowler, the brother of the preeminent American popularizer of phrenology, Orson Squire Fowler. Lorenzo had begun his trip alone, working his way down the Ohio River. But after a lecture in Lexington, Kentucky, he’d been approached by a Professor of Medicine at Transylvania University, Dr. Joseph Buchanan, who proposed partnering with Lorenzo as he continued down the Ohio and then the Mississippi. And so, like Saint Paul and Saint Timothy, they travelled together spreading their message of a subdivided head.
And so, like Saint Paul and Saint Timothy, they travelled together spreading their message of a subdivided head.
The two lectured in Nashville, Memphis, and Natchez. Upon reaching Louisiana, Lorenzo was invited to visit the Baton Rouge Penitentiary, the state prison that preceded Angola, located between Laurel Street and Florida Street on land that would later become the Federal Courthouse. There, Lorenzo phrenologized eleven inmates, matching each criminal with his crime only by head shape. In each case, so he himself claimed, his reading was correct. He knew criminals by their phrenological features—a murderer by his large Destructiveness, a thief by his large Secretiveness.
Phrenologists were fond of visiting any institution that housed deviants because they were able to test their theories. Some residents of lunatic asylums were known to be excellent musicians or mathematicians, showing, so phrenologists believed, that while a certain savant may have been unfit for society, at least part of the savant’s brain remained untouched by madness.
At the end of 1835, Lorenzo and Dr. Buchanan reached New Orleans. After a few months of working there, they split up—Dr. Buchanan going west, through Louisiana and Texas and Fowler returning to New England. But while in New Orleans, they introduced phrenology to Mariano Cubi y Soler, a Spaniard recently returned from Mexico. In introducing Cubi y Soler to phrenology, they created another missionary for their cause. Cubi y Soler believed that he had been introduced to the next great science. He later described the Lorenzo and Dr. Buchanan as “jovenes apreciables”—praiseworthy young men—to whom he was eternally grateful for giving him his first knowledge of phrenology.
Apparently Cubi y Soler was a quick study, because only five months later, in May 1836, he left New Orleans to lecture on phrenology throughout the southern United States. In October of that year, he returned to New Orleans, where he wrote a short Spanish-language book on phrenology, taught classes on the subject, also in his native tongue, and lectured to large crowds in English.
In the fall of 1837, he was hired to teach Spanish and French at the College of Louisiana at Jackson, Louisiana. Cubi y Soler had previous experience in education—he’d come to America at the age of twenty, and for a time, had worked as a Spanish teacher in Washington D.C.
While in Jackson, Cubi y Soler promoted phrenology by establishing a Phrenological Society. He also continued to lecture locally. In 1839, he gave an extemporaneous speech before the Woodville Lyceum Association of Woodville, Mississippi. The nineteenth-century lyceum associations were organizations that gathered to hear educational speeches on topics ranging from geology to history to agronomy.
“My object will not be to make believers or followers of this science,” Professor Cubi y Soler began, “but merely to draw attention to the subject, which, in my humble opinion, is of the highest importance in all our religious, moral, and social relations.” He then exhibited a cast of a human brain, a common prop in the field, and contended that the mind acted through the brain, a claim that, at that time, made some uneasy because they felt it promoted materialism and left no space for a soul.
Anecdotal evidence was often used by phrenologists as hard proof. Later in his speech, Cubi y Soler told the story of a young woman who struck her head on a protruding nail, while “hastily going from one room to another.” The attending doctor had knowledge of phrenology and noted to himself that she had struck her head directly above the organ of Marvelousness, so he was not surprised when she began seeing “phantoms and various apparitions, her mind in other respects remaining entirely unimpaired.”
The attending doctor had knowledge of phrenology and noted to himself that she had struck her head directly above the organ of Marvelousness, so he was not surprised when she began seeing “phantoms and various apparitions, her mind in other respects remaining entirely unimpaired.”
