Mark Twain, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the Head Readers: Literature, Humor, and Faddish Phrenology 9781009301299, 9781009301251, 1009301292

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MARK TWAIN, DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, AND THE HEAD READERS

Having a phrenological “head reading” was one of the most significant fads of the nineteenth century – a means for better knowing oneself and a guide for self-improvement. Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) had a lifelong yet long overlooked interest in phrenology, the pseudoscience claiming to correlate skull features with specialized brain areas and higher mental traits. Twain’s books are laced with phrenological terms and concepts, and he lampooned the head readers in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. He was influenced by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who also used his humor to assail head readers and educate the public. Finger shows that both humorists accepted certain features of phrenology, but not their skull-based ideas. By examining a fascinating topic at the intersection of literature and the history of neuroscience, this engaging study will appeal to readers interested in phrenology, science, medicine, American history, and the lives and works of Twain and Holmes. stanley finger is Professor Emeritus of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Washington University, St. Louis. He has published more than 250 articles and 22 books, including Origins of Neuroscience, Minds Behind the Brain, The Shocking History of Electric Fishes, and Franz Joseph Gall. He edited the Journal of the History of Neurosciences for twenty years.

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M A R K T WA I N, DR . OL I V E R W E N DE L L HOL M E S , A N D T H E H E A D R E A DE R S Literature, Humor, and Faddish Phrenology S TA N L EY FI NGER Washington University, St. Louis

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Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge cb2 8ea, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, usa 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009301299 doi: 10.1017/9781009301251 © Stanley Finger 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. isbn 978-1-009-30129-9 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible. Francis Bacon (1561–1626)

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Contents

List of Tables and Figures page viii Preface xiii 1 The Birth of a Controversial Doctrine

1

2 Coming to America

27

3 Skeptical in Hannibal

58

4 The River, the West, and Phrenology Abroad

75

5 Mark Twain’s “Small Test”

100

6 Tom, Huck, and the Head Readers

127

7 More Head Readings and a Phrenological Farewell

146

8 Young Holmes and Phrenology in Boston

167

9 An American in Paris

185

10 Quackery and Holmes’s Head Reading

208

11 Holmes’s Professor on “Bumpology”

226

12 Holmes’s “Medicated Novels”

245

13 Mr. Clemens and Dr. Holmes

257

14 Phrenology Assessed

281



306

Epilogue

References 318 Index 339

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Tables and Figures

Tables 1.1 Gall’s twenty-seven faculties of mind.

page 24

Figures 1.1 Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828), the founder of what later would be called “phrenology.” 2 1.2 Johann Gaspard Spurzheim (1776–1832), who served as Gall’s assistant from 1804 until 1813 and then promoted phrenology on his own. 12 1.3 Some of the human skulls Gall left in France that are now housed at the Rollett Museum in Baden bei Wien (photograph courtesy of Wendy Finger). 16 1.4 Etching from Gall and Spurzheim’s 1810 Atlas showing the skull regions overlying their organs of mind on a skull. 19 1.5 A plate from Gall and Spurzheim’s 1810 Atlas for the organ of wit, as revealed in a large forehead. 20 2.1 John Collins Warren (1778–1856), who learned about Gall’s doctrine in Europe and disseminated and tested his theory on his return.30 2.2 Edinburgh phrenologist George Combe (1788–1858). 40 2.3 Combe’s use of lines to delineate organ groups (from Combe, 1828). 41 2.4 Sir William Hamilton (1788–1856), an outspoken Scottish critic of phrenology.42 2.5 Spurzheim’s skull (courtesy of the Warren Anatomical Museum, Center for the History of Medicine, Harvard University). 46 2.6 Brothers (a) Lorenzo Fowler (1811–1896) and (b) Orson Fowler (1809–1887), who turned phrenology into a highly profitable industry. 50 viii

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List of Tables and Figures

ix

2.7 A head reading, ca. 1848. 51 2.8 The standard Fowler diagram showing thirty-seven phrenological organs. 52 2.9 Clinton Hall, headquarters for the Fowler phrenological enterprises from 1838 to 1854. 54 2.10 The Phrenological Journal and Miscellany started by the Fowlers in 1838 underwent several name changes, with one shown here. 56 3.1 Daguerreotype of Samuel Clemens, ca. 1851 (courtesy of Google Images). 64 4.1 George Combe’s illustration of the four basic temperaments (Combe, System, 1835). 79 4.2 Weaver’s organ groupings. 81 4.3 Samuel Clemens asking Horace Bixby to teach him the river (from Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, 1883). 83 4.4 Bixby offered Clemens the wheel of the Paul Jones in 1857. The City of Baton Rouge, shown here, was one of the steamboats Bixby piloted at a later time. Clemens joined Bixby on this classic sidewheeler after going downriver to New Orleans, and he took it back to St. Louis in 1882. He was then gathering material for his travelogue, Life on the Mississippi.84 4.5 The Quaker City.95 5.1 Samuel Clemens in 1871 (courtesy of Google Images). 105 6.1 Senator Dilworthy, the sweet-talking politician with the “grand, noble forehead” (from Twain and Warner’s The Gilded Age).129 6.2 Tom Sawyer (1876). 130 6.3 Huckleberry Finn (1884). 134 6.4 The phony King and Duke at an Arkansas slave auction. 138 6.5 Whitelaw Reid (1837–1912), editor of the New York Tribune.141 7.1 A poster announcing the Twain and Cable tour in Montreal, about six weeks after Clemens had his head read in Cincinnati. 147 7.2 Phrenologist Edgar C. Beall (1853–1930), who read Mark Twain’s head in 1885. 150 7.3 Jessie Allen Fowler (1856–1932), Lorenzo Fowler’s daughter, who evaluated Clemens in New York in 1901 (courtesy of Google Images). 159 7.4 Mark Twain in old age (photograph courtesy of the US Library of Congress, No. 2005691598). 164 8.1 Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. 169

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x

List of Tables and Figures

8.2 Massachusetts General Hospital. 173 8.3 Dr. James Jackson (1777–1867). 173 9.1 Dr. Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis (1787–1872), the French physician Holmes most admired. 193 10.1 Holmes lecturing on puerperal fever in 1843 (from Wikimedia Commons and based on a painting by Dean Cornwell in the Countway Library, Harvard University). 211 10.2 The poet Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), ca. 1849 (from Wikimedia Commons). 217 10.3 The poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892), who found inspiration in phrenology and had his head read in 1849. 219 10.4 (a) The cover page of Holmes’s Self-Instructor (note Lorenzo Fowler’s signature) and (b) the first page of his phrenological assessment (reproduced with permission of the Berkshire Athenaeum).221 10.5 The cover plate of Holmes’s 1859 head reading in the Holmes Memorabilia Scrapbook (reproduced with permission of the Phillips Academy). 223 11.1 Holmes (center) with other members of the Saturday Club. Clockwise from top: Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), James Russell Lowell (1819–1891), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882), William Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892), and John Lothrop Motley (1814–1877) (from Holmes, Works, Vol. 14, 1892). 228 11.2 The Autocrat trying to hold court at his boardinghouse’s breakfast table (from Holmes, Works, Vol. 1, 1892). 230 12.1 Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), one of several famous American authors incorporating phrenology into midnineteenth-century writings. 246 12.2 The brilliant Lurida Vincent with Dr. Butts, her medical mentor and friend (from Holmes, Works, Vol. 5, 1892). 252 12.3 Holmes in 1892, two years before his death (from Holmes, Works; Life and Letters, Vol. 2, 1892). 253 12.4 The gravestone of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and his wife, Amelia, in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge. 254 14.1 The Philadelphia physician Samuel Jackson (1787–1872). 282 E.1 Paul Broca (1824–1880), who associated the inability to speak fluently with damage to the third frontal convolution of the left hemisphere. 311

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E.2 David Ferrier (1843–1928), whose stimulation and ablation experiments confirmed cortical localization in a wide variety of animals, and whose cortical maps helped transform neurosurgery.313 E.3 David Ferrier’s functional cortical areas mapped onto an image of the human brain (from Ferrier, 1876). 314

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Preface

During the mid-1790s, Dr. Franz Joseph Gall, born in what is now Germany, began to lecture on his new science of man in Vienna. Unlike previous physiognomists attempting to correlate character with physical features, Gall included the brain in his theory. Understanding brain functions was, in fact, a major focus of his controversial doctrine. Gall observed individuals unusually gifted in specific domains, such as music and mathematics. He astutely recognized that there are distinct types of memory, each associated with a different “faculty” of mind. His “species” of memory included types for words, numbers, and locations. The fact that acute brain damage and certain diseases could affect some kinds of memory and not others helped give rise to two closely associated ideas. One was that the various faculties of mind must be involved with more than just memory. The second, even more revolutionary, was that each of faculty of mind depends on the integrity of a different part (“organ”) of the brain. Gall relied on the extremes of society, exceptionally gifted individuals, criminals, and the insane, to support his theory that there are numerous mental faculties associated with anatomically separate organs. But because the brains of great artists, gifted mathematicians, and other exceptional talents were next to impossible to obtain and preserve, he turned to skulls, convinced that well-developed cortical organs would produce noticeable cranial bumps. Conversely, underdeveloped organs should result in telltale cranial depressions. His heavy reliance on craniology made his theory more “visible” and exciting to physicians, philosophers, and interested laity. Gall left Vienna in 1805 with his recently hired assistant, Johann Gaspar Spurzheim. After lecturing throughout the German states and other parts of northern Europe, the two men settled in Paris. With Spurzheim’s help, Gall began to publish the first volumes of his “great work” in 1810. Three years later, Spurzheim split from Gall, in part to make changes in what xiii

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had been “their” system. He now began presenting his modified version of the theory in Britain under the catchy term “phrenology.” In 1832, four years after Gall’s death, Spurzheim sailed to the United States, hoping to interest more Americans in the doctrine that seemed to promise so much. Gall had envisioned what he was doing as a scientific enterprise, one that would allow him to understand more about the mind, the functional organization of the brain, brain damage, individual differences, and where humans stood on the Great Chain of Being. Yet before midcentury, phrenology as a scientific endeavor was already languishing among physicians and scientists in the United States, although it now had considerable traction among the laity. Working-class men, women with young children, clergy, and even people running for office were now lining up to pay to have their heads read by phrenologists, some of whom passed themselves off as erudite “professors” in cities or made stops in hamlets across the expanding country. Thanks to Orson and Lorenzo Fowler, who started a huge and widely successful business promoting and selling all things phrenological during the 1830s, head reading became one of the nineteenth century’s most significant scientific and medical fads. In retrospect, that this could happen is unsurprising, since its promoters were promising a scientific way to know more about oneself and others, a path to happiness, and a sound basis for reforming legal systems, asylums, and other stodgy institutions needing help. The Fowlers and their business associates understood markets and were quick to capitalize on phrenology’s appeal. They presented the doctrine to people near and far, providing inquisitive readers with what they most wanted to know. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who would write under the pen name “Mark Twain,” saw phrenology’s appeal and long reach while just a teenager in Hannibal, Missouri. Born in 1835, he was intrigued when a phrenologist arrived and began to lecture and read heads in his small town on the Mississippi River in about 1850. In 1855, he copied parts of a phrenology book into his first notebook. Afterward, he maintained a continuing interest in the controversial subject while working as a steamboat pilot, trekking through the Wild West, traveling the world, and residing in Connecticut and New York. Skeptical by nature, he even conducted a “little test” on famed head reader Lorenzo Fowler during the early 1870s, after which he underwent other head readings. Convinced by his clever experiment that the head readers were tricksters and frauds, he went on to disparage them in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,

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in a futuristic but never completed work called Eddypus, and in a humorous autobiographical dictation. He also employed phrenological terms and concepts in other books, magazine articles, and personal letters – in some instances sarcastically and in others to make his descriptions more vivid, colorful, funny, and memorable. Clemens was not, however, the first American to use humor to tell the laity that the head readers were charlatans preying on gullible citizens. Although overlooked by historians, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Boston physician, writer, and heralded wit, did much to clear the path for him. Holmes, who trained in Boston and Paris and obtained his medical degree from Harvard, was determined to improve American medicine by exposing false beliefs and worthless remedies. He went to Lorenzo Fowler for a phrenological examination before Clemens did so, and he also used his wry sense of humor to educate the public about the head readers before “Mark Twain” did the same. His first and most important exposé appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1859, after which he continued to assail the head readers in his three “medicated novels” and lectures. The present book is not intended to trace phrenology’s “bumpy” history. The ups and downs of this (pseudo)science turned fad have been covered elsewhere, though typically with a heavy focus on what transpired in England and Scotland.1 Moreover, other scholars have begun to examine how phrenology became a global movement that involved both racial and gender issues.2 Instead, this volume deals with how both Samuel Clemens and Oliver Wendell Holmes, two American humorists with huge followings, observed the head readers when they were young, set forth to learn more about the intriguing doctrine and its practitioners, and later expressed their thoughts about the fad in public venues. With this focus and by letting these famous writers use their own voices at select times, I hope to show how these two pioneers of American literature utilized wit and humor to convey serious warnings about the head readers to the gullible laity. At the same time, this book will reveal new information about the lives and interests of these two authors, who were admired around the world – material that has remained largely overlooked 1

2

Most notably by Roger Cooter in British alienists, 1975; Cooter, Popular Science, 1979; Cooter, British Isles, 1989; and by John van Wyhe, Victorian Scientific Naturalism, 2004a. Also see Shapin, Phrenological knowledge, 1975; Shapin, Homo phrenologicus, 1979; and De Giustino, Conquest of Mind, 1975. E.g., Bittel, Truth of Phrenology, 2019; Branson, Science of Race, 2017; Poskett, Materials of Mind, 2019.

