The last recorded meeting of the Society took place in 1870. The Society's museum closed in 1886.
The Edinburgh Phrenological Society was founded in 1820 by George Combe, an Edinburgh lawyer, with his physician brother Andrew Combe.[1] The Edinburgh Society was the first and foremost phrenology grouping in Great Britain; more than forty phrenological societies followed in other parts of the British Isles. The Society's influence was greatest over its first two decades but declined in the 1840s; the final meeting was recorded in 1870.[2]
The central concept of phrenology is that the brain is the organ of the mind and that human behaviour can be usefully understood in broadly neuropsychological rather than philosophical or religious terms. Phrenologists discounted supernatural explanations and stressed the modularity of mind. The Edinburgh phrenologists also acted as midwives to evolutionary theory and inspired a renewed interest in psychiatric disorder and its moral treatment. Phrenology claimed to be scientific but is now regarded as a pseudoscience as its formal procedures did not conform to the usual standards of scientific method.[3]
Phrenology emerged from the views of the medical doctor and scientific researcher Franz Joseph Gall in 18th-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 extended 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).[5][unreliable medical source?]
In 1815, the Edinburgh Review published a hostile article by anatomist John Gordon, who called phrenology a "mixture of gross errors" and "extravagant absurdities".[6] 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 were troubled by the philosophical materialism inherent in phrenology.[7] 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.[8]
Founding and function
George Combe, founder of the society, was a lawyer who devoted his later life to advancing phrenology around the world.
"Mental dispositions are determined by the size and constitution of the brain... and these are transmitted by hereditary descent..." George Combe The Constitution of Man in relation to External Objects (1828)
The Edinburgh Phrenological Society was founded on 22 February 1820, by the Combe brothers with the support of the Evangelical minister David Welsh.[9] The Society grew rapidly; in 1826, it had 120 members, an estimated one third of whom had a medical background.[10] The Society acquired large numbers of phrenological artefacts, such as marked porcelain heads indicating the location of cerebral organs, and endocranial casts of individuals with unusual personalities. Their museum was located on Chambers Street.[11]
Members published articles, gave lectures, and defended phrenology. Critics included philosopher Sir William Hamilton and the editor of the Edinburgh Review, Francis Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey.[11] The hostility of other critics, including Alexander Monro tertius, anatomy professor at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, actually added to the glamour of phrenological concepts.[citation needed] Some anti-religionists, including the anatomist Robert Knox and the evolutionist Robert Edmond Grant, while sympathetic to its materialist implications, rejected the unscientific nature of phrenology and did not embrace its speculative and reformist aspects.
In 1823, Andrew Combe addressed the Royal Medical Society in a debate, arguing that phrenology explained the intellectual and moral abilities of mankind.[12] Both sides claimed victory after the lengthy debate, but the Medical Society refused to publish an account.[12] This prompted the Edinburgh Phrenological Society to establish its own journal in 1824: The Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, later renamed Phrenological Journal and Magazine of Moral Science.[13]
In the mid-1820s, a split emerged between the Christian phrenologists and Combe's closer associates. Matters came to a head when Combe and his supporters passed a motion banning the discussion of theology in the Society, effectively silencing their critics. In response, David Welsh and other evangelical members left the Society.[14]
In December 1826, the atheistic phrenologist William A.F. Browne caused a sensation at the university's 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, then a 17-year-old student at the university, 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 members of the Plinian Society and, again, Darwin observed the ensuing outrage.[15] In his private notebooks, including the M Notebook written ten years later, Darwin commented sympathetically on the views of the phrenologists.
George Combe published The Constitution of Man in 1828. After a slow start, it became an international bestseller in the 19th century, with around 350,000 copies sold.[11] Almost a century later, psychiatrist Sir James Crichton-Browne said of the book: "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".[16]
Phrenologists from the Society applied their methods to the Burke and Hare murders in Edinburgh. Over the course of ten months in 1828, Burke and Hare murdered sixteen people and sold the bodies for dissection in the private anatomy schools. Burke was executed on 28 January 1829, while Hare turned King's evidence; Burke was publicly dissected by Professor Monro the next day, and the phrenologists were permitted to examine his skull. Face masks of both men - a death-mask for Burke and a life-mask for Hare - form part of the Edinburgh phrenology collection.