Cubi y Soler submitted his resignation to the College of Louisiana in 1842 because, after seventeen years abroad, he wanted to return to Spain and spread phrenology there. In New Orleans, he gave one last series of lectures in French and English and then boarded a boat for Europe. After years of spreading phrenology throughout Louisiana, he became one of Spain’s best-known phrenologists.
In the published version of his lecture to the Woodville Lyceum Association, Cubi y Soler recommends The American Phrenological Journal to his audience, available “at the cheap price of two dollars a year.” Besides lyceum lectures and person-to-person transmission, phrenology was spread by periodicals. That Cubi y Soler’s would recommend The American Phrenological Journal is no surprise, as it was the most widely distributed periodical on the subject, and also, published by Orson Squire Fowler, Lorenzo’s brother.
A hodgepodge of articles—tutorials about specific organs, defensive rants decrying detractors, essays on other new sciences like mesmerism and the water cure—The American Phrenological Journal also published phrenological readings of contemporary celebrities, including this reading, from 1851, of John James Audubon:
See that bold projection at the root of his nose, between the eyebrows—the location of INDIVIDUALITY, then the general fullness across the brow to its external angle, and we get the great secret of his remarkable genius as a naturalist; the close observation, the ready perception, the critical knowledge of forms, colors, and arrangement of all the minute and varied phenomena of Nature’s works, as developed in his researches in ornithological science, and that great monument to his fame, “The Birds of America.” LOCALITY, INDIVIDUALITY, EVENTUALITY, and COMPARISON are equally remarkable, hence the power to classify, analyze, distinguish differences and resemblances, and power to retain facts, a knowledge of places, and desire to travel the trackless forest.”
This reading, probably written by Lorenzo, would have been made from a likeness of Audubon, either a drawing or a daguerreotype. The reading is typical—assured diction, vaguely scientific jargon—and demonstrates phrenology’s faults, chief among which was the use of the science to prove the common knowledge of the day. Audubon was already a highly regarded artist and naturalist at the time this reading was published, so finding strong Locality and Comparison was hardly controversial. At once the reading confirms what everyone knows to be true about Audubon and “proves” the validity of the “science.”
Phrenology was qualitative, so practitioners felt their own biases in their fingertips, which included all the racist and sexist notions of the time. The Fowler brothers gave readings that included a standardized list of suitable professions. Orson’s reading of one woman included a standardized list of suitable professions, with checkmarks next to dressmaker, milliner, seamstress, housekeeper—the acceptable female professions of the time.
Though Cubi y Soler and other early phrenologists seem to have been genuine in their belief, as phrenology was disproved, its practitioners became less sincere. In popular imagination it became linked to Music Man-type hucksterism and the occult. The city code of Alexandria, Louisiana still implies as much. Chapter Fifteen, “Offenses Affecting the Public Generally,” includes an ordinance entitled “Fortune-telling, phrenology, palmistry, etc.” which states: “It shall be unlawful for any person to engage in the business or practice of palmistry, card reading, astrology, fortune-telling, phrenology, mediums or activities of a similar nature within the city, regardless of whether a fee is charged directly or indirectly, or whether the services are rendered without a charge.” But this association with the occult came after phrenology had been disproved as a science and mediums began incorporating it into their practices along with other disgraced -ologies.
Yet writing phrenology off as just a dead-end path in the history of science would be an over-simplification. Phrenologists wanted to live where the present met the future. Many were progressive, taking up such causes as sexual equality for men and women, vegetarianism, and abstinence from alcohol. Though their detractors described them as determinists who believed that the shape of a person’s head limited a person’s destiny, most phrenological readings were positive and complimentary—why insult a paying customer?—and most phrenologists believed that a person could exercise the mental organs as if they were muscles, making the strong weak. So perhaps it's best, not to remember phrenologists as failed scientists or snake oil peddlers, but as the first self-help gurus or proto-high school guidance counselors.
Shane Noecker, former editor of New Delta Review, recently moved from Baton Rouge to Pune, India, where he is working on a historical novel about the American phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler.
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