The dome of thought

Phrenology and the nineteenth-century popular imagination

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William Hughes
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The dome of thought examines how phrenology and phrenologists were represented in British daily newspapers, popular magazines and serious journals from the opening of the nineteenth century to its conclusion, before tracing the residual influence of the pseudoscience across the twentieth century and, surprisingly, into the second decade of the twenty-first century. The book opens with a consideration of how phrenology was deployed to explain literary celebrity in the Victorian period with particular attention being directed to the interpretation of the skulls of William Shakespeare and Robert Burns. The book then continues by recalling the manner in which the doctrine of phrenology was introduced to British culture in the early nineteenth century, and the manner in which the Continental activities of Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Gasper Spurzheim were reported. The lecture tour of Britain and Ireland subsequently undertaken by Spurzheim is discussed, and the book reassess the controversy which surrounded his encounter with the Scottish medical establishment in 1816. Spurzheim’s influence upon George Combe, the Scottish lawyer who was the popular face of British phrenology for much of the century, is then considered, as is the interface of phrenological thought with mesmerism in the work of John Elliotson. The final chapter of the book surveys the declining years of speculative and theoretical phrenology and its transformation into a primarily commercial activity under the particular influence of the American Fowler brothers. The conclusion surveys phrenology in the twentieth century, and its resurgence in political satires directed against Donald Trump.

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Preamble - ‘This far-famed skull’
Preamble - ‘This far-famed skull’
Chapter 1: ‘Dr Gall, the anatomist, who gives lectures on the skull’
Chapter 1: ‘Dr Gall, the anatomist, who gives lectures on the skull’
Chapter 2: ‘A field for quacks to fatten in’
Chapter 2: ‘A field for quacks to fatten in’
Chapter 3: ‘The doctrines of phrenology shall spread over Britain’
Chapter 3: ‘The doctrines of phrenology shall spread over Britain’
Chapter 4: ‘That strange amalgamation of the two sciences’
Chapter 4: ‘That strange amalgamation of the two sciences’
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