Scotswoman Agnes Sillars Hamilton made a living from phrenology travelling throughout Britain and Ireland. It was her son who left for Australia and published an account of Ned Kelly's skull.[17]
Society co-founder and president Andrew Combe had two successful publications in the early 1830s: Observations on Mental Derangement in 1831 and Physiology applied to Health and Education in 1834.[18] The latter, especially, sold well in Great Britain and the United States, with numerous editions and reprintings.[18]
The Edinburgh Phrenological Society received a financial boost by the death of a wealthy supporter in 1832. William Ramsay Henderson left a large bequest to the Edinburgh Society to promote phrenology as it saw fit. The Henderson Trust enabled the society to publish an inexpensive edition of The Constitution of Man, which went on to become one of the best-selling books of the 19th century.[11][19] However, despite the widespread interest in phrenology in the 1820s and 1830s, the Phrenological Journal always struggled to make a profit.
Influences from the society
"One is tempted to believe phrenologists are right about habitual exercise of the mind altering form of head, & thus these qualities become hereditary." Charles Darwin (1838) The M Notebook.
W.A.F. Browne: In 1832–1834, 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 internationally influential 1837 publication What Asylums Were, Are and Ought To Be was dedicated to Andrew Combe. In 1866, after his twenty years of leadership at The Crichton asylum in Dumfries, Browne was elected President of the Medico-Psychological Association. In his later years, Browne returned to relationships of psychosis, brain injury and language 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.
Robert Chambers: Although not formally admitted to the Society, Chambers occasionally acted as George Combe's publisher and became an enthusiast for phrenological thinking. In 1844, Chambers anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, written as he recovered from depression at his holiday home in St Andrews. Chambers' wife, Anne Kirkwood, transcribed the manuscript for the publishers (dictated by her husband) so that they would not recognise its origins. In a strange parallel, Prince Albert read it aloud to Queen Victoria in the Summer of 1845. It became an international bestseller and a powerful public influence, situated midway between Combe's The Constitution of Man (1828) and Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859.
Charles Darwin: Darwin attended the University of Edinburgh Medical School and, as an active member of Plinian Society,[3] observed the 1826-1827 controversies with phrenologist William A.F. Browne. In 1838, some eleven years after his hurried departure, Darwin revisited Edinburgh and his undergraduate haunts, recording his psychological speculations in the M Notebook and teasing out the details of his theory of natural selection. At this time, Darwin was preparing for marriage with his religiously minded cousin Emma Wedgwood, and was in some emotional turmoil: on 21 September, after his return to England, he recorded a vivid and disturbing dream in which he seemed to be involved in an execution at which the corpse came to life and joked about having died as a hero. Darwin committed his "gigantic blunder" concerning the parallel roads of Glen Roy while on this Scottish trip, suggesting an element of mental distraction. He published On the Origin of Species some twenty years later, in 1859; the book was translated into many languages, and became a staple scientific text and a key fixture of modern scientific culture.
William Ballantyne Hodgson: Hodgson joined the phrenology movement as a student at Edinburgh University and later supported himself as a hired lecturer for literature, education, and phrenology. He became an educational reformer, a pioneering proponent of women's education and - in 1871 - the first Professor of Political Economy (and Mercantile Law) at Edinburgh University. In later life, Hodgson lived at Bonaly Tower outside Edinburgh, and was elected President of the Educational Institute of Scotland.
Thomas Laycock: Laycock was one of George Combe's "influential disciples".[20] He was a pioneering neurophysiologist. In 1855, Laycock was appointed to the Chair of Medicine in Edinburgh University. In 1860, Laycock published his Mind and Brain, an extended essay on the neurological foundations of psychological life. Laycock was friendly with asylum reformer William A.F. Browne and was an important influence on Browne's son, Sir James Crichton-Browne.
