An Organ of Murder

COURTNEY E. THOMPSON is an assistant professor of the history of science and medicine and U.S. women’s history at Mississippi State University in Starkville. She received her Ph.D. from the program in the history of science and medicine of Yale University in 2015.

Introduction:
Through a Mirror, Darkly

The phrenologist Lorenzo Fowler had a meeting scheduled for an autumn day in 1849. Rather than viewing his subject in the comfort of his office, he ventured out onto the streets of New York City. He traveled half a mile from Clinton Hall to the New York Halls of Justice and House of Detention, colloquially known as the Tombs, where the warden, who had written to invite the phrenologist on this occasion, welcomed him to the institution. Perhaps he received a tour of the prison with the warden, but the main event was the set of “test examinations” conducted by Fowler on three prisoners. The warden maintained a “studied silence” as Fowler examined each of his subjects in turn, writing down his descriptions of their characters and phrenological characteristics. Only then were the identities and the charges against these prisoners revealed, with the correspondence between this data and their crimes standing as proof of the “triumphant success of phrenological truth.”[1]  

When one imagines the phrenological encounter, one often thinks first of a client paying for a reading as a combination of self-help and amusement, an image that is part of our cultural lexicon, captured in popular imagery and satirical accounts. Fowler’s trip to the prison at first glance appears to be an inverted image, a dark mirror to the phrenological visit. Few would suspect that at the same time as phrenologists were being paid to examine men, women, and children in their offices and in tours of the country, they were also paying close attention to and examining another population: convicted criminals in prisons. Indeed, the criminal was more essential for the development of phrenological theory and practice than the paying client, central to both the self-conception of the phrenologist and the development and articulation of phrenological theory. 

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Phrenology, the science of reading the shape of the skull to interpret and predict powers of mind and character, has a rich history and historiography.[2] As early as 1933, Robert Riegel argued that, “contrary to common belief, phrenology did not originate as the scheme of money-making fakers, but from the study of able men using the best scientific methods of their day.”[3] The scientific nature of phrenology, and its place within the history of science, has been well established by historians. Beginning in the 1970s, scholars including Geoffrey Cantor, Roger Cooter, and Steven Shapin closely analyzed the social structures, cultural meaning, and scientific status of phrenology, particularly in the British context. Their debates about the development and meaning of phrenology, its social and intellectual status, and its techniques continued to inform historians of science over the next fifty years. 

Why have historians of science and medicine returned again and again to phrenology? The same features which draw historians account in part for the fascination it held for practitioners, commentators, and clients nearly two centuries ago. Phrenology was capacious in its meanings, porous in its boundaries, flexible in its interpretations, and adaptive to various applications. Phrenology was a mirror reflecting that which observers most desired—or most feared—to see, in themselves, in others, in science, and in society. As such, historians have also contemplated this prismatic mirror, analyzing the various images it has produced, considering how phrenology reflected and refracted social concerns about topics like gender, race, reform, education, and the nature of scientific inquiry itself. 

The mirror of phrenology also offers another, darker side. While many historians have remarked on the utopian side of phrenology—its reformist ethos and applications, its uses by clients for self-improvement, and so forth—phrenology also reflected a negative image of such utopian visions. Phrenology not only promised to perfect or improve the human race, but simultaneously suggested that not all minds were capable of perfection or improvement. Phrenology was not just an amusing pastime, nor was it only a matter of theoretical debate for elite scientists about the nature of science itself. There were real stakes to this debate and these practices, particularly for those at the bottom rungs of society. 

An Organ of Murder examines the ways in which the criminal and criminality became central objects of phrenological research, theory, and public discourse from its origins in Gall’s Schädellehre at the turn of the nineteenth century to its efflorescence and decline in midcentury American practical phrenology. I argue that a primary theme associated with phrenology at each stage of its history was a focus on the problem of crime and the criminal. In the United States, phrenology shaped the production of medico-legal knowledge around crime, the treatment of the criminal, and sociocultural expectations about the causes of crime. Phrenologists made the criminal a central figure for their work and thus a primary tool for the articulation and dissemination of their science. The criminal was the research and demonstration subject par excellence for the spread of phrenology, and the courtroom, the prison, and the gallows were essential spaces for the staging of scientific expertise. 

