Edinburgh Phrenological Society

The Edinburgh Phrenological Society was established in 1820. The central concept of phrenology was that the brain is the organ of the mind and that human behaviour can therefore be usefully understood in neuropsychological rather than philosophical or religious terms. Phrenologists stressed the modularity of mind, and they were regarded as materialists and anti-religionists, wary of Christian beliefs. With their distaste for supernatural explanations, the phrenologists acted - in Edinburgh, at least - as the midwives to evolutionary theory. They also inspired a renewed interest in psychiatric disorder and its moral treatment. Founded by the lawyer George Combe, his physician brother Andrew and a close circle of friends, the Edinburgh Society was the first and foremost phrenological grouping in the Great Britain. More than forty phrenological societies followed in other parts of the British Isles.

Phrenology was claimed to be scientific, but is now regarded as a pseudoscience; its formal procedures did not conform to the usual standards of scientific method. Early Edinburgh phrenologists included the publisher Robert Chambers (1802–1871), author of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), the astronomer John Pringle Nichol (1804-1859), the botanist and evolutionary thinker Hewett Cottrell Watson (1804–1881), the distinguished asylum reformer William A.F. Browne (1805–1885) and the pioneer of women's education William Ballantyne Hodgson (1815-1880). Charles Darwin, a medical student in Edinburgh in 1825/1826/1827, was much engaged in phrenological discussions at the Plinian Society and returned to Edinburgh in 1838 when formulating his concepts concerning natural selection, as recorded in his M Notebook.

The Edinburgh society transformed phrenology from a simple materialist theory of the mind into a secular doctrine of healthy living with a reformist-political agenda deriving from Combe's legal/constitutional interests. Like the psychoanalysts almost a century later, the phrenologists displayed some characteristics of a cult. Many of the early members were lawyers or doctors with an interest in institutional and social reform, a flair for interdisciplinary thinking and a generally secular outlook on human life.

Background

“	"Phrenology....a mixture of gross errors and extravagant absurdities..." John Gordon (1815) The Edinburgh Review.	”

Phrenology emerged from the views of the medical doctor and scientific researcher Franz Joseph Gall in 19th century Vienna. Gall suggested that facets of the mind corresponded to regions of the brain, and that it was possible to determine character traits by examining the shape of a person's skull. This "craniological" aspect was greatly expanded by his one-time disciple, Johann Spurzheim, who coined the term phrenology and saw it as a means of advancing society by social reform - improving the material conditions of human life.

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 politely by the scientific and medical community there, many had anxieties about the philosophical materialism inherent in phrenology.^[2] George Combe, a lawyer who had previously been skeptical, became a convert to phrenology after listening to Spurzheim's commentary as he dissected a human brain.

The Society

"Mental qualities are determined by the size, form and constitution of the brain and these are transmitted by hereditary descent...." George Combe (1828) The Constitution of Man in relation to External Objects.

"One is tempted to believe phrenologists are right about habitual exercise of the mind altering form of the head, and thus these qualities become hereditary..." Charles Darwin (1838) The M Notebook.

The Edinburgh Phrenological Society was founded on 22 February 1820, by the Combe brothers with the support of the Evangelical minister David Welsh.^[3] 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 Monro tertius, the lamentable Professor of Anatomy in Edinburgh, actually added to the glamour of phrenological concepts. Some anti-religionists, including the anatomist Robert Knox and the evolutionist Robert Edmond Grant, rejected the unscientific nature of phrenology - and did not embrace its speculative and reformist aspects. 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 unusual personalities. In 1823, Andrew Combe addressed the Royal Medical Society in a debate, arguing that phrenology properly 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,^[4] prompting the Phrenological Society to establish its own journal,The Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, in 1824 which was later renamed Phrenological Journal and Magazine of Moral Science.^[5]

In the mid-1820s, a split emerged between the religious 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 some of George Combe's colleagues. Matters came to a head when Combe and his supporters successfully passed a motion banning the discussion of theology in the society, effectively silencing their critics. This prompted the evangelical members, including David Welsh, to leave.^[6]

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 the expression of the human emotions. Bell held that human anatomy uniquely allowed the expression of the human moral self while Browne argued that there were no absolute distinctions between human and animal anatomy.Charles Darwin was there to listen. On 27 March 1827, Browne advanced phrenological theories concerning the human mind in terms of the Lamarckist evolution of the brain. This attracted the opposition of almost all the members of the Plinian Society - and, once again, the 18 year old Charles Darwin observed the ensuing outrage.^[7] In his private notebooks, including the M Notebook written ten years later, Darwin made some rather casual and complimentary references to the views of the phrenologists.

