Phrenology

Phrenology is a discredited theory that personality and mental abilities can be inferred from the shape and contours of the skull. It proposed that distinct mental faculties occupied separate brain regions whose development altered the skull.

Cranioscopy: The practice of examining skull shape to infer a person's mental faculties or character. Franz Joseph Gall used this name for the skull-based method that became phrenology.
Johann Spurzheim: A German physician who collaborated with Franz Joseph Gall before promoting phrenology independently. Spurzheim helped popularize the doctrine in Britain and the United States.
Lorenzo Niles Fowler: An American phrenologist and publisher who promoted practical phrenology in the nineteenth century. Fowler helped popularize paid character readings and phrenological publications.
Pierre Flourens: A French physiologist whose experiments on animals challenged claims that specific mental faculties occupied discrete brain regions. His lesion studies directly disputed Gall's proposed map of mental faculties.
Phrenological organs: The distinct mental faculties that phrenologists claimed occupied specific regions of the brain. Phrenologists treated these hypothetical faculties as the features whose development supposedly shaped the skull.
The American Phrenological Journal: A nineteenth-century periodical devoted to phrenology and related reform movements. Its articles carried phrenological ideas to a broad American readership.
Orson Squire Fowler: An American phrenologist and publisher who promoted phrenology as a guide to health, education, and self-improvement. His lectures and books carried phrenological advice into everyday American life.
Paul Broca: A French physician who linked damage to a specific brain region with impaired speech production. Broca's evidence for functional localization relied on brain lesions, not skull contours.
Phrenological head: A diagram mapping proposed mental faculties onto regions of the skull. These charts translated the theory's supposed brain map into locations practitioners could examine.
Phrenological Society of Edinburgh: A society founded in Edinburgh in 1820 to promote the study of phrenology. The society gave the movement an organized base in Scotland.

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