The Edinburgh Phrenological Society was established in 1820. Phrenology was then claimed to be a science but is now regarded as a pseudoscience. The central concepts of phrenology were that the brain is the organ of the mind and that human behaviour can be most usefully understood in neurological rather than philosophical or religious terms. Founded by George Combe, his brother Andrew and a close circle of friends, it was the first - and foremost - phrenological society in Great Britain. More than forty phrenological societies followed in other parts of the British Isles. Phrenologists were mildly hostile to Christian beliefs. Early phrenologists included the publisher Robert Chambers (1802-1871), author of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), the botanist and evolutionary thinker Hewett Cottrell Watson (1804-1881) and the distinguished asylum reformer, William A.F. Browne (1805-1885). The society transformed phrenology from being merely a materialist theory of the mind into a secular doctrine of healthy living. Many of its early members were lawyers or doctors with an interest in social reform, a flair for interdisciplinary thinking and a generally secular outlook on human life.
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Phrenology emerged from the views of the physiologist and medical phantasist Franz Joseph Gall in the early 19th century. Gall suggested that facets of the mind corresponded to regions of the brain, and it was possible that to determine character traits by examining the shape of a person's skull. This aspect was greatly expanded by his one-time disciple, Johann Spurzheim, who coined the term 'phrenology' and saw it as a means to facilitate the advance of human society.
In 1815, a hostile article by the anatomist John Gordon was published in the Edinburgh Review, calling phrenology a "mixture of gross errors and extravagant absurdities".[1] In response, Spurzheim went to Edinburgh to take part in public debates and to perform brain dissections in public. Whilst he was received sympathetically by the scientific and medical community there, many had doubts about the philosophical basis of phrenology.[2] George Combe, a lawyer, who had previously been sceptical, became convinced of the truth of phrenology after seeing Spurzheim perform a dissection of the brain.[3][4]
The Edinburgh Phrenological Society was founded on 22 February, 1820, by the Combe brothers at the suggestion of the Evangelical minister David Welsh.[5] The society grew rapidly, members publishing articles, giving lectures and defending phrenology from opponents like the philosopher Sir William Hamilton and the editor of the Edinburgh Review, Francis Jeffrey. The hostility of other critics, including Alexander Munro (tertius), the lamentable Professor of Anatomy in Edinburgh, actually added to the glamour of phrenological concepts. The society acquired large numbers of phrenological artefacts, such as marked porcelain heads indicating the placement of phrenological organs, and endocranial casts of individuals with abnormal personalities .[2] In 1823, Andrew Combe, a distinguished physician and phrenologist, addressed the Royal Medical Society in a debate, arguing that phrenology best explained the intellectual and moral abilities of mankind. Both sides claimed victory after the lengthy debate, but the Medical Society refused to publish an account of it,[6] prompting the Phrenological Society to establish its own journal in 1824, The Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, later re-named Phrenological Journal and Magazine of Moral Science.[7]
In the early 1820s, a split emerged between the evangelical members of the society and Combe's close associates. The Christian phrenologists, led by David Welsh, detected an increasing emphasis on a "morality without religion" among George Combe and his colleagues. This angered the Christian group, who judged it to be an attempt to undermine the revealed morality of the Bible and, as they saw it, an effort to place science on an equal footing to religion. Matters came to a head when Combe and his supporters successfully passed a motion banning the discussion of theology in the society, effectively silencing his critics. This prompted the evangelical members, including David Welsh, to leave.[7][8] In December 1826, the atheistic phrenologist William A.F. Browne caused a sensation at the Plinian Society with an attack on the recently republished theories of Charles Bell concerning emotional expression - arguing that there were no absolute distinctions between human and animal anatomy - and Charles Darwin was there to hear. On 27th March 1827, William A.F. Browne returned to advance phrenological theories concerning the human mind in terms of Lamarkian evolution of the brain in a style destined to attract the opposition of almost all the members of the Plinian Society - and, once again, the 18 year old Charles Darwin observed the ensuing outrage [9]. In his early notebooks, Darwin made some rather casual and complimentary references to the views of the phrenologists.
The society was given a financial boost by the death of a wealthy supporter in 1832, William Ramsay Henderson, who left a large bequest to the Society to promote phrenology as it saw fit. This enabled the phrenologists to publish a cheap version of The Constitution of Man, which went on to become one of the best selling books of the 19th Century.[10] Despite the widespread interest in phrenology in the 1820s and 1830s, the Phrenological Journal always struggled to make a profit. In 1832 - 1834, William A.F. Browne published a paper in three serialised episodes relating mental disorder to a disturbance in the neurological organization of language. In 1836, Hewett Cottrell Watson published a paper entitled What Is The Use Of The Double Brain ? in which he speculated on the separate development of the two human cerebral hemispheres. Like Robert Chambers, Watson later turned his energies to the question of the transmutation of species, and appointed himself editor of the Phrenological Journal in 1837. In the 1850s, Watson conducted an extensive correspondence with Charles Darwin concerning the geographical distribution of British plant species and Darwin made a generous acknowledgement of Watson's scientific contributions in The Origin of Species.
Interest in phrenology in Edinburgh declined in the 1830s, though worldwide interest remained high, with George Combe's The Constitution of Man and his Lectures on Phrenology being much in demand. The last recorded meeting of the society took place in 1870.[11] On 29th February 1924, Sir James Crichton-Browne (the elder surviving son of William A.F. Browne) delivered the Ramsay Henderson Bequest Lecture entitled The Story of the Brain in which he recorded a generous appreciation of the role of the Edinburgh phrenologists in the later development of neurology and neuropsychiatry. Much of the society's collection of phrenological artefacts survives today.