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for too long.3 Additionally, this volume will shed more light on the scientific and medical beliefs that were being entertained across America (and the world) during the long nineteenth century, a subject worthy of more attention. Unlike the great majority of history of science and history of medicine books, which are based on scientific journal articles and books written by and for professionals, this voyage back in time will draw heavily from page-turning novels and popular magazine articles aimed at a diverse and large readership. With this primary-source orientation, readers will see precisely how Twain and Holmes transmitted their insights about the head readers and their “new science” to the laity and how both men viewed themselves as reformers when it came to educating the gullible public about phrenology and its purveyors. As can be surmised, considerable attention will be paid to what Twain and Holmes found so disturbing about the head readers, who seemed to be enriching themselves. But a closer look at the writings of both men will also reveal something unexpected and just as important. As will be emphasized toward the end of this book, neither man went so far as to damn everything about phrenology. True, both came down hard on its misguided reliance on small cranial features (supposedly tell-tale bumps). But both men believed that phrenology also had acceptable tenets and worthwhile objectives. They accepted the basic concepts of numerous faculties of mind and specialized cortical organs; they appreciated how these ideas could account for the variable effects of brain damage; and they agreed with phrenologists that brain features could account for individual differences, even in young children. These positive features of phrenology are very much a part of the story to be told, informing us even more about the changing culture and about Twain and Holmes as profound thinkers, not just great humorists. Writing this book was challenging, not just because of the research it demanded, but also because it involved straddling a high and formidable fence. On the one hand, there was a need to find a way to introduce Twain, Holmes, and literary enthusiasts to how phrenology emerged and changed over the nineteenth century – that is, how this often-ridiculed 3

Alan Gribben’s “Twain and phrenology” from 1972 is the exception. Although more than fifty years old, it stimulated me to research and write three journal articles on Twain, Holmes, and phrenology (Twain’s fascination with phrenology, 2019; Twain’s phrenological experiment; Holmes on phrenology, 2020). The present book expands what can be found in Gribben’s and my articles, providing more cultural background, biographical information, and insights about scientific and popular phrenology.

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doctrine began as a serious medical and anthropological subject and how head readings then became faddish, with ordinary people paying phrenologists to learn more about themselves and for directives needed to live healthier and happier lives. Yet, on the other hand, there was also a need to inform readers interested in the histories of science and medicine about Samuel Clemens and his famous creation, Mark Twain, and in Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, a giant in his day now largely forgotten or confused with his son, the American Supreme Court justice of the same name. To reach these disparate audiences, I shall begin with an introduction to phrenology, its founder, its other early promoters, and how it succeeded in making inroads in Britain and then the United States. Following this introduction to phrenology, I shall turn to Samuel Clemens, providing basic biographical information and showing how he was involved with head readers throughout his life. The same will then be done for Holmes, whom Clemens knew and emulated on this controversial subject. By so doing, I hope to show readers in different fields how and why each writer, one with little formal education, the other an exceptionally well-trained physician, became interested in the medical and social movement that captured the public’s imagination – so interested that they would go on to “expose” the head readers in their most widely read and admired works. I must now explain why I have chosen to begin my Clemens and Holmes sections with Clemens, who arrived on the scene after Holmes. Many factors figured in my decision, perhaps the most important being that “Mark Twain” is still read and admired throughout the world today, unlike Holmes, who had nonetheless been an icon in his day. Additionally, the path back to Holmes solved two mysteries. First, who did the most to open Clemens’s eyes to how the phrenologists were tricking gullible laity? And second, was he largely copying another writer when portraying the charlatans, yet not damning everything about phrenology in his writings? Until now, Holmes had not been recognized as a major source for Clemens’s most profound, telling, and witty comments about what the head readers were really attending to while seemingly examining heads. By following several converging lines of evidence, I hope to show that Clemens borrowed freely and was less than original in his thinking and writing about phrenologists and their so-called science. I also hope to show that this did not seem to bother him in his crusade to warn and educate the public about the head readers. Before beginning this voyage back in time, I would like to acknowledge the many people who assisted me on my project. Topping my list

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are the always helpful staff at Washington University’s main campus and medical school libraries. For Clemens/Twain, I am most indebted to Alan Gribben, who stimulated my interest in him and phrenology, and to Robert Hirst and Gary Scharnhorst, for needed guidance and for providing me with hard-to-obtain documents. For Holmes, thank you Scott Podolsky and archivists Dominic Hall, Jessica Murphy, Paige Roberts, and Ann-Marie Harris. I am also grateful to Caleb Barr and Daniel Roe for checking various Holmes documents in Harvard’s archives when I could not travel. Paul Eling, my co-author on many publications about Franz Joseph Gall, deserves special thanks. Additionally, Malcolm Macmillan, Warren Danziger, and Ellen Wasserman are among the many readers who provided me with feedback on earlier drafts. If this book has oversights, missteps, or errors, they are mine and mine alone. Lastly, thank you Wendy for fifty-four years of love and encouragement, for recognizing my insatiable need to read and write, for your thoughtful comments on this book, and for walking our bossy dog when I was locked in my study writing or procrastinating about what to read, write, or slash next. My life would be empty and dull without you as my wife and without our loving family.

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chapter 1

The Birth of a Controversial Doctrine

I was astonished to find that the most inveterate chipeurs [thieves] had a large [cranial] prominence … and that this region was flat in all those who showed a horror of theft; while, in those who were indifferent about it, the part was sometimes more and sometimes less developed, but never so much as in the professed thieves. Franz Joseph Gall, Functions, 1835

Samuel Clemens might never have been given a more perfect opening for poking fun at phrenology’s practitioners and the doctrine itself than when he showed up incognito at Lorenzo Fowler’s London office for a head reading during the 1870s. As his creation “Mark Twain” would later inform his followers, the highly regarded phrenologist fondled his head and found that he had a cavity showing he was a man without a sense of humor! Quoting Twain: “He said he often found bumps of humor which were so small that they were hardly noticeable, but that in his long experience this was the first time he had ever come across a cavity where a bump ought to be.”1 Could a humorist looking for good material have asked for a better gift? After Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes went to have his head read in 1859, he was also profoundly influenced by what he saw and heard. Later that year, he published a piece in the Atlantic Monthly describing his fictitious “Professor’s visit” to a phrenological emporium, followed by his lecture to a small assembly of people having breakfast at a Boston boarding house. Tongue-in-cheek and using his unflappable Professor as his mouthpiece, Holmes had his protagonist state that the phrenologist “acquires his information solely through cranial inspections and manipulations.” And then, after looking at the astonished faces around the breakfast table and feigning

1

For his head reading, see Twain, Autobiography, 2013, 2: 334–337.

1

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2

The Birth of a Controversial Doctrine

Figure 1.1  Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828), the founder of what later would be called “phrenology.”

astonishment, Holmes (assuredly smiling himself) had his Professor ask: “What are you laughing at?”2 How Twain would describe his two head readings with Fowler, disguising himself during his first but not his follow-up visit, will be presented in Chapter 5. What Holmes would write humorously about phrenology and head readers will appear in Chapters 11 and 12. But to fully appreciate what phrenology had become, the events leading up to what these two literary giants wrote, and the important messages they were presenting to the public, we must begin with Franz Joseph Gall (Figure 1.1), who, unlike them, was droll and appeared to be lacking a good sense of humor.

Gall’s Formative Years Today, Gall is almost always portrayed as a charlatan, a fraud, or a buffoon, derogatory terms also applied to him by various adversaries during his lifetime. Yet aside from his faulty craniology, his other methods for understanding the mind and brain, including dissections and studying development and comparative anatomy, were sound. More importantly, 2

Holmes, Professor, 1859; in Holmes, Works, 1892, 2: 201.

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Gall’s Formative Years

3

almost everything he was championing, sans his craniology, is now considered mainstream science.3 Two of Gall’s most significant contributions, the concept of a large number of practical “faculties” of mind (for speech, music, color perception, etc.) and how each of these basic functions must be associated with a specialized cortical area, or “organ,” are now taken for granted. Yet, other than some historians of science and medicine, few people today seem to know that Gall had introduced these ideas. Gall was born on March 9, 1758, in Tiefenbronn, a small town in what is now southwestern Germany.4 Joseph, as he was called, was the sixth of thirteen children. He was fascinated with nature from his childhood. He loved walking in the woods and catching birds and small animals, some of which he took home as pets and continued to watch, study, and even dissect. He would never lose this interest in the natural world, and he would continue to have a menagerie of birds, dogs, rabbits, monkeys, and other pets in the various places he would call home. His schooling began in 1767 under a priest, who was also his uncle. He then went to a Lyceum in Baden and a Gymnasium in Bruschal. With his strong interest in the natural world, he continued his education by studying medicine and anatomy at the University of Strasbourg. His favorite professor was Jean Hermann, who taught philosophy, pathology, botany, chemistry, and medicine, as well as a popular course in natural history. Gall not only listened to Hermann’s every word but even caught wild animals for him. One was a tiny shrew that now bears his professor’s name, Sorex tetragonurus, Hermann. Gall did not, however, receive his medical degree from Strasbourg. Instead, he chose to complete his medical studies at the University of Vienna, which had recently undergone significant reforms associated with Enlightenment ideals. There he enjoyed listening to Maximilian Stoll, who rejected unsubstantiated theorizing, promoted fact-based medicine, and stressed the importance of detailed patient histories. Calling him “my immortal professor Stoll,”5 Gall would follow him by shunning 3 4

5

For a detailed scientific biography of Gall, see Finger and Eling, Gall, 2019. The final chapter examines how many of his ideas, though not his craniology, have become mainstream science. Gall’s ancestors came from Como, Italy, in 1635 and settled in nearby Weil der Stadt, where they dealt in textiles. His father was a successful merchant and became mayor of nearby Tiefenbronn (see Finger and Eling, Gall, 2019). For additional works about Gall, see Chenevix, Gall, and Spurzheim, 1828; Capen, Biography, 1835; Hollander, Mental Functions, 1901; Möbius, Gall, 1905; Gräffer, Gall, 1918; Lanteri-Laura, Phrénologie, 1970; Ackerknecht, Gall, 1953; Ackerknecht and Vallois, Gall, 1953; Heintel, Gall, 1968; Young, Functions, 1968, Minds, 1970; Schulz, Schädellehre, 1973; Lesky, Gall, 1979; OehlerKlein, Schädellehre, 1990; van Wyhe, historyofphrenology.org.uk, 2002a; van Wyhe, Authority, 2002b. Gall, Functions, 1835, 2: 160.

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4

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metaphysical speculations in his science and medicine, instead favoring what could be experienced through the senses, an empirical approach.6 Gall seemed to have no interest in seeking an academic appointment after obtaining his medical degree in 1785. Nor did he want to be tied down at Vienna’s new hospital or in a governmental administrative position. Instead, he opted to support himself by starting a private medical practice. He made himself more respectable by marrying in 1790 and buying a fine house in a fashionable part of the city, where he saw wealthy patients. When not treating patients or engaging in consultations, Gall pursued a related interest – something he was increasingly viewing as his true calling. Along with other forward-looking physicians of the Enlightenment, he wanted to modernize medicine by anchoring it more firmly in the sciences. And with this goal in mind, he began to construct a new science of man that would be applicable to medicine – a science devoid of theological and other metaphysical constructs.

Emergence In 1791, he published his first book, a treatise that railed against metaphysicians and encouraged physicians to focus on observable nature, including human nature.7 He planned two volumes, though he published only one. In it, he explained how “a comparison of human beings with the unintelligent animals, both in healthy and sick conditions, will bring us much closer to a real insight in human nature.”8 He further pointed out how we differ from one another, even in infancy. And he argued that, much like the senses, “the various psychic faculties and notions have their seats in different places of the brain,” a conclusion supported by the finding that patients sometimes show defects in one or just a few mental functions, while others remain unaffected. Thus, Gall began to plant the seeds for the doctrine that would soon make him famous. Nonetheless, other key features of this doctrine were missing in his 1791 book. Of particular importance, he did not provide a list of his suspected faculties of mind. Nor is there anything substantial about different faculties being associated with specific brain territories. Additionally, there is nothing about how skull features (bumps, 6 7 8

Eling and Finger, Gall on God, 2021. Gall, Untersuchungen, 1791; see Finger and Eling, Gall, 2019, 24–31; Temkin, Gall, 1947. Gall, Untersuchungen, 1791, 28.

