| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Charles Colbert. A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America. (Cultural Studies of the United States.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1997. Pp. xvi, 441. Cloth $55.00, paper $24.95.

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Viennese physician and anatomist Franz Joseph Gall and his student Johann Gaspar Spurzheim popularized the new "science" of phrenology, which measured and mapped the configurations of human skulls. The external bumps of the skull supposedly signified the brain's internal geography, which was divided into specialized areas or nodes controlling different intellectual organs and affective powers of the mind. Through its medical association with anatomical studies, phrenology claimed greater objective certainty than the older, physiognomical method of reading facial features and expressions for signs of internal moral character. Advocates argued that phrenological diagnoses would enable individuals to cultivate brain areas that required further development. While fundamental genetic differences could not be entirely overcome, phrenology promised social progress through exercising such diverse mental faculties as "constructiveness," "firmness," and "ideality." . . .

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