Book Review

Phrenology, its practice, and its adherents in the nineteenth-century United States constitute a woefully underexplored subject in American history and culture. The last full-length study dedicated to this "pseudoscience" in the United States appeared in 1955, in the form of John D. Davies's Phrenology, Fad and Science: A 19th-Century American Crusade, whose title encapsulates the standard treatment of phrenology. Historians of science have most often concentrated on the early "pure" theory—and, by extension, the "pure" intent—of phrenology's European originators (Franz Joseph Gall and his student Johann Gaspar Spurzheim) and proselytizers (particularly George Combe). Those historians chart simultaneously their contributions to science and society and phrenology's ultimate scientific invalidation and subsequent "vulgarization" by "practical phrenologists" such as Orson Squire Fowler and Samuel R. Wells. Debunked science used for commercial gain wins only a scholarly "harrumph!" for Fowler and his family, who together created a national market for phrenology charts, manuals, casts, and books—one that lasted much longer than the term fad would encompass.

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