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Emergence

5

depressions, etc.) could reflect the brain’s functional anatomy, soon to become his most controversial idea. Gall’s thinking was primarily guided by German natural philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder.9 Still, two personal observations over the next few years would give him the remaining components he would need to formulate the doctrine that would take the world by surprise. The first involved a girl named Bianchi,10 who was about five when he met her. She had a singular, isolated talent for music, yet was ordinary in all other ways. “This child repeated all that she had heard sung or executed on the piano; she retained by heart whole concertos, which she had heard at most twice.” He then added, “Her parents assured me that she was endowed, with this astonishing faculty for music only.”11 Bianchi was extremely important because she showed Gall that “there exists a well marked difference between memory for music, and the other species of memory.” This insight led him to postulate “that each species of memory must have its distinct organ,” a marked departure from earlier thinking.12 Philosophers had long considered memory a single, indivisible function, listing it with perception and cognition as a fundamental faculty of mind. But having met Bianchi, Gall would now go on to write: “From that moment I devoted myself to more connected researches into the different species of memory. In very little time I became acquainted with a considerable number of persons, who had an excellent memory for certain objects, and a very feeble memory for others. These observations led me to augment the number of my denominations for memory.”13 Gall further realized that Bianchi had more than just an exceptional memory for music. She also had an unusual talent for music, suggesting the musical part of her mind must also oversee other functions in this domain. Moreover, her age and lack of formal training supported the idea that she had been born with her unusual memory and talent for music – that her highly specialized faculty must be innate rather than the result of learning or experience. Meeting Bianchi could well have led Gall to think back to some schoolmates, who could memorize long verbal passages with ease, unlike him. This ability suggested a second innate and independent faculty of mind: 9 10 11 12 13

Finger and Eling, Gall, 2019, esp. 27–28, 119–122. Eling, Finger, and Whitaker, Music, 2015; Bianchi, 2017. Gall, Functions, 1835, 5: 63 (italics added). Gall, Functions, 1835, 5: 63. Gall, Functions, 1835, 5: 63.

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one for words. But more than just helping him identify a second faculty, his schoolmates took him well beyond where he had been with Bianchi. This was because, when he had seen her, it “had not yet presented itself to my mind, that the talent for music could be recognized by the form of the head.”14 He now recalled that the excellent verbal memorizers he knew from his school days possessed bulging, cow- or saucer-like eyes. Two important deductions followed from his memory of his talented classmates. The first was that a specialized brain area for words must exist behind the eye sockets. And the second was, “if [verbal] memory manifests itself by an external character, why should not the other faculties have their characters outwardly visible?”15 With Bianchi directing his thinking to many independent faculties, and the cow-eyed schoolboys suggesting that each faculty might be associated with a distinct brain area with a detectable skull marker, Gall set forth to confirm his new ways of thinking about the mind and brain. He visited local jails to interview wardens and prisoners, asylums housing the insane, and institutions for the deaf and dumb. He also searched for accomplished people with unique talents, and even invited neighborhood children and working-class people to his house to probe deeper into what could account for their differences. I therefore collected in my house, quite a number of individuals of the lower classes of society, following different occupations, such as coachmen, servants, etc. I obtained their confidence, and disposed them to sincerity, by giving them beer, wine, and money, and when favorably inclined, I got them to tell me of each other’s good and bad qualities, and in short, of all their most striking characteristics.16

By 1796, Gall had enough confidence in his observations and deductions to start offering courses on his theory. His lecturing began in his stately home, where he was now busily filling his cabinets with human skulls, head casts, and various animal specimens. His collections provided him with prime examples for his lecture demonstrations, and they would serve as his most important research “library.” He would utilize and value them more highly than his extensive book collection. Physicians, students, artists, writers, government officials, and even clergy paid to hear his insights and watch as he presented his evidence. Moreover, people now began to show him their cranial bumps and tell him about their unique personality 14 15 16

Gall, Functions, 1835, 5: 63. Gall, Functions, 1835, 5: 8. Gall, Functions, 1835, 4: 14.

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Going Public

7

traits and accomplishments. Most of those attending his lectures left his home impressed with him and his novel ideas.

Going Public Gall waited two more years before publishing the basics of his still-nascent theory, using his time to collect more specimens and assimilate his data. In 1798, he went public in an open letter to Freiherr von Retzer,17 book censor and secretary to the court in Vienna. His letter appeared in the Neue Teutsche Merkur (New German Mercury), a newspaper that promoted the humanities and Enlightenment values. He laid out a list of seven items he wished to cover in the first part of his letter, and they are telling. In translation:

I. The faculties and the propensities [are] innate in man and animals. II. The faculties and propensities of man have their seat in the brain. III & IV. The faculties are not only distinct and independent of the propensities, but also the faculties among themselves, and the propensities among themselves, are essentially distinct and independent: they ought, consequently, to have their seat in parts of the brain distinct and independent of each other. V. Of the distribution of the different organs and their various development, arising from different forms of the brain. VI. From the totality and the development of determinate organs results a determinate form, either of the whole brain, or of its parts as separate regions. VII. From the formation of the bones of the head, until the most advanced period of life, the form of the internal surface of the skull is determined by the external form of the brain: we can then be certain of the existence of some faculties and propensities, while the external surface of the skull agrees with its internal surface, or so long as the variation is confined to certain known limits.18 Gall presented five proofs when discussing the faculties being independent of each other and associating them with different brain areas. They 17 18

Freiherr is a title comparable to Baron. Gall, Functions, 1835, 1: 8–14.

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The Birth of a Controversial Doctrine

were: the faculties can become fatigued and recover separately; people are not equally talented in their various dispositions; animals also differ in their dispositions; the faculties develop at different times; and brain damage could affect some faculties while leaving others unaffected. The second part of his open letter dealt mainly with his investigative methods. He prioritized finding people with unusual skull elevations or depressions and then determining if they had peculiar propensities or isolated, unusual behaviors. Conversely, he looked for people with exceptional talents or other standout traits or deficiencies and then examined their skulls for bumps and depressions. Knowing ordinary people could not provide the information he needed and having little interest in averaging, he drew most heavily from three extremes of society: criminals; the insane; and individuals he considered geniuses in specific fields, such as music, mathematics, and painting. He mentioned collecting skulls, and life and death masks, dissecting healthy brains, and studying diseased or injured brains. Nonetheless, he found it very difficult to obtain the brains of truly great people. Moreover, suitable methods for preserving the brains he could get from executed criminals and the insane were not yet in use.19 Gall made it clear in his 1798 letter that he believed in a “gradual scale of perfection,” a concept sometimes called the scala naturae or the “Great Chain of Being.” In earlier times, this hierarchy had God at the top, with angels, demons, noblemen, and the laity occupying successively lower positions, followed by animals, in diminishing order of intelligence.20 Gall dispensed with the supernatural parts of the chain and showed no interest in plants and rocks. His gaze was firmly set on the “perfection” of the nervous system as one ascended Nature’s ladder. After all, “Can man, so long as he is an animal, stand insulated from the rest of nature?” “Can he be governed by organic laws, opposed to those which preside over the qualities and faculties of the horse, the dog, the monkey?”21 He declined to give a new name to his ambitious scientific program. Further, he did not coin or even like the word “phrenology” when it later became a part of the lexicon. American physician Benjamin Rush would introduce this term while lecturing at the Medical College of the University of Pennsylvania in 1805.22 As for Gall’s reasons for rejecting Rush’s new 19 20 21 22

Hagner, Skulls, 2003; Finger and Eling, Gall, 2019, 130–135. Lovejoy, Great Chain, 1966; Finger and Eling, Gall, 2019, 113–119. Gall, Functions, 1835, 1: 87. Rush used the term in a general way to denote a science of mind and did not mention Gall or his theory. His two lectures using the word “phrenology” were published in 1811 (Rush, Introductory

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term once it began to catch on, the one he usually gave was that its Greek roots (“phren” and “ology”) signified the study of the mind, a field of philosophy associated with speculative, unscientific ideas, rather than the functional organization of the brain as revealed by the latest methods of science. Additionally, he wanted to distance himself from Johann Gaspard Spurzheim. The latter began to popularize the word in 1818 after leaving Gall, setting off on his own, and making some “unacceptable” changes in the doctrine Gall had fathered. Gall also disliked Schädellehre (skull theory) in German, craniologie in French, and “craniology” in English. “The object of my researches is the brain,” he explained, adding that “The cranium is only a faithful cast of the external surface of the brain, and is consequently but a minor part of the principal object.”23 The French term organologie was closer to describing how he associated behavior traits with specialized brain areas. Yet well before he died in 1828, his original system was also being dubbed “phrenology,” to his horror and chagrin. Interestingly, Gall did write that he was “nothing less than a physiognomist” in his open letter to Retzer.24 Physiognomists had long maintained that character has physical correlates, especially noticeable in heads and faces. The term “physiognomy” is itself derived from the Greek words for “nature” and “to know.” It has been said that the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras used this branch of knowledge when selecting students. Several Aristotelian treatises tell us more about early physiognomy. For example, in the Historia animalium we find: “When men have large foreheads, they are slow to move; when they have small ones, they are fickle; when they have broad ones, they are apt to be distraught; when they have foreheads rounded or bulging out, they are quick tempered.”25 The Physiognomonica is especially interesting, although the origins of this later Aristotelian thesis are murky. Here, readers are assured that people having lion-like features (e.g., deep-set eyes, a square forehead, broad shoulders, and a powerful chest) tend to be bold, proud, and ambitious.26 They stand

23 24 25 26

Lectures, 1811; Noel and Carlson, Phrenology, 1970; Finger and Eling, Gall, 424–427). Thomas Forster appeared to have been the person to introduce the word to Spurzheim (Forster, Observations, 1815a; Forster, Sketch, 1815b). Spurzheim, in turn, adopted the word in 1818, titling one of his books Observations sur la Phraenologie (Spurzheim, Phraenologie, 1818b). Gall, Functions, 1835, 1: 18. Gall, Functions, 1835, 1: 18. Aristotle, Historia animalium, 1.1. 488b, 17–20 (see Aristotle, Works, 1908.) Aristotle (pseud.), Physiognomonica, 1913, 809b. The panther, in contrast to the lion, is singled out among “brave animals” as the best representative of the feminine type (but for its strong legs), and, with regard to its character, for being “mean and thievish … a beast of low cunning.”

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in sharp contrast with people displaying sheep-like physical features, who exhibit the opposing character traits. Such associations remained popular into and through the Renaissance. Due mainly to Swiss minister Johann Kaspar Lavater’s influential work from the 1770s, physiognomy was still in vogue while Gall was composing his letter to Retzer.27 Nevertheless, Gall was not about to emulate Lavater, who merely attempted to correlate head and other features with behavioral traits. Instead, he was intent on identifying the fundamental faculties of mind, of which there were many. And he was set on going well beyond Lavater by revealing the functional organization of the human brain associated with these higher faculties of mind, faculties he was associating with consciousness and making choices. Little was known about the anatomy and physiology of the brain during this period. Microscopy was still in its infancy, and loose speculations were rampant. Chronologically, this was approximately a century before Spanish anatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal came forth with the idea that the brain is made up of individual cells (“neuron theory”).28 It was also well before British physiologist Charles Scott Sherrington made a case for the presence of gaps (synapses) where nerves ended.29 Moreover, next to nothing was known about so-called nerve “spirits.” Although Italian investigator Luigi Galvani had recently raised the possibility that these mysterious agents might be electrical, like the discharges from some specialized (electric) fishes, not everyone agreed.30 In fact, most researchers sided with Alessandro Volta, who did not think that frogs, farm animals, and, most importantly, humans have nervous systems that function electrically, mainly because he could not identify anything like the special organs one could observe in some saltwater rays and freshwater “electric” eels.31 There was not even an ongoing back-and-forth discussion about cortical localization of function before Gall. Several decades earlier, Swedish physician and natural philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg had collected clinical data suggesting that willed movements are dependent on the middle part 27 28 29 30 31

Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente, 1775–1778. Shepherd, Neuron Doctrine, 1991; the word “neuron” dates from 1891. Bennett, Synapse, 2001. Galvani, Viribus electricitatis, 1791. Importantly, Volta could not feel the shocks or measure the electricity in his frogs and other animals. The electrical organs in the strange fishes would become models for his pile or battery, a landmark in the history of electricity. For more on this topic, see Manzoni, Cerebral ventricles, 1998; Smith et al., Animal Spirit, 2012; Finger and Piccolino, Electric Fishes, 2011.

