Cranioklepty by Colin Dickey Read Free Book Online

Chinese, and Cannibals, but we have only a few from the higher class of minds, such as Reformers, Statesmen, Scholars, & c. Of these we have hundreds of casts, and busts from living heads, but not their skulls. What a treasure it would be if some plan could be devised, by which these leading “types” could be preserved as specimens, for scientific purposes.
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The Phrenological Journal,
May 1855

C HAPTER S EVEN

T HE N EW S CIENCE
    By this time phrenology had gone from a dubious scientific theory to a worldwide cultural phenomenon. Unlike Gall’s organology, the brand of phrenology advocated by his star pupil, Johann Spurzheim, focused not just on identifying the various mental functions of the brain but on the possibility of actual self-improvement through phrenology. Though the two doctors had been inseparable through the early nineteenth century, in 1814 this philosophical difference erupted: Gall accused Spurzheim of distorting the project of organology, of turning his science into pop philosophy, and denounced his former pupil, calling him a fraud and a plagiarist.
    Unbowed, Spurzheim taught himself English in six months and moved to London in 1814 to lecture on “practical phrenology.” Spurzheim’s phrenology may indeed have been a perversion of Gall’s ideas, but it was a necessary perversion. The body of scientific evidence was now fairly strong against organology, and certainly against the bump-reading aspects of cranioscopy. Inorder for phrenology to survive at all, it had to move beyond science and into popular culture. This was what Spurzheim set out to do, to bring it into the public sphere as something other than pure science. “Phrenology is one of a group of sciences, different from anatomy, and its truths are of a larger stature,” one phrenologist later put it. “It belongs to the doctrine not of the human body, but of man.” 93
    In England Spurzheim quickly befriended a number of prominent phrenologists, including the Swede Johan Didrik Holm. Holm had been a captain in the Royal Swedish Navy before embarking on a lucrative career in private shipping and settling in London in 1805. He had met Gall at Napoleon’s coronation in 1804 and had subsequently developed a large phrenological library and a skull collection that included the head of Alexander Pope and other notables. His zeal for the New Science was such that he had reportedly tried to plunder his own father’s grave for his collection. One visitor to his home described it as “a museum, filled with natural history specimens, works of art and curiosities. Books and pictures cover the walls together with a large number of heads, such as marble busts, plaster casts, and real skulls of deceased persons.” 94 His prominence was such that when Spurzheim died, it was to Holm that he left his own collection.
    Spurzheim traveled widely through the United Kingdom,where his lectures and demonstrations were met with fascination and derision. He turned both to his advantage. After a scathing attack against him was published in June 1815 in the
Edinburgh Review
, Spurzheim began performing dissections with the article placed alongside the brain, inviting spectators to compare what they had read in the
Review
to what they saw with their own eyes.
    Among those deeply impressed by such showmanship was a young Scottish lawyer named George Combe. Combe had come from miserable poverty and carried with him a deep loathing of the backward religious and educational institutions that had oppressed him as a child. As an adult he had dedicated himself to liberal reform. He had immersed himself in the philosophy of Locke, Hume, and Adam Smith, but after watching one of Spurzheim’s dissections he had an epiphany. “I attained the conviction,” he wrote in his memoirs, “that the faculties of the mind he had expounded bare [sic] a much greater resemblance to those which I had seen operating in