Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [64]
The errand-boys, and others of that class of people, whom I used to assemble in my house in great numbers, would frequently charge each other with petty larcenies, or, as they called them, chiperies. Some of these people showed the utmost abhorrence of thieving, and preferred starving to accepting any part of the bread and fruits their companions had stolen, while the chipeurs would ridicule such conduct and think it very silly. On examining their heads, I was astonished to find that the most inveterate chipeurs had a long prominence, extending from the organ of cunning almost as far as the external angle of the superciliary ridge;* and that this region was flat in all those who showed a horror of theft.7
Gall and a colleague, a young doctor named Johann Christoph Spurzheim, painstakingly examined the heads of hundreds of patients, friends, prisoners, inmates of insane asylums, and others, and mapped out twenty-seven regions of the skull (later expanded by Spurzheim to thirty-seven), each of which represented an underlying organ or cortical area in which a particular faculty was located and which, in those in whom that trait was pronounced, was elevated. (Gall’s portrait shows him with both hands spread over a model of a head, fingers deftly feeling bumps.) Among the areas Gall and Spurzheim identified were those of amativeness (just below the back of the skull), benevolence (the center of the upper forehead), combativeness (in back of each ear), reverence (just forward of the crown of the head), mirthfulness (midway up and toward the sides of the forehead), and so on.
Gall described his findings in a series of massive volumes published between 1810 and 1819. Spurzheim co-authored the first two but then went his own way; dynamic and charming, he became a highly successful lecturer and popularizer of phrenology in Europe and in the United States. Through Gall’s books and self-promotion and Spurzheim’s public appearances, phrenology became immensely popular and remained so for nearly a century. At one time, in Great Britain alone there were twenty-nine phrenological societies and several phrenological journals. In New York City, phrenological “parlors” sprang up on Broadway, and itinerant phrenologists gave readings all over the United States. In its heyday, phrenology was the vogue among ordinary folk, who sought in it answers to life’s dilemmas. More surprisingly, many distinguished people and serious intellectuals believed in it: Hegel, Bismarck, Marx, Balzac, the Brontës, George Eliot, Walt Whitman, and others.
But from the first it met with powerful scientific opposition, and for good reason. For one thing, Gall collected and presented cases that fit his theory when he should have measured random samples of people and shown that bumps were correlated with hyperdevelopment of the traits in question and the absence of bumps with normal or less than normal development of those traits. For another, when an individual with a cranial prominence failed to have the predicted trait, Gall explained it in terms of the “balancing action” of other brain parts that offset the part in question. With so many different faculties to work with, Gall could “prove” whatever he chose, and accordingly most scientists found his proofs worthless.8
But definitive refutation of phrenology came from the laboratory. Pierre Flourens (1794–1867), a brilliant young French physiologist, was aghast at Gall’s slipshod methodology and set out to discover, by experiment, whether specific psychological functions are, or are not, located in particular areas of the brain.9 A skilled surgeon, he operated on the brains of birds, rabbits, and dogs, removing small areas and carefully nursing the animals back to health to see how their behavior was altered by the loss of those areas.
He could not, of course, test for such human faculties as verbal memory, but he could test for faculties housed in portions of the brain that Gall himself said were comparable