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Assistants

11

of the cerebral cortex.32 He further deduced that there must be specialized areas for each sensory system, even concluding from cases of brain damage and other lines of evidence that higher cognitive functions probably have something to do with the front of the brain.33 Swedenborg’s most informative writings on this subject, however, were still unpublished when Gall came on the scene, and what he did publish never really circulated in scientific circles. Experiencing visions and believing he was conversing directly with God, Swedenborg opted to abandon the sciences and medicine, and instead devote his remaining years to religion and rewriting scripture.34 Branded a heretic or a madman by some of his countrymen, he left Sweden for London, where he died in 1772. Consequently, Gall was indeed breaking new ground when he laid out his case for a multitude of everyday faculties dependent on different brain parts, with the two hemispheres duplicating each other.35 Still, as was true with his 1791 book, what Gall omitted from his “coming out” letter is equally worthy of attention. Specifically, he did not provide a list of his faculties or a map of the brain or skull showing the locations of some of his organs of mind. He also conveyed nothing about how the faculties might interact. Not wishing to deal with theology and with so little known about brain physiology, he would never satisfactorily address how the parts could work so harmoniously. About all he would contend is that interactions would be easier for organs situated close to one another, such as those for music and mathematics.36

Assistants Gall devoted more of his time and energy to discovering the faculties of the mind and the part of the brain associated with each one after he published his open letter. He studied human and animal behaviors and correlated what he learned with skull morphology. And, as he worked, he kept amending his list of faculties and the locations of the organs needed for their expression. His fundamental assumptions and various methods of inquiry, however, remained unchanged. 32 33 34 35 36

For biographical information, see Toksvig, Swedenborg, 1948; Sigstedt, Swedenborg, 1952; Trobridge, Swedenborg, 1962; and Jonsson, Swedenborg, 1971. For Swedenborg on the brain, see Neuberger, Swedenborg, 1901; Akert and Hammond, Swedenborg, 1962; Norrsell, Swedenborg, 2007; Finger and Eling, Gall, 2019, 85–93. Fifteen years after Swedenborg died from a stroke, his followers in London established the New Church, also called the Swedenborgian Church. Eling and Finger, Symmetry, 2020a. Eling and Finger, Fine arts, 2015; Finger and Eling, Gall, 2019, 358–361.

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The Birth of a Controversial Doctrine

Figure 1.2  Johann Gaspard Spurzheim (1776–1832), who served as Gall’s assistant from 1804 until 1813 and then promoted phrenology on his own.

He soon recognized that he needed help to move ahead with his research program. This was partly because he also had to maintain his medical practice for income. Hence, he employed several assistants during his time in Vienna.37 Karl Franz Anton Ritter von Schreibers was an early assistant, and Franz Klein followed, being especially adept with animal preparations and making plaster models. He also had an assistant identified only as M. Niklas. But it was Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (Figure 1.2) who became his most valued, trusted, and visible assistant, at least for a while.38 Quoting Spurzheim: “In 1800, I assisted for the first time at one of his courses, and after having completed my medical studies in 1804, I became associated with him in his labors, concerning the Anatomy, Physiology, and Pathology of the brain and nervous system.”39 Spurzheim was, in fact, an excellent dissector, and he also had a deep knowledge of philosophy and an unusual gift for languages. Gall and Spurzheim would work side by side until about 1813, when Spurzheim surprised his mentor by going 37 38 39

Finger and Eling, Gall, 2019, 198–202. Carmichael, Spurzheim, 1833; Capen, Dr. Spurzheim, 1881; Finger and Eling, Gall, 2019, 198–202; Van Wyhe, Spurzheim, 2020. Spurzheim, Phrenology, 1838, 11.

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Interim Reports

13

off on his own and altering some features of what had been “their” theory. Gall would look upon his departure as a betrayal, and he did not hesitate to disparage what his wayward assistant was now doing. The two men would never meet again, even though both resided in Paris since 1807.

Interim Reports Gall opted not to publish anything more about his emerging doctrine before leaving Vienna in 1805. But some physicians attending his Vienna lectures took notes and provided informative progress reports. One such person was Ludwig Friedrich Froriep, who published his synopses of Gall’s lectures between 1800 and 1802. He began with a summary of Gall’s basic principles, next presented his “Ladder of Improvement of Animals,” then attended to the senses, and only then dealt with his propensities and faculties of mind. Philipp Franz Walther (presenting himself as W_R) was more detailed in his 1802 publication. He too followed Gall’s lecture sequence. But he also covered how the organs of mind seemingly developed, how they were affected in old age, and more. He even related what Gall said about gender, racial, and national and regional differences in anatomy and behavior.40 These and related publications reveal that Gall’s doctrine was still undergoing considerable fine-tuning as the eighteenth century closed and the nineteenth was beginning. Gall was still unsure how many faculties of mind belonged on his list, what to call some of them, and where several organs were located. For example, Froriep stated that he had twenty-two faculties, whereas Ludwig Heinrich Bojanus, who was in Vienna from 1796 to 1797, wrote that he had over thirty.41 Andrew Sniadecki, who arrived in the Austrian capital a year before Bojanus, mentioned twenty-eight.42 These early reports also show that Gall was already starting to distinguish between those faculties unique to humans and those we share with animals lower on the scale of perfection. Some of his early lists had Attentiveness, Reasoning, Wit, Goodness, Generosity, and Imagination in the distinctly human category. At the same time, he felt that both we and our animal cousins share Love of Offspring, Courage, Cunning, Locality, and many other propensities. Instinct to Assassinate, Love of Truth, and 40 41 42

Walther, Critische Darstellung, 1802. Bojanus, Encephalo-Cranioscopie, 1801; Bojanus, Craniognomic system, 1802; SakalauskaitėJuodeikiene et al., Vilnius, 2017; Sakalauskaitė-Juodeikiene et al., Bojanus, 2020. Sniadecki, Systematu Galla, 1805; Sakalauskaitė-Juodeikiene et al., Vilnius, 2017.

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Theatrical Talents are among the faculties that would disappear from his later lists, albeit with some being subsumed under other headings. Early on, Gall did not associate all of his basic propensities with cortical organs, although he did locate the organs for each of his higher faculties in the cerebral cortex. For example, he placed the organ for the reproductive behaviors that he was associating with consciousness and choice in the cerebellar cortex, as opposed to the cerebral cortex. Further, he specifically mentioned three non-cortical functions and organs, locating two (Tenacity of Life, Self-Preservation) in the medulla and the third (Choice of Nourishment) in the midbrain.43 His final list would be devoid of all non-cortical faculties or propensities. As for his organ for reproductive instinct, it would remain the only one of his twenty-seven organs not housed in the cerebral cortex, still being confined to the cerebellar cortex.44 Somewhat less controversially, he would maintain that our most noble faculties have their organs high in the front of the cerebrum.

European Tour Gall was taken by surprise at the end of 1801, when Emperor Francis II stepped in to curtail his lecturing in Austria. Napoleon’s armies were then threatening to invade and the emperor felt he had to exert more control over potentially destabilizing influences on the home front. Gall, he was advised,45 was one such destabilizing influence because, as the emperor put it in a letter to a lower government official, his “theory can be traced to materialism, and consequently seems to contradict the first principles of religion and morality.”46 Gall tried to explain to the Government of Lower Austria that his theory was not materialistic or a threat to Catholicism. He pointed to a long history of anatomists and scholars associating the mind with different parts of the brain, even the Church Fathers Paul and Augustine.47 “Consequently, my fundamental principles have at all times been expounded by the greatest men,” he wrote, “without any one having ever, on that account, become

43 44 45 46 47

Eling and Finger, Non-cortical faculties, 2020b. Eling and Finger, Cerebellum, 2019. Andreas Johann von Stifft, whom Gall had recommended to be court physician, was probably the force behind the emperor’s hostile actions. Froriep, Gall’s Vorlesung, 1802, 249–250; Lesky, Gall, 1981. Walther, Neue Darstelungen, 1804; Combe and Combe, Cerebellum, 1838.

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European Tour

15

alarmed on the subject of materialism.”48 He especially tried to make clear that the associations he was making between faculties and organs did not mean that brain tissue experiences or judges things. He explained that the tissue provides only the material conditions or instruments necessary for our spiritual or mental expressions – that is, the brain is not the soul. He further argued, with evidence to support his assertion, that he had not broken any laws when lecturing in his home without official permission. This was the second charge leveled against him. Much like the city of Vienna, which would fall before Napoleon’s advancing troops in 1805 and again in 1809, Gall was not about to win this battle. He prevailed only in being allowed to lecture without official permission to despised Frenchmen and other foreigners, but not to Austrians. It seemed clear that he would never be allowed to lecture to Austrian citizens. Although not expelled by the emperor, he now began to consider leaving Vienna. He increasingly thought about a journey that would take him to several German cities, where he could present his doctrine freely while obtaining needed feedback. A change of scenery would also provide him with access to more prisons, asylums, schools, and other establishments, where he could collect more case studies. He might even find a publisher and better artists for the book he had started to write in 1801, one he believed would make him famous.49 And a trip through several German states would enable him to visit his parents in Tiefenbronn, about 340 miles (550 km) away. He cared deeply for his mother and father, and years had passed since he had last seen them. He nonetheless opted to let more time go by before departing Vienna. He finally left in March 1805. He expected to return several months later, not knowing he would never see the city again. He was so focused on presenting his doctrine and finding additional support for it that he appeared oblivious to the ongoing Napoleonic Wars and, more specifically, to the fighting that was raging in or near several of the places he was planning to visit. When Gall departed Vienna, he was accompanied by Spurzheim, a wax modeler, some animals, and boxes filled with his best skulls and casts. He left his wife and many other specimens behind (Figure 1.3). Thinking ahead, he had already arranged for advance publicity, wanting to attract 48 49

Combe and Combe, Cerebellum, 1838, 320. Gall had even given this book a title: Lehre über die Verrichtungen des Hirns, und über die Möglichkeit, die Anlagen mehrerer Geistes- und Gemüthseigenschaften aus dem Baue des Kopfes und des Schedels der Menschen und der Thiere zu erkennen (Doctrine on the Actions of the Brain, and on the Possibility to Recognize the Organization of Several Mental and Mood Qualities from the Construction of the Head and the Skull of Men and Animals) (see Heintel, Pränumeration, 1986).

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The Birth of a Controversial Doctrine

Figure 1.3  Some of the human skulls Gall left in France that are now housed at the Rollett Museum in Baden bei Wien (photograph courtesy of Wendy Finger).

paying customers and important guests to his lectures and demonstrations. He was so adept at promoting himself that one newspaper, Der Freimüthige (“The Outspoken”), announced his lecture series in Berlin two weeks before he even left home. He offered a series of about ten lectures, each lasting two hours, on most of his stops. He was not bashful about charging for these talks. He also gave separate lecture demonstrations on brain anatomy that included human and animal dissections, in which he traced fiber tracts from the periphery into the brain and then to successively higher levels. These demonstrations were for physicians, their associates, and students. They were not for the faint of heart. After lecturing, demonstrating, and visiting various institutions in Berlin, which had been his first stop, he headed to nearby Potsdam, where he

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Paris

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entertained royalty at the Sanssouci Palace. He then continued to Leipzig, Dresden, Halle, Weimar (the center of the Aufklärung, the German version of the Enlightenment), Jena, and Göttingen, before turning northward to Braunschweig, Hamburg, and Kiel. Late in September, he made his way to Copenhagen, after which he returned to the German states for more lectures and demonstrations, before crossing the border into the Netherlands. He then headed back to what is now Germany to address more audiences and to spend time with his parents. The new year (1807) began with lectures in Freiburg and Munich, before he headed into Switzerland. Although he had been thinking about continuing on to Russia, the ongoing fighting led him to opt for safer Paris, a bustling city with many amenities.

Paris Gall arrived in Paris in October 1807, two and a half years after leaving Vienna. He did not receive a hero’s welcome, but neither was he shunned or hounded away. Instead, his reception was mixed. The same had been true in some of the German cities, including Berlin and Heidelberg, where he had considerable support, but where there was also some vocal opposition.50 In Parisian social circles, he was treated like a celebrity, and his presence was very much in demand. An anonymous newspaper reporter stated in 1808 that there was “no great evening party, no dinner,” where the hosts did not attempt to convince him to attend – “all the ladies want to have him examine their heads.”51 Even Napoleon’s wife, Joséphine, was eager to meet the new arrival and learn more about his ideas. In contrast to his wife, Napoleon was suspicious of foreign physicians and scientists, and he rejected Gall’s contentions about cranial bumps revealing Nature’s secrets. He felt sure that the foreigner’s new, skull-based theory was nonsense. Consequently, he maneuvered to undercut Gall, using Baron Georges Cuvier as his instrument. As self-appointed President of the influential Institut National des Sciences et des Arts, Napoleon had chosen Cuvier to oversee the section responsible for Sciences Mathématiques et Physiques at the highly regarded institution. One of his jobs was to police these sciences. Shortly after arriving, Gall submitted a manuscript detailing his and Spurzheim’s neuroanatomical findings to the Institut. When Napoleon was informed about the 1808 submission, he supposedly shouted to 50 51

Eling and Finger, German enemies, 2020c. Anon., [Paris], 1808.

