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‘Materials of the Mind’ Review: The

Lost Art of Reading Bumps
Phrenology (n.): the study of the conformation of the skull based on the belief
that it is indicative of mental faculties and character.
By Christoph Irmscher
May 22, 2019 6:42 pm ET

In the summer of 1868, in sweltering Barbados, a man named W.D. Maxwell, a native of
the island, gave a series of public lectures on the subject of phrenology. Audience
members were pleased; a Mr. Brewster, who had his head measured and manipulated by
Maxwell, later professed his enthusiasm for the new science in a letter to the Barbados
Times. Maxwell was on a roll: After a repeat performance in neighboring British Guyana,
he eventually took his phrenology lectures to England, where his “piercing eye” (as the
papers reported) came to rest on the skulls of compliant Brits. In his wide-ranging,
engagingly written “Materials of the Mind,” James Poskett, an assistant professor at the
University of Warwick, reveals that Maxwell’s career wasn’t an anomaly. Phrenology
wasn’t just Western or limited to a particular country. From Cambridge, Mass., to
Canberra, from Calcutta to Cape Colony, the world had gone cranium-crazy.

Phrenology, literally “mind science,” had its roots in grade-school competitiveness.

Remember that annoying classmate who never forgot to do his homework, whose mind
always retained everything? As a young boy in southwest Germany, Franz Josef Gall
(1758-1835), the founder of phrenology, noticed that these intimidating hyper-achievers
tended to look alike: They all had, he claimed, protruding eyes and high foreheads. (As
one might suspect, young Gall was not a member of that select group, although
contemporary portraits do show that he was the owner of a pretty sizable brow.) After
earning a medical degree from the University of Vienna, Gall, with his assistant Johann
Spurzheim, theorized that different moral and mental faculties dwelt in different parts of
the brain. Their exercise put varying kinds of pressure on our skulls, producing uneven
“bumps” on our heads that could be felt and assessed. The stronger the attribute, the more
pronounced the bump.

Measuring those cranial hills and hillocks, with calipers made for the purpose, the
phrenologist was purportedly able to disclose the secrets of a person’s inner life.
Specially developed terms—“amativeness” (the capacity for physical love),
“philoprogenitiveness” (the instinct for parental love) or, my favorite, “vitativeness” (the
faculty that makes us see everything “in a joyful way”)—lent an aura of scientific
respectability as well as a touch of poetry to these skull readings. Thanks to all that
ceremonial laying-on of hands, the process also involved just enough magic to scandalize
the orthodoxly devout. For a fee, the phrenologist would, after the exam, provide you
with a chart mapping out the results.

A phrenology chart from around 1920. PHOTO:OXFORD SCIENCE ARCHIVE/PRINT

COLLECTOR/GETTY IMAGES

PHOTO: WSJ

MATERIALS OF THE MIND

By James Poskett 
Chicago, 373 pages, $45

Today we tend to snicker at the silliness of the whole enterprise.

And we remember the spectacular misdiagnoses. The poet Walt
Whitman, who had his noggin fingered by the famous American
phrenologist Lorenzo Fowler, scored only a disappointing 4 for his “tune” bump,
measuring the “organ for musical perception.” Whitman was pleased with his other
ratings including a very desirable 6-7 for “self-esteem.” Gauging the bumps on Mark
Twain’s leonine head, the same Prof. Fowler, who incredibly hadn’t recognized his
famous client, found no indication of a sense of humor: Where there should have been a
bump, Twain had, he joked, “a cavity.” By contrast, his bump for cautiousness (not a
quality one would immediately associate with Twain) was the size of the Matterhorn.

Phrenology, like so many other fads of the past, has landed in the scrap yard of very bad
ideas. But terms such as “lowbrow” and “highbrow” still inhabit our language, and each
time we recommend that someone should have their “head examined” or “see a shrink,”
we’re tipping our hats to phrenological theory, whose underlying premise was as
revolutionary as it was liberating. Imagining mind as matter, and personality not as
something that we’re stuck with but as a bundle of qualities each of which could be
improved upon, was a proposition that appealed to people around the world. Arguably,
the current vogue of train-your-brain self-help books began with these homespun mind
exams.

One of the many merits of Mr. Poskett’s book is that it rejects the standard view of
phrenology as something that was almost accidentally invented in Europe and then came
to flourish in the therapy-obsessed United States. Instead, Mr. Poskett paints the picture
of a globe crisscrossed by phrenological exhibits and ephemera: skulls; plaster casts of
people’s heads; phrenological charts, drawings and photographs; and articles in
periodicals. George Combe’s “The Constitution of Man” (1828), the self-respecting
phrenologist’s bible, was printed in a special octodecimo edition, small enough to fit in
one’s pocket: light shipboard reading when you needed it. Phrenology thus provided a
lingua franca for the understanding of individual and national differences while also
allowing folks to hold out hope for a sense of shared humanity.

While the new “mind science” was often invoked to bolster theories of white superiority,
Mr. Poskett shows that the phrenological insistence on the possibility of amelioration also
worked against such tendencies. In Calcutta, Bengali phrenologists appropriated Combe’s
book, adding dainty little mustaches to the androgynous heads in his charts, and exulted
in how excellent their own intellectual faculties were. And just north of Calcutta, on the
banks of the Hooghly River, the surgeon George Murray Paterson, another avid fan of
Combe’s work, opened a school based entirely on phrenological principles. He assigned
his Indian “lads” to classrooms according to the results of their head exams, but he also
taught them that their minds (and bodies) were eminently improvable.

Since “Dr. P.” urgently wanted to shrink that large bump of cautiousness he had noticed
on “Hindoo” skulls, he put his boys through a rigorous regimen of wrestling, skipping
and weight lifting. The problem was that Paterson’s own brain, floating in a sea of liquor,
was also shrinking, and not in a good way. “He drinks like a fish!” one of his colleagues
complained to George Combe. Send no more books to him, he pleaded: Dr. P.’s brandy
bump—or, rather, cavity—was, sadly, beyond the phrenologist’s ken.

Mr. Irmscher is director of the Wells Scholars Program at Indiana University

Bloomington.