12" Ceramic Phrenology Head

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Phrenology is a pseudoscience that uses measurements of the human skull to determine personality traits, talents, and mental ability. During the 1930s, Belgian colonial authorities in Rwanda used phrenology to explain the purported superiority of Tutsis over Hutus.

While the success of this approach is debatable, Conolly, through phrenology, introduced a more humane way of dealing with the mentally ill.The celebrated French criminologist Alexandre Lacassagne, for instance, had a different take to Lombroso on the matter of tattoos. Contemporary experiments on pigeons showed that the loss of parts of the brain either caused no loss of function or the loss of a completely different function than what would have been predicted by phrenology (Flourens, 1846).

Cheap and plentiful pamphlets, as well as the growing popularity of scientific lectures as entertainment, also helped spread phrenology to the masses. Parker Jones, Alfaro-Almagro, and Jbabdi (2018), for example, used structural MRI to quantify local scalp curvature. The pocket Lavater, or, The science of physiognomy: to which is added, An inquiry into the analogy existing between brute and human physiognomy, from the Italian of Porta. Carla Bittel explains that where “[m]en were distinguished by their firmness, force, self-esteem, courage, combativeness, and destructiveness; women were known for exquisiteness, emotion, susceptibility, and ‘devotion to offspring,’ as well as their secrecy, artifice, and nervousness.

Combe also devoted a large portion of his book to reconciling religion and phrenology, which had long been a sticking point. Controlling Time and Shaping the Self: Developments in Autobiographical Writing Since the Sixteenth Century.

In the latter work, which examines the subject of paleoanthropology, Bouts developed a teleological and orthogenetical view on a perfecting evolution, from the paleo-encephalical skull shapes of prehistoric man, which he considered still prevalent in criminals and savages, towards a higher form of mankind, thus perpetuating phrenology's problematic racializing of the human frame. The American brothers Lorenzo Niles Fowler (1811–1896) and Orson Squire Fowler (1809–1887) were leading phrenologists of their time.

But just because phrenology failed to make an impact on the courts, doesn’t mean it had no impact upon penal policy in general.