John Pringle Nichol: Nichol was originally educated and licensed as a preacher, but the impact of phrenological thinking pushed him into education.[21] He became a famous lecturer and Regius Professor of Astronomy in Glasgow University, and his 1837 book The Architecture of the Heavens was a classic of popular science. In the 1840s, Nichol became addicted to prescription opiates, and he recorded his successful hydropathic rehabilitation in his autobiographical correspondence Memorials from Ben Rhydding.
Hewett Cottrell Watson: In 1836, 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 medical practitioner Arthur Ladbroke Wigan in his 1844 treatise A New View of Insanity: On the Duality of Mind.[22] 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 1868, Broca presented his findings at the Norwich meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1889, Henry Maudsley published a searching review of this topic entitled The Double Brain in the philosophical journal Mind.[23] 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 as 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 assistance in On The Origin of Species (second edition). Watson was unusual amongst phrenologists in explicitly disavowing phrenological ideas in later life.
Decline
Interest in phrenology declined in Edinburgh in the 1840s. Some of the phrenologists' concerns drifted into the related fields of anthropometry, psychiatry and criminology, and also into degeneration theory as set out by Bénédict Morel, Arthur de Gobineau and Cesare Lombroso.[24] In the 1870s, the eminent social psychologist Gustav Le Bon (1841-1931) invented a cephalometer which facilitated the measurement of cranial capacity and variation. In 1885, the German medical scientist Rudolf Virchow launched a large scale craniometric investigation of the supposed racial stereotypes with decisively negative results for the proponents of racial science. Worldwide, interest in phrenology remained high throughout the nineteenth century, with George Combe's The Constitution of Man being much in demand. Combe devoted his later years to international travel, lecturing on phrenology. He was preparing the ninth edition of The Constitution of Man when he died while receiving hydrotherapy treatment at Moor Park, Farnham.
The last recorded meeting of the Society took place in 1870.[25] The Society's museum closed in 1886.[11]
Legacy of the Society
"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 The Hound Of The Baskervilles (1902).
On 29 February 1924, Sir James Crichton-Browne (the 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. Crichton-Browne did not remark, however, on his father's having joined the Society a century earlier, almost to the day.
"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 (1924) The Story of The Brain.
The Henderson Trust was wound up in 2012.[27] Many of the society's phrenological artefacts survive today, having passed to the University of Edinburgh's Anatomical Museum[27] under the guidance of Professor Matthew Kaufman, and they are now on display at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
The activities of the Edinburgh phrenologists have enjoyed an unusual afterlife in the history and sociology of scientific knowledge (science studies), as an example of a discarded cultural production.
Related Research Articles
Phrenology is a pseudoscience that involves the measurement of bumps on the skull to predict mental traits. It is based on the concept that the brain is the organ of the mind, and that certain brain areas have localized, specific functions or modules. It was said that the brain was composed of different muscles, so those that were used more often were bigger, resulting in the different skull shapes. This led to the reasoning behind why everyone had bumps on the skull in different locations. The brain "muscles" not being used as frequently remained small and were therefore not present on the exterior of the skull. Although both of those ideas have a basis in reality, phrenology generalized beyond empirical knowledge in a way that departed from science. The central phrenological notion that measuring the contour of the skull can predict personality traits is discredited by empirical research. Developed by German physician Franz Joseph Gall in 1796, the discipline was influential in the 19th century, especially from about 1810 until 1840. The principal British centre for phrenology was Edinburgh, where the Edinburgh Phrenological Society was established in 1820.
Franz Josef Gall was a German neuroanatomist, physiologist, and pioneer in the study of the localization of mental functions in the brain.
John Hutton Balfour was a Scottish botanist. Balfour became a Professor of Botany, first at the University of Glasgow in 1841, moving to the University of Edinburgh and also becoming the 7th Regius Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and Her Majesty's Botanist in 1845. He held these posts until his retirement in 1879. He was nicknamed Woody Fibre.
