The Science and Myth behind Phrenology

The Science and Myth behind Phrenology

Phrenology is a phenomenon that attempts to relate one’s personality and mental capabilities with the form and structure of one’s skull. This “science” became popular in the nineteenth century as the Eugenics movement gained widespread approval.

In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the reference to Phrenology is apparent in the scene where Marlow visits the doctor.

“Then with a certain eagerness [the doctor] asked me whether I would let him measure my head. Rather surprised…he produced a thing like calipers. ‘I [the doctor] always ask leave, in the interests of science, to measure the crania of those going out there [the African jungle].’…He gave me a searching glance, and made another note. ‘Ever any madness in your family?’ he asked, in a matter-of-fact tome. I felt very annoyed. ‘Is that question in the interests of science, too?’” (Conrad 13).

As it can be inferred, Marlow patronizes the doctor by implying that Phrenology is not a scientific practice because it cannot be used to determine the psychologcal “fitness” of an individual. Regardless, the spectacle of this practice in the late 1900s most likely gave Conrad the impetus to construct this parodied scene, which depicts Phrenology as a baseless science; however, the practice is not wholly baseless.

The founder of Phrenology, Austrian physician Franz Joseph Gall, determined the existence of a relationship “between the morphology of the skull and the human character” (Peter 1). Franz asserted that the brain is responsible for a human’s mental capacities. He attempted to prove this assessment by making statements—found in his chief work, The Anatomy and Physiology of the Nervous System in General, and ...

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...d the movement to justify their White supremacist, Aryan revolution. “Fascist ideologies like Nazism have misused some elements of craniometry in the framework of their infamous racist doctrines” (Peter 3). As a result of this misuse of Phrenology, it lost much of the scientific respect it hand gained in Western Civilization to the emerging field of psycho-analysis, whose father, Sigmund Freud, believed that the objectivity of Phrenology was limited because of its lack of introspection.

Regardless of Phrenology’s disgraced past, it can still be regarded as a well-founded science that has an objective groundwork for assessing the importance of “self-knowledge, self-achievement, education, and human relationships” (Peter 4) in human development.

Works Cited

Peter, Van den Bosche. Phrenology. http://134.184.33.110/phreno/intro21.html. 05 October 2002.