In 1828, George Combe published his international bestseller The Constitution of Man. At the end of that year, the Burke and Hare murders scandalized the city of Edinburgh, and on 29 January 1829, the phrenologists were permitted to examine Burke's skull following his execution on the previous day and subsequent public dissection by Professor Monro. Face masks of William Burke and William Hare form part of the Edinburgh phrenology collection.

In 1831, Andrew Combe published his Observations on Mental Derangement.

Later influence of phrenological thought

“	"The Constitution of Man on its first appearance was received in Edinburgh with an odium theologicum, analogous to that afterwards stirred up by the Vestiges of Creation and On The Origin of Species. It was denounced as an attack on faith and morals....read today, it must be regarded as really rather more orthodox in its teaching than some of the lucubrations of the Dean of St Paul's and the Bishop of Durham...." James Crichton-Browne The Story of the Brain The Ramsay Henderson Lecture delivered in Edinburgh, 29th February, 1924.	”

"You interest me very much Mr Holmes. I had hardly expected so dolicocephalic a skull or such well marked supra-orbital development....A cast of your skull, sir, until the original is available, would be an ornament to any anthropological museum...." Arthur Conan Doyle (1902) The Hound Of The Baskervilles.

“	"While defending the fundamental principle that the brain is the organ of the mind....the phrenologists were exposed to violent abuse, ridicule and vituperation....it was, of course, their craniological conclusions, their dissection of the mind into a number of component faculties....that was the main point of attack, and that, it must be allowed, readily leant itself to burlesque...." James Crichton-Browne The Story of the Brain, 29th February, 1924.	”

"The fall of civilizations is the most striking, and at the same time the most obscure, of all the phenomena of history....Every assemblage of men, however ingenious the network of social relations that protects it, acquires on the very day of its birth, hidden in the elements of its life, the seed of an inevitable death...." Arthur de Gobineau (1855) Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races.

The Ramsay Henderson Trust: The phrenologists were given a financial boost by the death of a wealthy supporter - William Ramsay Henderson - in 1832; he left a large bequest to the Edinburgh Society to promote phrenology as it saw fit. The Ramsay Henderson Trust 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.^[8] However, despite the widespread interest in phrenology in the 1820s and 1830s, the Phrenological Journal always struggled to make a profit.

W.A.F. Browne: In 1832-1834, William A.F. Browne published a paper in The Phrenological Journal in three serialised episodes On Morbid Manifestations of the Organ of Language, as connected with Insanity, relating mental disorder to a disturbance in the neurological organization of language. Browne went on to a distinguished career as an asylum doctor and his 1837 publication What Asylums Were, Are and Ought To Be had an international impact. He was appointed Superintendent of the Crichton Royal Institution in Dumfries in 1838, and elected President of the Medico-Psychological Association in 1866. Towards the end of his career, Browne returned to the relationships of language, psychosis and brain injury in his 1872 paper Impairment of Language, the Result of Cerebral Disease published in the West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports, edited by his son James Crichton-Browne from the Wakefield asylum. At this time, Crichton-Browne was concluding a lengthy correspondence with Charles Darwin during the preparation and publication of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

John Pringle Nichol: Nichol was appointed Regius Professor of Astronomy in Glasgow University in 1836, and attained fame and distinction as an outstanding lecturer - his book The Architecture of the Heavens (1837) achieved legendary status as a classic of popular science. In the 1840s, Nichol became addicted to opiates and sought hydropathic treatment, recording his successful cure in his autobiographical correspondence, Memorials from Ben Rhydding.