In particular, phrenological ideas helped to construct ways of looking alongside modes of language for identifying, understanding, and analyzing criminals and their actions. These ways of seeing and describing were subsequently translated from the realm of phrenology and into both popular and elite conceptions of criminal behavior.[4] Decades before the “invention” of criminal anthropology by Cesare Lombroso in the 1870s, phrenologists were using visual evidence of facial and cranial anatomy to explain the potential of individuals for violence and criminality, and this discourse also inflected popular uses of visual judgment. Phrenological language around the causes and nature of criminality not only structured mid-nineteenth century medico-legal approaches to the problem of violent crime, but continue to hold a place in our modern lexicon. These two vocabularies—lexical and visual—enabled criminal profiling avant la lettre. Both phrenological language and images of criminality remain a ghost in the machinery of the contemporary carceral state. 
This study is centered on the nineteenth-century United States, with a focus on the decades of the 1830s through the 1850s. These decades were crucial for the development of phrenology in the United States, including the rise of phrenology as an elite intellectual pursuit among learned professionals, the emergence of practical phrenology and decline of elite phrenology, and the heyday of practical phrenology in America, set against the political, social, and cultural currents of antebellum period. This book draws a distinction between two cohorts of phrenologists and their respective eras of influence in America. First, I identify a group of educated and professional men, particularly physicians, lawyers, and professors, who orchestrated the introduction of phrenology into American intellectual circles during the 1820s and 1830s. These men established the earliest phrenological societies and journals in the United States, and they sought in phrenology a body of knowledge that could be applied to their respective professional fields, especially medicine, even as these professional fields experienced challenges to their expert status in this period.[5] In contrast to these phrenological enthusiasts stood another group, proponents of a new variety of phrenology that was emerging by the early 1840s: practical phrenologists, as they named themselves, were phrenologists by trade. Rather than attempting to speak to an educated elite, they instead focused on a popular audience as itinerant lecturers who “read” heads for a fee. After the decline of elite phrenology by the beginning of the 1840s, this group of practical phrenologists became the face of phrenology in the United States, contributing to longstanding misapprehensions about the nature of phrenology in the nineteenth century. 

Much has been written about phrenology in Europe and in Britain, due to its Continental origins and the role of Scottish and English phrenologists in popularizing the science in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. In the United States, the profound enthusiasm of early adopters matched that of British phrenologists, and the midcentury turn to practical phrenology made the science all the more prevalent and culturally influential in America. Within this context, phrenological approaches to crime and punishment, whether practical, rhetorical, or cultural, were put to use and became common currency. For example, in the United States prison officials frequently invited phrenologists into prisons, and phrenologists and enthusiasts were called to serve as expert witnesses on the stand. Phrenology from its inception spoke to the problems of crime, but the applications of the science to this problem were more successful and longer-lived in the United States. The unique circumstances by which American phrenology was adopted, promulgated, and popularized contributed to its ability to move from theory to practice, especially in the realms of law and penology. 

As with many histories of nineteenth-century medicine and science, this story about American phrenology must be told through a partially transnational lens: American phrenology could not have existed without its Continental and British progenitors. American phrenological enthusiasts, practical phrenologists, and phrenological clients alike responded throughout the century to intercontinental crosscurrents, and this transnational movement of ideas, people, objects, texts, and capital is a central part of my study. Further, the engagement of American phrenologists over the course of the century with European scientific developments are also part of this story, particularly how phrenologists reacted to late-century innovations in criminal theory.

Little attention has been paid to the role of phrenology in American criminal jurisprudence and penology.[6] This book demonstrates that phrenology, both elite phrenological enthusiasm and practical phrenology, had much to say about these subjects, influencing the development of various approaches to crime in American medicine, law, and culture. In particular, I illuminate the concurrent development of approaches to medical jurisprudence in 1830s America and the rise of elite phrenological enthusiasm in medico-legal circles in this period. This book demonstrates the deep-seated commitment to and influence of phrenological theory amongst medico-legal experts, especially Isaac Ray, and thus locates phrenology in the history of medical jurisprudence and the insanity defense.[7]

This project also decenters the traditional history of criminology, which has located its origins in 1870s Continental positivism, by positioning phrenology as more than a precursor to theories of the criminal mind.[8] The majority of the history of criminology has focused on the post-1870s positivist moment, instigated by the Italian criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso’s theories of degeneracy, which in turn were inspired by Charles Darwin’s theories of heredity.[9] I suggest that phrenological criminology as it developed within American phrenology and popular culture was a coherent and consistent set of theories and practices that pre-dated the “invention” of criminology in the 1870s. 

