An American Circus of Skulls: Paul Stob on Phrenology, the P.T. Barnum of Pseudosciences

“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 American Reform. From the 1830s to the 1860s — the era of reform — practically every movement to improve the young republic was led by believers in phrenology: abolition, women’s suffrage, temperance, prison and education reform. Whitman, Susan B. Anthony, John Brown, Stanton, and Mott were all sympathetic; Orson Fowler barnstormed Massachusetts with his Amherst friend Henry Ward Beecher, who swore by phrenology for the rest of his life; John Brown Jr. worked at the Fowlers’ Phrenological Cabinet until Bleeding Kansas called him west. The reason was one word: improvement. Even the enslaved, the phrenologists argued, must be freed — because every human being deserves the chance to improve.

•       Curl Your Brain Like a Bicep. European phrenology said your skull was your fate. The Fowlers Americanized it: exercise a mental faculty, they taught, and the brain deposits new gray matter that literally pushes out the skull — self-improvement you could measure with calipers. Parents brought children for readings, returned years later, and found the head had grown just as prescribed: to the Fowlers, concrete proof. The ideal male head measured twenty-three inches around, the female twenty-two — women started in a different place, but nothing said they couldn’t climb. And in 1843’s Hereditary Descent,