Phrenology is, or rather was, a pseudo-scientific discipline that surrounded the belief that the shape, size and imperfections of the skull could be interpreted into knowledge about one’s personal traits. This “science”, originally known as cranioscopy, was the product of Austrian physician Franz Joseph Gall in the 18th century. Gall maintained that the make up of someone’s personality could be attributed to the size of certain organs within the brain. By feeling the outside of the skull with one’s hands, it was possible to feel parts that were bigger than others, and therefore more likely to play a major role in their personality. This practice was widely accepted, even by leading figures such as Queen Victoria and Karl Marx. Indeed multiple thousands of books were sold on the subject during its zenith.
Of course, over time the legitimacy in phrenology was debunked, as Gall neglected to take simple things like bone and muscle density and into account! By the 1840s, it was longer an accepted school of science, and was scoffed at by its peers. While there’s little doubt that Phrenology is an incredibly inexact science, it actually has helped pave the way for modern day Neurology. For example, phrenologists were derided for their belief that damage to the brain could lead to impaired mental facilities. This of course has been proven to be completely true today. Another belief that phrenologists held, and were criticized for, was that certain parts of the brain were responsible for different mental and motor functions. Yet again, the phrenologists were proven to be right! Phrenology may have been folly, but it did help lay the foundations for a lot of what we now understand about the brain.