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Cuvier, “What? Are we now reduced to receiving lessons in chemistry from an Englishman [i.e., Humphrey Davy] and in anatomy from a German? What a disgrace!”52 Consequently, although Gall and Spurzheim had made several important anatomical discoveries and confirmed others with improved methods, Cuvier, under considerable pressure from Napoleon, rejected their manuscript, declaring it unoriginal.53 Gall was poor at controlling his emotions, and the letter he received informing him of the Institut’s decision sent him into a frenzy. He craved acceptance and respectability from his French peers, and felt he had just received an unjustified slap in the face. Moreover, it was his neuroanatomy that was rejected, not his organologie, which he knew was generating controversy. Realizing that Cuvier was not about to change his mind, he decided to take matters into his own hands. He began by publishing a book in 1809 that included his submitted manuscript, Cuvier’s rejection letter, and a rebuttal. He intended to show others what he had accomplished with Spurzheim’s help and how unfairly he had been treated.54 Motivated even more than before, he now worked day and night with Spurzheim to complete the volume he had started to write during the 1790s. By this time, however, it had morphed into a set of books accompanied by a separate volume of illustrations. Gall had made significant progress on these tomes before entering France, where he found high-quality artists and a suitable publisher. But he now recognized that he had to publish rapidly, with Cuvier deprecating him for performing “à la manière des charlatans.” As the doyen of French science reminded him, a respectable scientist, especially a man claiming to be an authority on a subject, would already have presented a book for proper evaluation.55 This message irked Gall. He did not view himself as a charlatan or a fraud. His goal was to advance a new, potentially useful science, and publishing his books became a high priority.

The Books The first volume of Gall’s “great work,” his Anatomie et Physiologie du Système Nerveux en Général, et du Cerveau en Particulier (Anatomy and Physiology of the Nervous System in General and of the Brain in Particular), came off the press in 1810, the same year as its atlas with 100 masterfully engraved plates (Figures 1.4 and 1.5). The second volume followed a year 52 53 54 55

Renneville, Crânes, 2000, 81. Cuvier, Report, 1809; Gall and Spurzheim, Recherches, 1809. Gall and Spurzheim, Recherches, 1809. Cuvier, Mémoires, 1857, 415.

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The Books

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Figure 1.4  Etching from Gall and Spurzheim’s 1810 Atlas showing the skull regions overlying their organs of mind on a skull.

later, with Spurzheim again given second authorship. Gall was the sole author of Volumes III and IV, which came out in 1818 and 1819, after Spurzheim’s departure. All the volumes were published in Paris by “F Schöll,” who had recently published Alexander von Humboldt’s heralded account of his adventures in South America, a classic in the science genre.56 Gall now faced a dilemma. The production of the Atlas with its beautifully engraved plates was extremely costly. The separate volumes of text were not nearly as expensive, but few readers could afford the entire set, which had a price tag of about 1,000 francs. With this realization, he began working on a less expensive set of books, dispensing with the atlas and the neuroanatomy, which was only tangentially related to his doctrine of mind and brain. He would, in fact, transfer the organologie sections almost intact from the original volumes to his cheaper set of books. The less expensive, six-volume set was completed in 1825, and this time there was one author.57 A faithful, posthumous English translation came in Boston a decade later.58 56 57 58

Humboldt and Bonpland, Recueil d’Observations, 1811. Gall, Fonctions, 1825. Gall, Functions, 1835. The quotations that follow come from this edition.

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Figure 1.5  A plate from Gall and Spurzheim’s 1810 Atlas for the organ of wit, as revealed in a large forehead.

In the first volume of the cheaper Sur les Fonctions du Cerveau et sur Celles de Chacune de ses Parties (On the Functions of the Brain and Each of Its Parts), Gall covered brains from the simplest to the most complex,

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The Books

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correlating increasing anatomical complexity with “special functions,” only some of which were unique to humans. As before, he maintained that these higher-order instincts, and moral and intellectual qualities are innate, although education and other external forces could perfect or repress individual faculties, albeit within limits. His next point was that these mental faculties have associated organs, and he presented nine types of “evidence” for this assertion. The first was that “The moral qualities and intellectual faculties manifest themselves, increase, and diminish, according as their organs are developed, increase in strength, and are impaired.”59 He again emphasized that he was never researching the nature of the human soul; he was merely investigating the material conditions that rendered “the manifestation of a moral quality, or an intellectual faculty possible.”60 It was essential, he emphasized, not to confuse “the faculty” with “the instrument.” “Whether souls are united to bodies sooner or later … whatever may be the decision of theologians and metaphysicians on this subject, my principle, that the manifestation of the moral qualities and intellectual faculties can take place only by means of organization [the brain], rests immoveable.”61 Viewing the brain as made up of multiple organs, he continued, is not a materialistic or fatalistic philosophy. Gall began his second volume with some history about brain functions, starting with the Greeks and Romans. He noted how metaphysicians always stepped in the way to retard scientific progress, such that it “was especially the knowledge of the brain, which remained longest enveloped in darkness.”62 Regrettably, he continued, researchers did not correlate comparative anatomy, development, or the brains of idiots and the insane with various higher functions of mind. Nor did they do proper brain dissections. This being the case, they remained in the dark. These thoughts led him to discuss why “examining crania and heads was necessary for attaining … a knowledge of the different cerebral parts.”63 Study the different developments of the cerebral parts, and you will no longer be deceived as to the prime motives which determine your tastes, and your actions; you will judge exactly of your merit and your demerit; you will know the reason, why it does not depend on yourself, that you have such and such a predominant propensity or talent, to become a mathematician, a mechanic, a musician, a poet, or an orator; you will 59 60 61 62 63

Gall, Functions, 1835, 1: 172–190. Gall, Functions, 1835, 1: 199. Gall, Functions, 1835, 1: 173. Gall, Functions, 1835, 2: 15. Gall, Functions, 1835, 2: 33.

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The Birth of a Controversial Doctrine comprehend why you excel without effort, so to speak, in one thing, whilst in another you are inevitably doomed to mediocrity; you will see, why he who is brilliant in a particular station, must necessarily be eclipsed in another.64

The rest of his second volume contained a general treatise on the functions of the brain, paragraphs on correlating structures with functions, and a section on why the cortex must be composed of multiple organs serving different functions. Anatomical, physiological, and pathological observations, Gall maintained, converged to show unequivocally that the cortex is a multi-organ structure. Gall presented his methods in more detail in the third volume. Because he was still having difficulty obtaining the brains of exceptional people and preserving the brains he could get, but also because he believed he had good evidence showing that cranial bumps faithfully reflected the locations and sizes of underlying brain areas, he continued to rely on human cranioscopy. This was his primary method. He did list various other methods, though he mentioned them only when they supported his cranioscopic findings. One such method involved studying animals and correlating their behaviors with brain and cranial features. After all, “the comparison of the human brain with that of animals, enables us to know, of what integral parts or of what individual organs, the brain of man is composed; where the animal ceases in man; where the noble character commences, which distinguished him from the brute, and how much he is elevated above brutality.”65 Among his methods not involving cranioscopy, “Accidental mutilations” was the first one appearing on his list. Nonetheless, he recognized that head injuries were notoriously unreliable sources of information. He explained that this was because of infections, secondary effects of the damage, impaired testability, inability to track patients that survived, failure to obtain their brains after death, and more. He would cite some cases, but only those supporting his craniological findings.66 He called his next method the “Succession and the Arrangement of the Organs,” and this was very different from the others. Although he shunned metaphysics in physiology, he told his readers that the organs of 64 65 66

Gall, Functions, 1835, 2: 42–43. Gall, Functions, 1835, 3: 128. For more on Gall’s use of animals, see Finger and Eling, Gall, 2019, 151–168. Finger and Eling, Gall, 2019, 143–148.

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mind appeared to be grouped in ways suggestive of “the hand of God.”67 Thus, the organs we share with animals are bundled together in the back of the brain, our highest intellectual functions are found together in the forehead, and organs that “mutually aid each other, are placed nearest to each other.”68 For example, the organ for self-defense lies near the one for carnivorous instinct, and music and mathematics are close together. Gall now began to work his way through his twenty-seven faculties (Table 1.1). He began with the most primitive and worked into and through the eight faculties that he considered unique to humans. Whenever possible, he began with a description of the faculty and how he had discovered it, then gave its “natural history,” provided evidence for its innateness, and described the effects of its “greater or less development.” He then described the “seat and the external appearance” of the organ in humans and other animals, before presenting some concluding remarks. Several things might seem surprising about how Gall ordered of his faculties. One is that he did not list “Metaphysical depth of thought” or “God and religion” (XXVI) as the highest faculty. Instead, he presented “Firmness, constancy, perseverance, obstinacy” as the last faculty on his ascending list. He explained that this faculty was not, however, a true faculty; rather, it related more to one’s character. In addition, and also surprising some readers, he did not present his two verbal faculties (XIV, XV) as distinctively human. Bothered by how Gall constructed his list, others interested in the new science, including Spurzheim, would propose alternative lists and groupings (see Chapter 2). Gall’s detailed treatment of his faculties extended almost to the end of Volume V. There he presented himself as an intrepid explorer of the unknown, a dedicated scientist who did not know quite what to expect when he started his voyage of discovery. He related how he came to believe in himself and his calling, and he expressed dismay over not getting more recognition, respect, and honors from his learned colleagues. No one before me, has found and pointed out the only means capable of discovering the seat of each instinct and propensity, of each sensation and intellectual talent. I claim to be the discoverer of these seats and to be the first that has demonstrated them by numerous irrefragable, pathological, and physiological facts, and by an infinity of researches into the comparative anatomy and physiology of all tribes of animals.69 67 68 69

Gall, Functions, 1835, 3: 132. Gall, Functions, 1835, 3: 131. Gall, Functions, 1835, 5: 317–318.

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The Birth of a Controversial Doctrine Table 1.1 Gall’s twenty-seven faculties of mind*

I. Instinct of generation, of reproduction; instinct of propagation, &c. II. Love of offspring III. Attachment. Friendship IV. Instinct of self-defense, disposition to quarrel, courage V. Carnivorous instinct; disposition to murder VI. Cunning, trick, tact VII. Sense of property, instinct of providing, … propensity to steal VIII. Pride, hauteur, loftiness, elevation IX. Vanity, ambition, love of glory X. Cautiousness, foresight XI. Memory of things, memory of facts, … educability XII. Sense of locality, sense of the relations of space XIII. Distinguishing and recollecting persons XIV. Attending to and distinguishing words, recollection of words XV. Spoken language; talent of philology, &c. XVI. Distinguishing the relation of colors; talent for painting XVII. Perceiving the relation of tones, talent for music XVIII. Relations of numbers XIX. Constructiveness XX. Comparative sagacity, aptitude for drawing comparisons XXI. Metaphysical depth of thought, aptitude for drawing comparisons XXII. Wit XXIII. Talent for poetry XXIV. Goodness, benevolence, … moral sense, conscience XXV Imitation, mimicry XXVI. God and religion XXVII. Firmness, constancy, perseverance, obstinacy Humans share the first nineteen faculties with animals; Gall presented the remainder as distinctly human (from Gall, Functions, 1835).

*

Although this would have been a fitting ending to his volumes, Gall felt compelled to add a thin, sixth volume of commentaries to his 1825 set of books. This addition covered what contemporary authors were stating about brain functions and his own efforts to bring the functional organization of the brain to light. As might be expected, his biases and inflated sense of greatness ruffled some feathers.

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Final Years Gall became a French citizen in 1819, the year the last volume of his Anatomie et Physiologie came off the press. He had been living in Paris and had acquired a cottage in the southern suburb of Montrouge that year, where he continued to be in demand as a physician. As before, he saw mostly wealthy clients, and documents show that he also helped other physicians with challenging cases.70 His science of man, debatable from the start, remained controversial. He continued to battle with Cuvier and his acolyte, physiologist Jean Pierre Flourens, who had admired his anatomical research.71 Gall remained firm in his belief that he had made large strides toward understanding the mind, individual differences, and the brain, and he never lost faith in his cranioscopic methods, despite mounting evidence against the idea that skull bumps and depressions reflect the growth of specific underlying brain areas. Gall received an invitation to return to Vienna, but never did so. He only made a single trip outside of France. This was in 1823 to give a series of lectures in Britain, where Spurzheim was making major strides with his variant of the doctrine. This trip began and ended abruptly in London after Gall failed to attract large audiences. He returned to Paris dejected and angry. His health began to fail three years later. His first stroke took place in 1826 and he suffered several more in 1827. These cerebrovascular events caused a paralysis on the right side of his body and led him to fatigue easily.72 He died at the age of seventy in the Paris suburb of Montrouge on August 22, 1828. His body was laid to rest in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, which had been established by Napoleon in 1804.73 As requested, he did not have a religious funeral. His skull, however, was detached and added to the skull and cast collection he had built in France, starting with the choice pieces he had carried

70 71 72 73

Nolte et al., Crouzon syndrome, 2020. Flourens, [Review], 1820. Rosen, American doctor, 1951, 245. The cemetery was named after Père François de la Chaise, a Jesuit priest and confessor to Louis XIV, who lived from 1638 to 1715. In 1804, the remains of French writers Jean de la Fontaine and Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) were transferred to the cemetery. The bodies of other famous people followed, although they now represent only a tiny fraction of the cemetery’s current population of more than 1,000,000 dead bodies.

