Phrenology is a pseudoscience which 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. Although both of those ideas have a basis in reality, phrenology extrapolated 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.
Orson Squire Fowler was an American phrenologist, vegetarian and lecturer. He also popularized the octagon house in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Octagon houses were a unique house style briefly popular in the 1850s in the United States and Canada. They are characterised by an octagonal (eight-sided) plan, and often feature a flat roof and a veranda all round. Their unusual shape and appearance, quite different from the ornate pitched-roof houses typical of the period, can generally be traced to the influence of one man, amateur architect and lifestyle pundit Orson Squire Fowler. Although there are other octagonal houses worldwide, the term octagon house usually refers specifically to octagonal houses built in North America during this period, and up to the early 1900s.
John Elliotson, M.D., M.D.(Oxford, 1821), F.R.C.P.(London, 1822), F.R.S. (1829), professor of the principles and practice of medicine at University College London (1832), senior physician to University College Hospital (1834) — and, in concert with William Collins Engledue M.D., the co-editor of The Zoist.
Francis Kernan was an American lawyer and politician. A resident of New York, he was active in politics as a Democrat, and served in several elected offices, including member of the New York State Assembly, member of the United States House of Representatives, and United States Senator from 1875 to 1881. His rank in his profession was well summed up by Judge Martin Grover, as being without a superior as an all-round lawyer at the bar of New York State. In dress, manner, decision, learning, and unassuming dignity of bearing and geniality, he was a rare type of the best of the old school of lawyers.
Rousseau Owen Crump was a politician and businessman from the U.S. state of Michigan.
Harold Fowler McCormick was an American businessman. He was chairman of the board of International Harvester Company and a member of the McCormick family. in 1948 he was awarded the Henry Laurence Gantt Medal by the American Management Association and the ASME.
Edward Samuel Lacey was a politician from the U.S. state of Michigan and Comptroller of the Currency from 1889 to 1892.
Moses Tyler Stevens was an American textile manufacturer and a U.S. Representative from Massachusetts.
John Thomson Mason was an American lawyer, United States marshal, Secretary of Michigan Territory from 1830 through 1831, land agent, and an important figure in the Texas Revolution.
The Mendelssohn family are the descendants of Mendel of Dassau. The German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and his brother Saul were the first to adopt the surname Mendelssohn. The family includes his grandson, the composer Felix Mendelssohn and his granddaughter, the composer Fanny Mendelssohn.
Dwight Baldwin was an American Christian missionary and medical doctor on Maui, one of the Hawaiian Islands, during the Kingdom of Hawaii. He was patriarch of a family that founded some of the largest businesses in the islands.
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.
Lydia Folger Fowler was a pioneering American physician, professor of medicine, and activist. She was the first American woman to earn a medical degree and one of the first women in medicine and a prominent women in science.
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.
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.
A pattern book, or architectural pattern book, is a book of architectural designs, usually providing enough for non-architects to build structures that are copies or significant derivatives of major architect-designed works.
Charlotte Fowler Wells was an American phrenologist and publisher from New York. Along with her brothers, Orson Squire Fowler and Lorenzo Niles Fowler, her sister-in-law, Lydia Folger Fowler, and her husband, Samuel Roberts Wells, she was an early American popularizer of phrenology. Wells founded Fowler & Wells Company, published the American Phrenological Journal, and taught the first class in phrenology in the United States. She died at her home in New Jersey in 1901.
Phrenology has been a cultural factor in the Latter Day Saint movement since around the time of its founding in 1830. Phrenology is a pseudoscience which involves the measurement of bumps on the skull to predict mental traits. Developed in the 1790s, it became widely popular in the United States in the 1830s and 1840s, coinciding with the rise of the Latter Day Saint movement.