George Combe was a Scottish lawyer and a spokesman of the phrenological movement for over 20 years. He founded the Edinburgh Phrenological Society in 1820 and wrote The Constitution of Man (1828). After marriage in 1833, Combe devoted his later years to promoting phrenology internationally.
Andrew Combe was a Scottish physician and phrenologist.
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals is Charles Darwin's third major work of evolutionary theory, following On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871). Initially intended as a chapter in The Descent of Man, The Expression grew in length and was published separately in 1872. This book concerns the biological aspects of emotional life, and Darwin explores the animal origins of such human characteristics as the lifting of the eyebrows in moments of surprise and the raising of the upper lip in an aggressive sneer. A German translation of The Expression appeared in 1872; Dutch and French versions followed in 1873 and 1874. A second edition of the book, with only minor alterations, was published in 1890. Since its first publication, The Expression has never been out of print, but it has also been described as Darwin's "forgotten masterpiece".
The Constitution of Man first published in 1828 is a work by George Combe, who is credited with popularizing the pseudoscience of Phrenology. Combe argues that the human mind is best understood through phrenology, and that the relative size of the various regions of the brain defined by phrenology determines a person's behavior and potential interactions with the external world. In The Constitution of Man, Combe uses phrenology to create a practical science of morality, proposing that conforming to natural laws leads to happiness based on the phrenological understanding of human nature. The book was an international bestseller, selling at least 100,000 copies in Britain alone and over 300,000 copies worldwide by 1855, largely due to the publication of the 'people's edition,' making it one of the best-sellers of the nineteenth century.
Moral treatment was an approach to mental disorder based on humane psychosocial care or moral discipline that emerged in the 18th century and came to the fore for much of the 19th century, deriving partly from psychiatry or psychology and partly from religious or moral concerns. The movement is particularly associated with reform and development of the asylum system in Western Europe at that time. It fell into decline as a distinct method by the 20th century, however, due to overcrowding and misuse of asylums and the predominance of biomedical methods. The movement is widely seen as influencing certain areas of psychiatric practice up to the present day. The approach has been praised for freeing sufferers from shackles and barbaric physical treatments, instead considering such things as emotions and social interactions, but has also been criticised for blaming or oppressing individuals according to the standards of a particular social class or religion.
Sir James Crichton-Browne MD FRS FRSE was a leading Scottish psychiatrist, neurologist and eugenicist. He is known for studies on the relationship of mental illness to brain injury and for the development of public health policies in relation to mental health. Crichton-Browne's father was the asylum reformer Dr William A.F. Browne, a prominent member of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society and, from 1838 until 1857, the superintendent of the Crichton Royal at Dumfries where Crichton-Browne spent much of his childhood.
Hewett Cottrell Watson was a phrenologist, botanist and evolutionary theorist. He was born in Firbeck, near Rotherham, Yorkshire, and died at Thames Ditton, Surrey.
The Royal Medical Society (RMS) is a society run by students at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, Scotland. It claims to be the oldest medical society in the United Kingdom although this claim is also made by the earlier London-based Society of Apothecaries (1617). The current President of the 286th session is fourth year medical student Miss Prithi Natarajan. The RMS is a professional society engaged in the advancement of medical knowledge and provision of assistance to medical students and professionals.
Thomas Laycock FRSE FRCPE was an English physician and neurophysiologist who was a native of Bedale near York. Among medical historians, he is best known for his influence on John Hughlings Jackson and the psychiatrist James Crichton-Browne. Laycock's interests were the nervous system and psychology; he is known as one of the founders of physiological psychology. He was the first to formulate the concept of reflex action within the brain, and is also known for his classification of mental illnesses.
The Plinian Society was a club at the University of Edinburgh for students interested in natural history. It was founded in 1823. Several of its members went on to have prominent careers, most notably Charles Darwin who announced his first scientific discoveries at the society.