By tracing the long-lasting influence of phrenological language and imagery in American culture, law, and medicine, as well as the practical application of phrenology in courts and prisons, I complicate considerations of phrenology in American history. I demonstrate that the elite intellectuals of the 1830s were as influential in medico-legal arenas as the practical phrenologists of midcentury proved to be in popular culture, and moreover that both groups were invested in issues of crime and punishment as a means for demonstrating the utility of phrenology and advancing their own claims to expertise over criminal matters. This project thus intervenes in the history of phrenology, exploring its influence in American medico-legal thought, particularly with regard to questions of criminal insanity and medical jurisprudence, as well as in the history of criminology, penology, and popular culture. 

Phrenology was not just a scientific curiosity or a precursor to positivist criminology, but rather a robust system of criminal science in its own right. This work traces the long-lasting influence of phrenological visual culture and language in American culture, law, and medicine, as well as the practical uses of phrenology in courts, prisons, and daily life. I further demonstrate the seriousness with which educated phrenological enthusiasts took up phrenology in the early-nineteenth-century United States, with particular attention to the utility they found in phrenology for solving the problem of crime. As I argue in this book, the early adopters of phrenology in Jacksonian America were physicians, professors, and legal experts, and their embrace of this science constituted what I term a “phrenological impulse.” This desire to apply phrenological theories, language, and practices to find practical solutions to social problems had a profound and enduring effect on the development of medical jurisprudence, theories of criminal insanity, and approaches to prison reform in nineteenth-century America. This book extends and reconsiders the history of medical jurisprudence and criminal science, along with the history of phrenology. In so doing, I consider the making of expert knowledge within, and the relationships between, the realms of medicine, law, and scientific practice in nineteenth-century America, as well as the place of both elite and popular science in American culture. 

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An Organ of Murder is organized chronologically, moving from the first decades of the nineteenth century through the turn of the twentieth century. The first chapter re-examines the history of the origins of phrenology in Continental Europe and the United Kingdom between 1805 and the 1820s, focusing on the role of criminals and the prison in the development of early phrenological theory. This chapter begins with a reconsideration of Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, demonstrating the extent to which the prison was used as a laboratory for the articulation of phrenological theory. Next, I discuss the interventions of the Combe brothers, particularly George Combe’s writings on the nature of criminal responsibility. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the criminal theory contained within phrenology, discussing the identification of an “organ of murder” and language of the criminal propensities. I describe how these were “read” visually on the head, and how the language of organs and propensities became tied to the problem of crime. This chapter establishes the extent to which criminals and penal spaces were foundational for and essential to phrenology.

The second chapter shows how phrenology was introduced to the United States in the 1820s and early 1830s, particularly the connections built across the Atlantic between two different phrenological communities. The chapter first traces the founding of the first phrenological societies in the United States and the work of the earliest converts, particularly Charles Caldwell. Second, the chapter explores a transatlantic debate about the validity of phrenology, which focused on the skulls and characters of famous murderers, especially Burke and Hare, and in which American phrenological knowledge was mobilized as part of a British debate. I next discuss the journey of Spurzheim to the United States, which directly resulted in the founding of the Boston Phrenological Society. This Society would become the locus of phrenological enthusiasm in the United States, as these elite, educated, urban professionals saw in phrenology the potential to undergird their expertise in their given fields. Finally, I explore the phrenological cabinets of the Boston and Edinburgh societies, discussing the extent to which they incorporated criminality into their cabinets and the transatlantic networks required to build these spaces. 

