The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [158]
Edinburgh University, centre of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment, when the city, known as the ‘Athens of the North’was a stronghold of elitist education.
Sometimes an entirely new area of specialisation may be generated by socially desirable goals. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the city of Edinburgh was feeling the first effects of industrialisation. It had avoided them for longer than most major British cities and regarded itself as the non-industrial intellectual capital of the north. As the numbers of the working class and petit bourgeoisie grew, the aristocrats and professionals moved out to the New Town, widening the divide between the social classes.
The newly affluent merchant class, denied entrance to the faculties, clubs and institutions of the city, felt their isolation from positions of power very strongly. By 1817 they had their own newspaper, The Scotsman. In defiance of the Scottish intellectual establishment, which they saw as exclusive, scholastic and interested in knowledge for its own sake, these social rejects supported the entirely new ‘science’of phrenology.
The study of the skull had originated in Germany with two physicians who had trained in Vienna, Franz Gall and Johann Spurzheim. They argued that the brain was the organ of the mind, with different faculties located in different areas of its surface, and that an excess or deficiency in any one of these faculties could be detected by bumps or hollows in the skull immediately over these particular areas. It was, therefore, possible to determine a person’s level of endowment in all the faculties by examining his head.
The city rapidly became a centre for the practice of phrenology. Thirty-three separate mental faculties in the brain had been identified by George Combe, the Edinburgh lawyer who was the leading proponent of the new science. Combe’s ‘faculties’included amativeness (propensity to love), cleverness, educability, wisdom, sense of purpose, forethought, vanity, tendency to steal, instinct for murder, memory, aggression, numeracy, poetry, and so on.
The Scottish phrenologists found a large and receptive audience among the lower-middle and working classes. At the height of its popularity, phrenology attracted hundreds to the lectures held in the Cowgate Chapel. In 1820 the Phrenological Institute was established. It numbered only one academic from the university. The phrenologists were regarded as dangerous social reformers: they agitated for better treatment of the insane, for education of the working class, criminal law reform, more enlightened colonial policy, improved working conditions in factories, and of course for a change in their own social status.
All these arguments were based on the belief that phrenology offered the opportunity to study the mechanisms of character and intelligence. This would provide the information necessary for any progressive social programme. The ameliorative effect of reforms in education, conditions at work, sanitation and the general environment could be observed directly, by scientific methods, on the skull of the ‘improved’citizen.
Two ‘born criminals’, from a collection by the nineteenth-century Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who claimed that such people could be identified by facial characteristics specific to their law-breaking tendencies.
These cranial maps stimulated research which led to Paul Broca’s discovery of the speech centres in the brain.
By the end of the nineteenth century interest in phrenology had waned, but not before it had spurred brain research well beyond contemporary necessity. There was no particular need for medicine, and surgery in particular, to examine the brain at this time, and little practical use to which the resulting knowledge could have been put. But the phrenologists’claims focused attention on brain function and structure, which over the following forty years led to the major early neurophysiological