Dr William Alexander Francis Browne (1805–1885) was one of the most significant British asylum doctors of the nineteenth century. At Montrose Asylum (1834–1838) in Angus and at the Crichton Royal in Dumfries (1838–1857), Browne introduced activities for patients including writing, group activity and drama, pioneered early forms of occupational therapy and art therapy, and initiated one of the earliest collections of artistic work by patients in a psychiatric hospital. In an age which rewarded self-control, Browne encouraged self-expression and may therefore be counted alongside William Tuke, Vincenzo Chiarugi and John Conolly as one of the pioneers of the moral treatment of mental illness. Sociologist Andrew Scull has identified Browne's career with the institutional climax of nineteenth century psychiatry.
"Browne was one of the reformers of the asylum care of the insane whose improvements and innovations were chronicled in his annual reports from The Crichton Royal Institution, but who in addition published almost on the threshold of his career a sort of manifesto of what he wished to see accomplished...." Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine (1963) Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry 1535–1860, page 865.
Luigi Ferrarese was an Italian physician and the leading proponent of phrenology in Italy in the nineteenth century.
Henry Shipton Drayton (1840–1923) was an American physician and phrenologist. He defended the now obsolete theories that one could predict the personality of human beings based on cranial features and that some humans had a sixth sense.
Robert Cox WS (1810–1872) was a Scottish lawyer, known as a writer of several works on the question of the Christian Sabbath, and a phrenologist.
The Boston Phrenological Society was formed in 1832 upon the death of a prominent continental phrenologist, Johann Gaspar Spurzheim. Spurzheim was an anatomist and a former pupil of Franz Josef Gall. Spurzheim's brief tour and death popularized phrenology in the United States outside of its controversial place in medical lecture halls, and into the sphere of social reformers and ministers. The Society's formation launched the phrenology movement in the United States. The Boston Phrenological Society was founded by phrenology adherent Nahum Capen on the day of Spurzheim's funeral, November 17, 1832.
The Zoist: A Journal of Cerebral Physiology & Mesmerism, and Their Applications to Human Welfare was a British journal, devoted to the promotion of the theories and practices of the pseudoscientific concepts of mesmerism and phrenology, and the enterprise of "connecting and harmonizing practical science with little understood laws governing the mental structure of man". The name derived from the Greek word Zoe (ζωή) meaning "life". The Zoist was published quarterly, without a break, for fifteen years: from March 1843 until January 1856.
William Collins Engledue, MD, MRCS, MRCS, LSA (1835) was an English physician, surgeon, apothecary, mesmerist, phrenologist – and, in concert with John Elliotson, M.D., the co-editor of The Zoist.
↑ Van Whye, John (2004). Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientific Naturalism. Science, Technology and Culture 1700-1945. Ashgate Publishing Limited. ISBN978-0754634089.
1 2 Kaufman, Matthew H. (October 1998). "The Edinburgh phrenological debate of 1823 held in the Royal Medical Society". Journal of Neurolinguistics. 11 (4): 377–389. doi:10.1016/S0911-6044(98)00025-6. S2CID53203063.
↑ Egerton, Frank N. (2003). Hewett Cottrell Watson: Victorian Plant Ecologist and Evolutionist. London: Ashgate Publishing. ISBN978-0754608622.
↑ Crichton-Browne, James (29 February 1924), The Story of the Brain, The Ramsay Henderson Lecture, Edinburgh{{citation}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
↑ MacLehose, James (1886). "71. John Pringle Nichol, 1804–1859". Memoirs and Portraits of One Hundred Glasgow Men who have died during the last thirty years and in their lives did much to make the city what it now is. Vol.2. Glasgow: James MacLehose & Sons. pp.249–252.
↑ McGilchrist, Iain (2009) The Master and his Emissary New Haven and London: Yale University Press, see especially pages 16 and 60. Ambitious and sweeping interpretation of western culture and civilization in terms of an asymmetric neurology of mind.
↑ Harrington, Anne (1987). Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain: a study in nineteenth century thought. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ISBN978-0691084657.
↑ Pick, Daniel (1989). Faces of Degeneration: a European disorder, c. 1848 – c. 1918. Ideas in Context. Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-0521360210.
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