Phrenology began with two ideas that neuroscience still accepts: the brain is the organ of the mind, and different areas do different jobs. The leap came next. This episode follows the idea from Johann Caspar Lavater’s physiognomy to German physician Franz Josef Gall, who in 1796 claimed 27 mental organs, including one for murder and one for loving children, that grew like muscles and pushed out the skull. Johann Spurzheim coined the word phrenology and lectured across Britain and the United States, and Scottish lawyer George Combe’s The Constitution of Man sold over 200,000 copies by promising readers they could train their weaker faculties.

The craze reached Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, who had a phrenologist read their children’s heads, and Orson and Lorenzo Fowler turned it into a publishing business built around the white china head. It was also used to rank races, justify colonial violence, measure people in Rwanda, and claim women lacked organs for logic, while Lydia Folger Fowler used it to argue the opposite. Félix Voisin sorted reform school children by skull shape, John Conolly pushed for humane asylums, and Jean-Pierre Flourens’ ablation experiments and Paul Broca’s discovery of a speech area in the left frontal lobe broke the theory.

• The wet glove theory of a skull molding itself over the brain
• A suggestion that a person with an oversized destructiveness organ become a butcher
• John Neal’s 1834 courtroom defense blaming his client’s inflamed violence organ
• Phrenomesmerism, in which pressing bumps on a hypnotized subject supposedly changed their behavior
• Why Gall is still credited as a pioneer of the localization of brain function