Hewett Watson: In 1836, Hewett Cottrell Watson published a paper in The Phrenological Journal entitled What Is The Use Of The Double Brain ? in which he speculated on the differential development of the two human cerebral hemispheres. This theme of cerebral asymmetry was picked up rather casually by the London society physician Sir Henry Holland in 1840, and then much more extensively by the eccentric Brighton practitioner Arthur Ladbroke Wigan in his treatise On the Duality of Mind in 1844. It did not achieve scientific status until Paul Broca, encouraged by the French phrenologist/physician Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud, published his research into the speech centres of the brain in 1861. In 1889, Henry Maudsley published (in the philosophical journal Mind) a lengthy review of this topic entitled The Double Brain.^[9]

Like Robert Chambers, Watson later turned his energies to the question of the transmutation of species, and, having bought the Phrenological Journal with the proceeds of a large inheritance, appointed himself its editor in 1837. In the 1850s, Watson conducted an extensive correspondence with Charles Darwin concerning the geographical distribution of British plant species and Darwin made generous acknowledgement of Watson's scientific contributions in On The Origin of Species.

Charles Darwin: In June 1838 (around the time of Queen Victoria's coronation), after months of ill health, Charles Darwin revisited Edinburgh and his undergraduate haunts some eleven years after his hurried departure. Characteristically, Darwin recorded much of this in his M Notebook. At this time, he was teasing out the details of his theory of natural selection and was in some emotional conflict, entertaining the possibility of marriage to his devoutly Christian cousin, Emma Wedgwood. Interestingly, it was on this trip that he committed his "gigantic blunder" concerning the parallel roads of Glen Roy. Darwin seems to have hit on the essence of natural selection in September 1838, and on 21 September he recorded a vivid and disturbing dream in which he was involved in a public execution at which the corpse came to life and claimed to have died as a hero. He married his cousin on 29 January 1839.

Darwin's marriage was a resounding success, and the domestic security with which he was provided enabled him to continue his scientific researches, culminating in the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859.

Robert Chambers: In 1844, Robert Chambers completed the dictation of his Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation to his wife, Anne Kirkwood, as he recuperated from a depressive illness at his holiday home in St Andrews. The composition of Vestiges may have served a therapeutic purpose. Chambers had been an enthusiastic phrenologist in Edinburgh in the 1830s, and the anonymously authored Vestiges became an international bestseller and a powerful public influence, anticipating the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. In a strange parallel to Robert and Anne Chambers, Prince Albert read the Vestiges aloud to Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle in 1845. Chambers died in St Andrews in 1871 and is buried in the grounds of its ruined cathedral.

Later Developments: Interest in phrenology in Edinburgh declined in the 1840s, though worldwide interest remained high, with George Combe's The Constitution of Man being much in demand. Combe devoted his later years to international travel and lectures on phrenology - he died in Farnham in Surrey in 1858 while receiving hydrotherapy treatment and preparing the ninth edition of The Constitution of Man. In 1855, Thomas Laycock (1812-1876) was appointed to the Chair of Medicine in Edinburgh University - Laycock was friendly with William A.F. Browne and, in 1860, he published his Mind and Brain, an extended essay on the neurological foundations of psychological life.

The last recorded meeting of the society took place in 1870.^[10] A number of the phrenologists' concerns drifted into the related fields of anthropometry, psychiatry and criminology, and also into degeneration theory as set out by Benedict Morel (1809-1873), Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) and Max Nordau (1849-1923).^[11] It should be noted, however, that some degenerationists, exemplified by Arthur Gobineau (1816-1882), attached less importance to phrenological theories. In 1885, the German medical scientist Rudolf Virchow launched a large-scale craniometric investigation of supposed racial stereotypes with comprehensively negative results for the advocates of racial science.

Together with mesmerism, phrenology exerted an extraordinary influence on the Victorian imagination in the later nineteenth century, especially in the fin-de-siècle aesthetic, including the work of George du Maurier, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells and comparable to the later cultural influences of spiritualism and psychoanalysis.

On 29 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. However, Crichton-Browne did not remark on his father having joined the Society a century earlier - almost to the day. The Ramsay Henderson Trust was wound up in 2012. Many of the society's phrenological artefacts survive today, having passed to Edinburgh University's Department of Anatomy under the guiding hand of Professor Matthew Kaufman.

Phrenology has enjoyed a curious afterlife as a case-study in the history and sociology of scientific knowledge (science studies), as an example of a discarded body of scientific thought.

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Phrenology.

• History of the Phrenology Bust as developed by Spurzheim.
• Elements of Phrenology by George Combe.
• articles on Phrenological practice by George Combe, Andrew Combe, and other early Phrenologists.