The third and fourth chapters cover the development of phrenology in the 1830s and 1840s United States in two sites, the courtroom and the prison, and among two cohorts of phrenological adherents, elite phrenological enthusiasts and practical phrenologists. The third chapter focuses on the uses of phrenological theory and language in the realm of medical jurisprudence between the mid-1830s and 1850s. Phrenology emerged in this period as one possibility for crafting medico-legal expertise, particularly on the topic of criminal insanity. This chapter begins by contextualizing medical jurisprudence in early America; at the same time that phrenology was gaining ground in the United States, theories of medical jurisprudence were in flux. I next turn to Isaac Ray, a central figure for the development of theories of medical jurisprudence in the United States, and the work of other phrenological enthusiasts in the realm of medical jurisprudence. Ray’s work, particularly his Treatise on the Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity (1838), helped to introduce phrenological language and ideas into American courtrooms. This chapter concludes with an exploration of court cases in which attorneys, judges, and expert witnesses made implicit or explicit use of phrenological theories. These cases of “phrenology on trial” suggest both the uses of phrenology for the building of medico-legal expertise and the extent to which phrenological language around the propensities was incorporated into the nature of criminal responsibility. 

The fourth chapter explores the relationship between American phrenology and the penal system from the mid-1830s through the 1850s. This chapter engages with practical phrenology, focusing on the tension between the anti-capital punishment and reformist ideology broadly promoted by practical phrenologists and the simultaneous necessity of the prison and the gallows for the production of phrenological materials and capital. This chapter begins with a discussion of the broad context of the reformist impulse in American culture and in the variation of practical phrenology promoted by the Fowler brothers. Next, the chapter discusses visits by American phrenologists to prisons, which they used as testing sites to promote the truth of their science, and the extent to which phrenologists participated in pre- and post-execution examinations of convicts. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the inherent tension between discourse and practice: phrenologists decried the horrors of capital punishment, but required access to the heads and skulls that were its fruits. 

The fifth chapter focuses on the midcentury popular culture of practical phrenology in the home and the urban landscape. I relate the popularity of phrenological messages about criminal potential to broader social anxieties about strangers, immigration, mobility, and danger in the antebellum city and discourses about policing. This chapter first develops the dichotomy between “good” and “bad” heads, which juxtaposed great men and notorious villains and was prevalent in popular phrenological writing. Next, I explore how this lesson was interpreted for daily use, especially anxieties about self-improvement and the potential of children. Beyond practical uses of the maxims of phrenology, this chapter also discusses fictional fantasies of the perfect prediction of “phrenological detectives” to catch criminals before (or shortly after) the act. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the racialization of criminality in the postbellum period, discussing the extent to which phrenology participated in this shifting narrative about criminal types. This chapter reflects on the ways in which phrenological ways of seeing inflected both self-knowledge and midcentury attempts to know others in a “world of strangers.”

The sixth chapter turns to the final third of the nineteenth century, discussing the development of new fields of criminal science through the lens of phrenological reception. This chapter begins with a discussion of the development of the neuro disciplines as framed within a dichotomy of “old” and “new” phrenology, exploring how phrenologists and critics alike interpreted the genealogy of these sciences. The next two sections address the criminal sciences of Cesare Lombroso and Alphonse Bertillon respectively, focusing in particular on the continuities between these “new” sciences and phrenological tradition, and on the ways in which phrenologists responded to these developments, viewing them as an extension of their own practices.

The epilogue considers the afterlives of this phrenological impulse in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as well as the phrenological futures inspired by the traces of this epistemology. I discuss the demise of the phrenological profession and the last case of phrenology in court, the 1928 murder trial of Eula Mae Thompson in Georgia. I then address recent developments in criminology, particularly attempts to identify a “criminal gene” and the use of fMRIs to identify the criminal mind. The epilogue considers the longevity of phrenological language and images of the criminal, suggesting that phrenological concepts continue to inflect how we think about, describe, and attempt to solve crime in the present day. 

Notes to the Introduction

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments 
Introduction    Through a Mirror, Darkly
1                      Origins and Organs     
2                      Transatlantic Societies and Skulls
3                      Phrenology on Trial
4                      The Prison as Laboratory
5                      Policing the Self and the Stranger 
6                      A Victory for Phrenology?     
Epilogue          Phrenological Futures             
Notes
Bibliography
Inde