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with him from Vienna. His French widow (second wife) offered his books and collections to the French Government in exchange for a pension. After both sides had agreed on the terms, his phrenology collection and own skull were shipped to the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. His collection would be moved to the Musée de l’Homme in 1938.74 The science Gall had started did not die with him. Thanks largely to Spurzheim, who had been trying to make the doctrine more scientific and appealing to all levels of society prior to and after Gall’s death, it was already gaining considerable attention in Britain, and was now beginning to make its way across the Atlantic Ocean. In America, the demand for head readings for greater personal awareness, self-improvement, and even bragging rights would make what Gall had introduced as a new science into one of the most influential and far-reaching medical fads of the nineteenth century. As we shall see in the next chapter, Americans would soon be lining up to have their heads “read” by all sorts of people calling themselves phrenologists, a fact of American life that would register on Samuel Clemens, then a teenager in Hannibal, Missouri. 74

Ackerknecht and Vallois, Gall, 1956.

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chapter 2

Coming to America

[Spurzheim’s] amiable manners; his practical knowledge; his benevolent dispositions and purposes; his active and discriminating mind, all engaged the good opinions of the prejudiced, and won the affection of the candid. Nahum Capen, Boston, 18331

The history of phrenology in America can be divided into four stages. The first started early in the nineteenth century with some British newspaper and magazine articles transported across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States. Additionally, American physicians returning from France, where they had gone to improve their knowledge of medicine, began to promote the doctrine to their colleagues in the New World during the 1820s. The second stage involved Johann Spurzheim, who had left Gall and had been spending considerable time lecturing in Britain. He not only wrote books about phrenology in English but also visited the United States. His death in Boston in 1832 triggered the formation of the first of many American phrenological societies and a slew of books and articles on the subject by American authors. It also stimulated George Combe, his energetic and devoted follower, to make a lengthy lecture tour of the United States later in the decade. Phrenology would achieve fad status in the United States, and this third stage of its “bumpy” history had much to do with two brothers. Orson and Lorenzo Fowler rose to the occasion and had the skills to turn phrenology into a lucrative business. They wrote and published phrenology books, started journals, trained others, and provided the charts, busts, and tools needed to understand phrenology and present it to others. They and 1

Capen, Death, 1833, 128.

27

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their minions did much to make head readings popular and fashionable while they were losing luster among physicians. The final part of this division covers how head readings then diminished among the laity. Several factors contributed to its fall from grace. They included failures to replicate what the phrenologists claimed, the more immediate demands of the Civil War, and advances in the life and medical sciences. As will be seen, what Samuel Clemens (presenting himself as Mark Twain) and Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote about the head readers helped contribute to craniology going out of favor. Still, popular demand for having one’s head read did not disappear overnight.

The British Press American physicians subscribing to medical periodicals or major newspapers published in England and Scotland, and those receiving copies from European visitors, had the opportunity to learn something about Gall’s new ideas even before he left Vienna in 1805. For example, the Medical and Physical Journal, a specialist publication, published a short piece on his progress in 1800. Its first line read: “Mr. F. J. Gall, at Vienna, has finished a most elaborate work on the Exercise of the Brain, and on the possibility of recognizing the several Faculties and Propensities from the Construction and Form of the Head and Skull.”2 British writers often used the word “cranioscopy” to describe Gall’s doctrine, and most of their pieces were direct or loose translations of articles appearing in German or French newspapers. The more informative pieces were written by physicians, who had attended his lectures. Some of his “auditors” simply reported what he said and showed, whereas others included their own thoughts and opinions about his nascent doctrine. In 1802, Gall’s ideas were presented in the Times, the Philosophical Magazine, the Monthly Magazine, and the Gentleman’s Magazine, to name just four important general periodicals.3 The latter had long been a favorite of Americans interested in new scientific and medical discoveries, including Benjamin Franklin, who had presented some of his electrical experiments and his new lightning rod on its pages.4 Its 1802 article on the 2 3 4

Anon., F. J. Gall, 1800. For a scholarly treatise on phrenology in the British Press, see Hughes, Dome of Thought, 2022. For more on these early reports, see Finger and Eling, Gall, 2019, 391–417. Anon., Gall’s theory, 1802a; Anon., Explanation, 1802b; Anon., Cranioscopical lectures, 1802c; Bojanus, Craniognomic system, 1802. Finger, Franklin’s Medicine, 2006, 80–114.

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doctrine came from German physician Ludwig Heinrich Bojanus, who had attended Gall’s lectures and first published his synopsis in French. Bojanus told his readers that Gall was trying to associate functions of the mind with cranial features, and he then explained Gall’s premises using headings probably taken from him. They included: “The Brain is the material Organ of the Internal Faculties”; “The Brain contains different Organs independent on [of] each other for the different Faculties”; “The Expansion of the Organs contained in the Cranium is in the direct Ratio of the Force of their corresponding Faculties”; and “We may judge of these different organs and of their faculties by the exterior form of the cranium.”5 Bojanus listed Gall’s faculties and covered his use of animals, his views on the insane, and other pertinent subjects from the German’s lectures. He was among the writers providing commentary, and concluded that it was now up to Gall to provide details and “convince us, in an incontrovertible manner, of the truth of his system.” Most early articles about Gall’s new doctrine were not nearly as detailed as Bojanus’s. But thanks to more British magazine and newspaper coverage and how these periodicals were being disseminated, Americans were informed of what Gall was theorizing while he was traveling through the German states and after he arrived in Paris.

Returning to America John Collins Warren, John Bell, and Charles Caldwell were among the first American physicians to embrace phrenology while abroad and to inform others about it after returning from Europe. All three men had positions at medical schools, which provided them with colleagues, students, and platforms for lecturing on the subject, which they did enthusiastically. John Collins Warren (Figure 2.1) learned about Gall’s doctrine in Paris, while still studying medicine and before Gall left Vienna.6 “At the time I was in Paris in the years 1801 and 1802,” Warren reminisced, “the new system of craniognomy, as it was called, attracted some attention.”7 Once back on American soil, Warren continued to follow what Gall and Spurzheim were claiming and how their ideas were being received in Europe. In 1821, and this time as a Harvard professor, he returned to Paris and attended at least one of Spurzheim’s lectures. 5 6 7

Bojanus, Craniognomic system, 1802, 78–80. E. Warren, Warren, 1860; Jones, Letters, 1978. J. C. Warren in E. Warren, Warren, 1860, 10.

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Figure 2.1  John Collins Warren (1778–1856), who learned about Gall’s doctrine in Europe and disseminated and tested his theory on his return.

Warren dutifully informed members of Boston’s medical community about Gall’s doctrine, Spurzheim’s modifications of it, and its many ramifications. He also began to amass his own collection of human and animal skulls, and to devote considerable time to studying them. Nonetheless, he was less than successful when it came to confirming some of Gall and Spurzheim’s craniological correlations. Most notably, he failed to find a prominent organ of courage when he examined a lion’s skull. “The authors of the craniological or physiognomical system seem disposed to refer frequently to comparative anatomy for the support of their doctrines,” he wrote in 1822, “but so far as I have observed, there do not appear to be very good grounds for such a reference.”8 Warren nonetheless retained his strong interest in phrenology as a science. He recognized the doctrine’s potential to stimulate needed research on the brain and never completely dismissed the idea that there might be something to cranioscopy. Hence, he continued to lecture on the subject at Harvard’s Medical School, when addressing various medical societies, and before other groups when opportunities arose. 8

J. C. Warren, Comparative View, 1822, 86.

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While Warren was introducing phrenology to his colleagues and students in and around Boston, John Bell was doing the same in Philadelphia. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Bell sailed to Europe during the 1820s to continue his medical education. He heard Gall lecture while studying in Paris. Bell was not, however, the first American to meet Gall. This distinction belongs to Nicholas Biddle, an inquisitive banker from Philadelphia, who had attended Gall’s lectures with Spurzheim assisting in Carlsruhe (Germany). Biddle returned home in 1807 with a skull he had obtained from Spurzheim that showed the regions overlying the different cerebral organs. But, unlike Bell, Biddle was not a physician, and he showed little interest in promoting the new science when he returned to Pennsylvania.9 Bell, in contrast, enthusiastically endorsed the doctrine on his return. He founded the Central Phrenological Society in 1822, just two years after the Edinburgh Phrenological Society became the first such organization globally. Mainly comprised of physicians, Bell served as Corresponding Secretary of the first American phrenological society. In 1822, Readers of the Philadelphia Journal of Medical and Physical Sciences learned that the [Central Phrenological] Society, in admitting the plurality of mental faculties, and corresponding cerebral organs, proposed to pursue “the study of the operations of mind as depending on proportional development of the brain.” With this view, it will of course, call in Comparative Anatomy and Natural History to its aid, by observing the coincidence between various instincts of animals and their cerebral organization and development – and when furnished with illustrations from this quarter, will extend the examination to all the varieties of our own species, and see how far national and individual character may have received their first impress by peculiarity of cerebral structure.10

Bell gave two introductory lectures to the Central Phrenological Society, in which he summarized Gall’s doctrine and provided supporting evidence for it.11 Additionally, he was instrumental in starting the society’s collection of skulls and busts, and republishing (and adding to) George Combe’s Essays on Phrenology. He also applied phrenology to cases of insanity and 9 10 11

Biddle gave the skull to George Combe in 1839, believing he could make better use of it (see Walsh, Philadelphia physicians, 1976a, 408). Phrenological Society of Philadelphia, [Formation], 1822, 204. Bell, Phrenology, 1822.

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mental retardation, promoted the doctrine at medical and postgraduate schools, and supervised dissertations utilizing it.12 Charles Caldwell, who wrongly believed he was the first person to introduce phrenology into the United States,13 was a third member of this early group of American promoters of phrenology. He had studied medicine under Benjamin Rush, who coined the term “phrenology” in 1805. In 1819, after failing to get a professorship at his alma mater, the University of Philadelphia, he joined the faculty of the new Transylvania Medical School, located in Lexington, Kentucky.14 This school’s leadership quickly sent him to Paris to purchase medical books for its library. There, in 1821, he met Gall and attended a lecture given by Spurzheim.15 Caldwell did what his school requested of him and, upon his return, everything he could to promote phrenology in the classroom and when lecturing or touring elsewhere.16 Caldwell was, in fact, the first American (corresponding) member of George Combe’s Edinburgh Phrenological Society. In 1824, he also published the first American textbook of phrenology, a work titled Elements of Phrenology. This 300-page book grew to almost three times its size in 1827, the year he also published New Views of Penitentiary Discipline. This work incorporated Gall and Spurzheim’s suggestions for reforming prisons and prisoners.

Early Opposition Warren, Bell, and Caldwell interested other American physicians in phrenology. Together, these physicians used the doctrine to explain the insanities, seizure phenomena, language disorders, color blindness, and other pathologies.17 But by the 1830s, many physicians were questioning and even turning their backs on phrenology.18 Perhaps most tellingly, the notes 12

13 14 15 16 17 18

Benjamin Horner Coates, another graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Medical School, also merits attention. He served as the Central Phrenological Society Recording Secretary, vigorously defended phrenology against early critics in America, and might have been the person behind the phrenological notices in the North American Medical and Surgical Journal, which he co-edited (see Coates, Comments, 1823; Walsh, Philadelphia physicians, 1976b). Caldwell, Autobiography, 1855, 304. Caldwell, Autobiography, 1855; Cohen, Caldwell, 1958; Horine, Caldwell, 1960. Caldwell, Autobiography, 1855, 201. Surprisingly, this work provides no additional information about Caldwell meeting Gall or Spurzheim. Caldwell had an abrasive and conceited personality. He was dismissed from the Transylvania Medical School in 1837 and went on to create the Louisville Medical Institute. Freemon, Phrenology, 1992. Davies, Phrenology, 1955; Freemon, Phrenology, 1992.

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and minutes of the Central Phrenological Society, which was primarily composed of physicians, seemed to have ended late in 1827, reflecting a sharp loss of professional interest in the organization, which had begun with considerable fanfare a mere five years earlier.19 One reason for phrenology’s fall from favor among physicians was that attempts to confirm what Gall and Spurzheim had been stating about skull features being reliable indicators of specific faculties of mind could not be confirmed enough to erase doubts. How the frontal sinuses could distort the parallelism between the interior and exterior surfaces of the facial bones overlying many small phrenological organs was often cited as an insurmountable problem.20 Other issues were also brought up, some in heated debates. Scottish physician John Gordon was an early vocal critic of the doctrine, and having just published his own anatomy book, he considered himself an expert on anatomy.21 Writing anonymously, he launched a well-publicized public attack on the doctrine in 1815, using language usually reserved for private conversations. His venomous words were published in the Edinburgh Review,22 a highly regarded periodical published in Scotland and London, and one with a following in the United States. Not one for polite conversation, Gordon opined: “We look upon the whole doctrines taught by these two modern peripatetics [Gall and Spurzheim], anatomical, physiological, and physiognomical, as a piece of thorough quackery from beginning to end.”23 He called phrenology “a collection of mere absurdities, without truth, connexion, or consistency; an incoherent rhapsody, which nothing could have induced any man to have presented to the public, under a pretense of instructing them, but absolute insanity, gross ignorance, or the most matchless assurance.”24 “It is not true,” he stated, “that there are ever such eminences on the surface of the brain, accompanied with projections of the cranium, as GALL and SPURZHEIM have affirmed.”25 Further, “examination of the outer surface alone can never lead to any certain conclusions as to the proportional dimensions of the brain.”26 Consequently, the promoters of this false 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Walsh (Philadelphia physicians, 1976a, 408, n. 35) wrote, “the minutes end around November 1827, although the society may have remained moderately active into the 1830s and perhaps as late as 1839.” Finger and Eling, Frontal sinuses, 2022. Gordon, Human Anatomy, 1815. Anon. [J. Gordon], Doctrines, 1815. Anon. [J. Gordon], Doctrines, 1815, 227 (italics in original). Anon. [J. Gordon], Doctrines, 1815, 239. Anon. [J. Gordon], Doctrines, 1815, 252. Anon. [J. Gordon], Doctrines, 1815, 252.

