“It’s too easy to look back at sciences of the past and say they were all fools. The exact same thing is gonna happen two hundred years from now when people look back at us.” — Paul Stob on the lessons of phrenology

Step right up. Over the road from P.T. Barnum’s American Museum in 19th century New York stood the city’s more metaphorical circus — the Phrenological Cabinet, where admission was free and you could hold a murderer’s skull in your hand. After the Barnum museum, it was the second most popular show in town. Although back then phrenology — the supposed science of skull size and head bumps — wasn’t seen as the province of tricksters or clowns.

So who created this 19th century American obsession with skulls, who created the phrenology phenomenon? In his new book, Empire of Skulls, the Vanderbilt scholar Paul Stob tells the phrenology story through the wealthy Fowler family — Orson, Lorenzo, and Charlotte — who financed and promoted this American circus. It was the Fowlers, Stob explains, who shaped phrenology into the intellectual glue of 19th century American progress and convinced reformers like Walt Whitman, Susan B. Anthony, John Brown, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton of its social value.

The appeal was self-improvement, that most American ideal. In Europe, your skull was your fate; in Fowler’s America, you could supposedly reshape your brain like a bicep in order to grow new bumps. A gym for skulls. And, in P.T. Barnum fashion, it toured, bringing replica skull collections to the utopian communes of mid 19th century America. And in good (or bad) American fashion, this bunk often had a darker subtext with skulls pilfered from native burial mounds and, inevitably, a slaveholding phrenologist wing.

Not everyone bought a ticket. Mark Twain visited Lorenzo Fowler’s London depot incognito and was told his skull shape indicated an absence of humor. Three months later, he reappeared, this time as Twain, and got the reverse prognosis. But what finally killed phrenology wasn’t Twain but the hitherto unparalleled bloodshed of the Civil War. Not even the Fowlers could glean much positive from the mountains of actual skulls at Gettysburg or Antietam. The circus had ended. Now it’s the Fowlers who are the freaks. We gawk at them rather than their skulls. Step right up. The show must go on.

Five Takeaways

• The Intellectual Glue of Reform. Whitman, Anthony, Brown, Stanton, Mott — virtually every reformer of the era believed. The reason: improvement.

• Curl Your Brain Like a Bicep. In Europe your skull was your fate; in Fowler America you could grow new bumps — self-help before the word existed.

• Second Only to Barnum. The free Phrenological Cabinet — hold a murderer’s skull! — sat kitty-corner from Barnum himself.

• Twain’s Two Visits. Incognito, his humor organ was a divot; card presented, off the charts. Holmes coined “pseudoscience” for the phrenologists.

• We Are the Phrenologists Now. The Civil War killed the utopia skull first — but astrology and Myers-Briggs carry the impulse on. In 200 years, they’ll laugh at us too.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.

Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Buy Empire of Skulls: counterpointpress.com/books/empire-of-skulls

Chapters:

00:00:31 Introduction: odd rich Americans, from the Greens to the Fowlers
00:02:15 Orson, Lorenzo, and Charlotte: three quirky siblings
00:03:20 What phrenology got right — and wrong
00:06:46 Why Stob calls it a science, not a pseudoscience
00:07:55 Whitman, Anthony, Brown: progressive phrenology
00:08:52 The era of reform — and its intellectual glue
00:10:46 Curl your brain like a bicep
00:13:42 Heaven on earth: phrenology and the utopians
00:15:30 Oliver Wendell Holmes coins “pseudoscience”
00:16:05 Mark Twain’s two head exams
00:17:55 Prescientific neuroscience? The kindest reading
00:19:20 Astrology, Myers-Briggs, and the modern equivalents
00:20:26 A religious science: Beecher and the Bible
00:23:57 Phrenology and eugenics: the two poles
00:24:26 Charles Caldwell — and Django Unchained
00:26:19 Orson’s obsession: sex, scandal, and hush money
00:27:09 Empire of skulls: the global skull trade
00:28:22 The Phrenological Cabinet: second only to Barnum
00:30:30 Crania Americana and pilfered burial mounds
00:32:14 Millionaires, not billionaires — and octagon houses
00:33:45 What killed phrenology? Skull first into the Civil War
00:38:00 Beards, big heads, and nostalgia
00:39:22 Thanks and goodbye