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science “have not added one fact to the stock of our knowledge, respecting either the structure or function of man.” Rather, with their “gross errors, extravagant absurdities, downright misstatements, and unmeaning quotations from Scripture,” their writings demonstrate “the real ignorance, the real hypocrisy … of the authors.”27 Peter Mark Roget, then in London, is best remembered for his eponymic Thesaurus, a project he worked on for half a century before finally completing it in 1852.28 What few people today know about Roget is that he received a medical degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1797, had a distinguished professional career in science and medicine, served as Secretary of the Royal Society of London for twenty-one years, and had even been that organization’s vice-president.29 Roget was a major contributor to the fledgling Encyclopaedia Britannica. In 1818, at the request of the encyclopedia’s editor, he published an eighteenpage piece titled “Cranioscopy,” which was subsequently bound into the 1824, fourth edition of the admired and widely disseminated encyclopedia.30 Roget started his “Cranioscopy” entry with some background information about Gall, including what led him to his insights and how he and Spurzheim were committed to studying skulls as the best way to understand the functional organization of the brain. These opening sections were essentially free from commentary, but not so the rest of his entry. Roget was more polite than Gordon, although he too assailed the doctrine and its promoters. He argued that the “craniologists” were utilizing weak and often faulty logic, frequently nothing more than silly analogies. And he seemed even more bothered by how they accepted and rejected cases at will. In his eyes, the doctrine was comparable to an edifice poorly built with “flimsy materials” on a “sandy foundation.” “With such convenient logic, and accommodating principles of philosophizing,” he wrote, “it would be easy to prove anything … and that on that very account, they will be rejected as having proved nothing.”31 Roget would continue to lambast the phrenologists after his initial salvo in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.32 In one of his later pieces, he would 27 28 29

30 31 32

Anon. [J. Gordon], Doctrines, 1815, 261, 268. Roget, Thesaurus, 1852. He completed this book after retiring from science and medicine. Roget’s spiral calculator, a forerunner of the slide rule, led to his becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society. He succeeded astronomer-physicist Sir John Herschel as Secretary, serving from 1827 to 1848, and also became its Vice-President. For more on Roget’s life and contributions to science and medicine, see Emblen, Roget, 1970; Kruger and Finger, Roget, 2013. Roget, Cranioscopy, 1824 (originally 1818). Roget, Cranioscopy, 1824, 433, 437. Roget, Craniology, 1837, Physiology and Phrenology, 1838; Outlines, 1839.

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write: “I do not remember to have found one who could say that his own observations had afforded any evidence favourable to the doctrine.”33 As might be expected, phrenologists, especially George Combe in Edinburgh, fought back, with many exchanges published so others could judge.34 There were also detractors on American soil, of which one of the most outspoken was John P. Harrison of the University of Louisville. His notable critique appeared in 1825.35 Harrison could not comprehend how the mind could be comprised of many independent faculties, since we experience a single unified consciousness. But, metaphysics aside, he also measured skulls and noted how they failed to correlate reliably with the physical features of the brain. He further argued that anatomists were fooling themselves if they believed they had the means to identify Gall and Spurzheim’s specialized cortical organs on the brains they were dissecting. With Gordon and Roget being read throughout the English-speaking world, and Harrison and other outspoken American physicians also voicing scientific concerns about phrenology, it is easy to understand why many American physicians were becoming increasingly suspicious of the doctrine that had initially seemed so promising. But this still falls short of providing the complete picture of what was now transpiring. Other reasons, ones not based on cranial bumps or brain dissections, had also been disconcerting to many physicians, America’s clergy, and even the laity. In the United States, as in Europe, as historian John Davies wrote in his book Phrenology: Fad and Science, “the vast majority of the indictments, and the most effective, were not rational or scientific but emotional condemnations of its philosophy and implications.”36 Davies’s point was that many people on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean saw the doctrine as materialistic, fatalistic, and atheistic. These were the same charges Gall had to face in Vienna and later by some of his critics in the German cities he visited, as well as in France. Now, according to Davies, they were being entertained on American soil. Additionally, some Americans, like their European counterparts, were concerned about the legal implications of Gall’s doctrine. Would judges and juries now be forced to allow convicted criminals to return to the streets? This, they reasoned, would be the outcome if judges and juries concluded that criminals could not be held accountable for how their 33 34 35 36

Roget, Outlines, 1839, 497. E.g., A. Combe, Strictures, 1838; G. Combe and A. Combe, Cerebellum, 1838. Harrison, Observations, 1825. Davies. Phrenology, 1955, 67.

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presumably sick brains were functioning. Indeed, how could one even distinguish reliably between criminals deserving incarceration or the gallows and the victims of diseases of the nervous system, especially diseases that might wax and wane? Faced with anatomical, emotional, moral, religious, and legal concerns, supporters of phrenology had to reengage those American physicians turning their backs on phrenology and recruit new physicians and more of the laity to the doctrine.37 A person with exceptional credentials and unusual charisma was called for – a virtuous, ideally devout man, someone who could present the doctrine clearly, defend it in ways that would resonate with everyone, and show how it could be integrated into the lives of pragmatic Americans. Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, who had left Gall almost two decades earlier and had emerged as the leading spokesman for phrenology in the English-speaking world, was the perfect spokesman to turn things around. Trained as a physician, his accomplishments as an anatomist were lauded. Additionally, he seemed to be a God-fearing moralist, and he was socially refined, amiable, and seemingly well intentioned. Gall’s death in 1828 solidified Spurzheim’s position atop the leadership ladder. In all respects, he was the individual most capable of bringing new energy to phrenology in America. And this was precisely what he intended to do when he departed Europe on a ship headed to New York in 1832.

Spurzheim’s Ascent It is usually contended that Gall’s most valuable assistant left him in 1813, although there are reasons to believe that he was thinking about leaving Gall before this time.38 Why the split between the two men occurred is open to speculation. One possibility is that Spurzheim felt slighted because Gall was not fully acknowledging his contributions. Another is that they might have disagreed over the different faculties and how they should be organized. Spurzheim might also have wanted to make more of a name for himself and earn enough money to marry and live the life of a proper gentleman. Then again, it could have been a combination of factors that 37 38

Writers of Warren’s, Bell’s, and Caldwell’s obituaries chose not to mention their earlier support of phrenology (see Freemon, Phrenology, 1992). See Finger and Eling, Gall, 2019, 419–421. Spurzheim’s collaboration with Gall on the Anatomie et Physiologie seemingly stopped on page 146 of the second volume, which was published with both men as authors in 1812 (Temkin, Phrenological movement, 1947, 280, n. 24; Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et Physiologie, 2, 1812, 213; Neuberger, Briefe, 1917, 26).

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led him to study English, return to Vienna to complete his medical degree, and then set off on his own, hoping to conquer seemingly hostile Britain. Much was made of Spurzheim’s arrival in Britain in March 1814. He had crossed the English Channel with boxes of skulls, casts, and other materials for the lecture demonstrations he was planning to offer, beginning in London. Spurzheim began his London lectures with minimal delay. He used his drawing room for them and typically charged three guineas as the entrance fee. Wishing to reach everyone, he advertised in local newspapers and offered his courses at different times of the day. An article from the London Times in 1814 shows how he began by using Gall’s better-known name to attract physicians and other inquisitive people to his lectures. The PHYSIOGNOMICAL SYSTEM OF DRS. GALL AND SPURZHEIM. – On Wednesday, the nineteenth inst. at 8 o’clock in the evening, Dr. Spurzheim, Coadjutor and Joint-Lecturer with Dr. Gall, will COMMENCE, at his residence, No. 11 Rathbone-place, a COURSE OF LECTURES on their SYSTEM OF PHYSIOGNOMY explaining the Manifestations of the Propensities, Sentiments, and Intellectual Faculties of Man, as indicated by the External Configuration of the Head. The lectures will be continued every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Gentlemen’s tickets, three guineas; Ladies’ two; together with a Syllabus of Lecture, may be had at Dr. Spurzheim’s residence.39

When it came to drawing crowds and organizing his material, Spurzheim was wise to follow Gall’s example, his mentor being a master at such things. Amazed at how adept Spurzheim was at changing minds in London with his demeanor and well-organized lectures, Andrew Carmichael wrote the following: He arrived in November, 1815, but found every mind poisoned against him by these liberal and philosophic effusions – I did not myself escape the infection. It was with difficulty I was persuaded to enter his lecture-room. … I listened to his first lecture, expecting it to breathe nothing but ignorance, hypocrisy, deceit, and empiricism. I found it fraught with learning and inspired by truth; and in place of a hypocrite and empiric, I found a man deeply and earnestly imbued with an unshaken belief in the importance and value of the doctrines he communicated. … He was attended by a large and intelligent class of both sexes, and consequently made many ardent converts to phrenology in this city. … Of the numbers who received his instructions, I have personally known only three who were not convinced of the truth and value of his doctrines.40 39 40

Spurzheim, [Lecture notice], 1814. Carmichael, Spurzheim, 1833, 14–15.

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Spurzheim also displayed a remarkable ability to adjust to challenging situations.41 Nonetheless, he still faced an uphill fight if he were to emerge victorious in Britain. Some of the resistance he faced was because of antiGerman sentiment; some because of lingering memories of Franz Anton Mesmer and his flawed theory of animal magnetism; and some because of how the British excelled at denigrating and destroying rivals, real and imaginary. The notion that he was promoting a materialistic doctrine that dispenses with the soul was just one of many concerns he would have to address in Britain. He published his first book in English a year after arriving in London. It was a 571-page tome with illustrations, and it was titled The Physiognomical System of Drs. Gall and Spurzheim.42 He admitted that Gall “has the merit of having first begun these inquiries.” But he bolstered his own importance in their endeavors, first by stating, “I had been especially charged with the prosecution of the anatomical part,” and then by referring to “how much I have improved our doctrine in the last few years.” He explained how he was giving the doctrine “a more scientific arrangement” and was presenting it “in a more philosophical manner,” while “daring to introduce new names” for the faculties.43 Spurzheim added six faculties to the list Gall had previously presented with his help, raising the number to thirty-three. An optimist by nature, he included “Hope” among the faculties added to the list. He also deleted some entries. Wishing to separate himself even more from his mentor, he argued that there are no “improper” or inherently “evil” faculties – that a loving, merciful God would never have provided organs for Thievery and Murder, and that such acts must therefore stem from the abuse of other organs.44 Wanting to improve the doctrine’s scientific structure, he reworked the rather simplistic division between the many faculties we share with lower animals and the smaller number of decidedly human faculties. He now divided the faculties into vegetative, affective, and intellectual classes. Stating that the most important objectives of phrenology are to know the affective and intellectual faculties, he arranged his list into orders and his orders into genera, modeling his actions on how Linnaeus and other taxonomists classified plants and animals. For example, under “Particular Organs of the Manifestation of Mind,” he had two orders. The second was 41 42 43 44

For example, Anon., [Course of lectures] 1814–1815. Spurzheim, Physiognomical System, 1815. Spurzheim, Physiognomical System, 1815, vi–vii (italics added). Spurzheim, Physiognomical System, 1815, 377–390.

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“Understanding or Intellect,” and here he had two genera: Genus I, the “Knowing Faculties” (e.g., Colour, Space, and Number; Motion, Sight); and Genus II, the “Reflecting Faculties” (e.g., Comparison, Causality, Wit).45 He would later divide his intellectual faculties into three genera. Spurzheim’s Physiognomical System sold so well that he came forth with a second edition and an abridged version later in 1815.46 The reviews varied. Most were laudatory, whereas some reviewers called for more research before passing judgment, and others were openly hostile. John Gordon’s aforementioned 1815 attack in the Edinburgh Review, which also targeted the first volumes of Gall and Spurzheim’s Anatomie et Physiologie, was the most vicious. In subsequent publications, Spurzheim would separate himself more and more from Gall. Nonetheless, he would continue to accept all of Gall’s postulates, general conclusions, applications, and the primacy of studying human skulls above all other methods. Spurzheim traveled to Edinburgh in 1816, keenly aware of the negativity shown toward him in the “hostile reviewer’s” (now widely known to be John Gordon) adopted city. But although he met and debated Gordon in public, he never succeeded in winning him over.47 Still, he was successful with many other people who came to listen to him and watch him perform dissections, most notably George Combe (Figure 2.2). Combe was born in Edinburgh in 1788 and worked in his father’s brewery before pursuing law.48 He was well-read and inquisitive, and he wanted to achieve a better understanding of the mind, not satisfied with what the moral philosophers were offering. Yet, like many other English readers, he had become skeptical of phrenology after reading Gordon’s blistering article – so much so that he did not plan to attend Spurzheim’s Edinburgh lectures. Nevertheless, after meeting Spurzheim, watching him dissect a brain, and hearing him reenact his confrontation with Gordon, he attended his second set of lectures and became his most ardent and vocal disciple. With the help of his younger brother Andrew, a physician, Combe began promoting and defending the new science. He published his first article soon after Spurzheim departed Edinburgh,49 and he went on to publish well over 100 books and articles on phrenology.50 The best 45 46 47 48 49 50

Spurzheim, Physiognomical System, 1815. Spurzheim, Outlines, 1815. J. Gordon, Observations, 1817. Gibbon, George Combe, 1878. G. Combe, Physiognomical system, 1817. Cooter, Bibliography, 1989, 68–81.

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Figure 2.2  Edinburgh phrenologist George Combe (1788–1858).

known was his The Constitution of Man, a book written explicitly for the betterment of individuals and society, which came out in 1828 and became a bestseller.51 Eight years earlier, he had established the Edinburgh Phrenological Society, the first of its kind. And three years after this achievement, he launched the Transactions of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society, the first phrenological journal. Combe maintained that morality would be enhanced if people did not abuse their higher faculties by drinking, overexertion, and other harmful activities. More positively, exercising the moral and intellectual faculties could strengthen them, allowing a person to overcome bad habits and propensities. Phrenology was, in fact, a guide for becoming more altruistic and virtuous. What Combe preached about personal betterment was decidedly more optimistic than Gall’s more biologically constrained organology. He not only extended what Spurzheim had been stating, but with his emphasis on achieving greater personal happiness, he made phrenology even more appealing to the masses. 51

G. Combe, Constitution of Man, 1828.

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Figure 2.3  Combe’s use of lines to delineate organ groups. The animal-like sentiments lie below the line from A to B, whereas the moral sentiments lie in the space between points B and C (from Combe, 1828).

He also broke new ground by using calipers and a more sophisticated organometer to measure the distances between some prominent organs.52 And by drawing a few straight lines between some points, he separated different groups of organs, such as the perceiving from the knowing faculties (Figure 2.3). His measurements made phrenology seem more objective and scientific, like the number-driven fields of chemistry and physics. Still, the subjectivity underlying the selection of the faculties and the locations of the organs remained contentious issues. Spurzheim would make other trips from his home in Paris to the British Isles, including one to London in 1825 to lecture at the city’s leading hospitals.53 Constantly on the move, he returned to London a year later and then headed to Cambridge, Bath, Bristol, and Hull for still more lectures and demonstrations before appreciative audiences. In 1828, he traveled back to Edinburgh, where he engaged in another notable battle. This time it was with Sir William Hamilton (Figure 2.4), who equated phrenology with fatalism, materialism, and atheism.54 Not one for mincing words, these were among the reasons why Hamilton proclaimed, “I have undertaken to assassinate Phrenology.”55 52 53 54 55

See, for example, G. Combe, Elements, 1834, 1836. For phrenology and the growing demand for measurements, see Finger, Objectivity and measurements, 2022. Spurzheim, Lectures, 1825. Monck, Hamilton, 1881; Stirling, Hamilton, 1990. Letter from Hamilton to G. Combe, 8 March, 1828; see Anon., Hamilton, 1828, 56.

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Figure 2.4  Sir William Hamilton (1788–1856), an outspoken Scottish critic of phrenology.

Hamilton had earlier pummeled the new science before the Royal Society of Edinburgh (in 1825 and 1826), at the University of Edinburgh, and in several heated published exchanges.56 And he had also engaged in various experiments with the anatomist Alexander Monro (Tertius) to disprove phrenology.57 He showed, for example, how large frontal sinuses could cause cranial bumps that could obscure as many as half of the phrenological organs on Spurzheim’s list. Adding fuel to the fire, he refused to engage in public debates with Spurzheim and was even more condescending to George Combe, whom he refused to recognize as a man of science. Although Hamilton rightfully singled out some of the significant weaknesses inherent in craniology, Spurzheim continued to press forward, as did Combe, making inroads with the working classes in Britain, who were attracted to a doctrine that focused on character and emphasized the importance of skills and talents over inherited titles.58 As contended 56 57 58

G. Combe, Controversy, 1827; Anon., Hamilton, 1828; Anon., Renewed correspondence, 1829; Hamilton, Experiments, 1831; Frontal sinuses, 1845. Hamilton, Experiments, 1831. de Giustino, Conquest, 1975; Shapin, Phrenological knowledge, 1975; Homo phrenologicus, 1979; Cooter, British alienists, 1976; Cultural Meaning, 1984; Wahrman, Middle Class, 1995.

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by British social historian Roger Cooter, as “a system of thought that explained, rationalized and legitimated most of the hopes, fears, desires, and assumptions of an age, phrenology’s impact or ‘success’ can hardly be quantified.”59 Egos, prestige, power, and status also shaped phrenology’s course in the British Isles during the pivotal 1820s, the decade before Spurzheim and Combe boarded ships to America.60

Spurzheim’s Tour of America In 1830, Spurzheim began receiving invitations to visit America. Knowing many physicians in the United States either did not care about phrenology or were now abandoning it, he recognized the need for a trip to drum up support for phrenology in America. Visiting the United States was also attractive because it would allow him to study Native American and slave populations and meet famous Americans representing different professions.61 He might also have felt a need to get away, since his wife had died a year earlier. In June 1832, he boarded a ship at Havre, France. It docked in New York a few weeks later. Finding Asiatic cholera raging in the congested coastal city, he quickly left for less densely populated Connecticut. He delivered some notable lectures and demonstrations at Yale, impressing the faculty and especially the physicians invited to watch him dissect a hydrocephalic child’s brain. He also stopped in Hartford to visit an asylum for the deaf and dumb, a facility for the insane, and a nearby prison.62 While at the prison, he impressed the staff by identifying the traits of some inmates that he claimed had led them to commit specific kinds of crimes. He next headed north to Boston, a much more important city for the sciences, where phrenology had many supporters.63 He arrived on August 20 and handed his letters of introduction to John Collins Warren, who would later write: Some years ago Dr. Spurzheim, the coadjutor of Gall, brought me letters from friends in France and I endeavoured to show him all the attention due a scientific stranger. He examined all my crania. He gave four or five lectures at the Medical College and afterwards gave a course of lectures on phrenology to a promiscuous assembly of ladies and gentlemen.64 59 60 61 62 63 64

Cooter, British alienists, 1976, 218. Van Wyhe, Phrenology, 2004a, Reform science, 2004b. For Spurzheim in America: Walsh, American tour, 1972. Capen, Reminiscences, 1881, 9–10. Bruce, Modern American Science, 1987, 29–42. E. Warren, Warren, 1860, 11–12.

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According to the historian John Walsh, “it was no doubt partly due to Warren’s personal interest in phrenology and his influential status in Boston at that time that the medical community there received Spurzheim so warmly.”65 Indeed, Spurzheim’s visit and various activities made headlines in the local papers and elsewhere. In a book published one year after his visit, John Carmichael stated, “Every city, every village, every university, every school of art and academy of science, thirsted for the promised stream of knowledge” that Spurzheim was bringing.66 Spurzheim delivered his first lecture at Boston’s State House, where members of the American Institute asked him to talk about education. This was a subject of great interest to Americans, who, with their democratic ideals, were stressing intelligence, skills, and merit, in contrast to their British counterparts, who seemed unable or unwilling to break away from birthrights and privileges based on titles. On September 14, 1832, Spurzheim began a series of five lectures on brain anatomy for Harvard’s medical faculty, other scientists and physicians, and students learning medicine. Three days later, he started the first of what was to be a set of eighteen public lectures on phrenology. Surviving documents show his public lectures were extremely well attended, and not just because stories were spreading about how he could discern the personality characteristics of prisoners, people in asylums, politicians, and schoolchildren, just by examining their heads.67 “To Americans attending his lectures at the Athenaeum, here was a system – beautiful, neat, scientific, and practical – by which man could learn to know himself.”68 Harvard’s Charles Follen stated that everything Spurzheim did was for the improvement and happiness of man, adding to his appeal.69 Nahum Capen was more descriptive, writing that Spurzheim’s lectures attracted the fashionable and the learned, the gay and the grave, the aged and the young ... [who] were early in the Hall to secure eligible seats; and they were alike profoundly silent and attentive to the eloquence and philosophy of the lecturer. ... Some of those who at first attended with a view to collect materials for amusement, or for ridicule, were among the earliest to become converts to his system; and among those of his most constant and devoted auditors were some of our most respectable and intelligent ladies.70 65 66 67 68 69 70

Walsh, American tour, 1972, 264. Carmichael, Spurzheim, 1833, v. Carmichael (Spurzheim, 1833, 47) estimated that these lectures drew 300–600 attendees. Spurzheim had to find a larger hall for his Boston lectures as his audiences grew. Stern, Phrenological Fowlers, 1971, xiii. Follen, Funeral oration, 1832. Capen, Reminiscences, 1881, 25–26.

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John Collins Warren was more interested in the lectures and demonstrations Spurzheim delivered to the medical faculty than in these public lectures. “The science of phrenology as expounded by them [Gall and Spurzheim] had met with much opposition,” he would later write, “but it also had many enthusiastic supporters and the value of much of their scientific work was generally recognized.” “The medical profession appears to have been courteous and open-minded,” he continued, “but cautious in its endorsement of the new doctrine of phrenology.”71 Spurzheim never completed what he planned to do in Boston. Although Nahum Capen described him as “the picture of vigor and good health” when he began,72 he became ill. Despite the concerted efforts of James Jackson and other notable Boston physicians to help him overcome his illness, it progressed. He succumbed to “a fever” on November 10, 1832, dying shortly before his fifty-sixth birthday.73 Warren was among Boston’s most distraught physicians, and he helped conduct the autopsy on Spurzheim’s mortal remains. “His body being carried to the Medical College,” he wrote, “I made a public examination of it in the presence of a crowded theatre and preceded the demonstration part of the discourse by an account of the investigations and improvements and other labors of this distinguished and philanthropic gentleman.”74 Warren also gave a lecture memorializing Spurzheim before his elaborate funeral on November 17, which attracted approximately 3,000 mourners.75 He then joined the group somberly accompanying Spurzheim’s body from its receiving tomb under the Park Street Church to the new Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. Nahum Capen quickly penned a letter to George Combe, telling the Edinburgh phrenologist, who had become Spurzheim’s most important disciple, about the tragedy that had taken place. He praised what Spurzheim had done and related how much he had been admired in Boston.76 “Although he had been with us a few weeks, his virtue and worth were known and acknowledged,” Capen told Combe. “His amiable manners; his practical knowledge; his benevolent dispositions and purposes; 71 72 73 74 75

76

J. C. Warren, Boston Phrenological Society, 1921, 3. Capen, Reminiscences, 1881, 11. Jackson, Final illness, 1832. E. Warren, Warren, 1860, 12. Warren appeared to be referring to the Harvard Medical School when using the term “Medical College.” Josiah Quincy (1772–1864), previously a member of Congress and Mayor of Boston, and now President of Harvard University, oversaw the funeral. For more, see Capen, Reminiscences, 1881; Walsh, American tour, 1972. The letter was published eleven years later (Capen, Death, 1833, 127–128).

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Figure 2.5  Spurzheim’s skull (courtesy of the Warren Anatomical Museum, Center for the History of Medicine, Harvard University).

his active and discriminating mind, all engaged the good opinions of the prejudiced, and won the affection of the candid.”77 Combe immediately wrote back to Capen, stating: “I have often heard him say, ‘When I die, I hope they will not bury my skull – it will prove what my dispositions were, and afford the best answer to my Calumniators.’”78 Thus, as was done for Gall, Spurzheim’s skull was separated from his body. Casts and sketches were made, and it was temporarily preserved in a locked safe. His skull now resides in a display cabinet in the Warren Anatomical Museum, located in the Countway Medical Library of Harvard University (Figure 2.5). The unexpected death of the world’s leading spokesman for phrenology a mere four years after Gall’s passing closed the second stage in the bumpy history of phrenology, and drew renewed attention to the doctrine and its utility. This was expected by James Simpson, President of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society. On December 13, 1832, he remarked: “Galileo, Newton, Harvey, and Gall; they, too, are among the great departed, ‘who are dead, yet speak,’ and many a kindred genius will yet arise to listen to 77 78

Capen, Death, 1833, 128. Walsh, American tour, 1972, 199. For tributes: Capen, Reminiscences, 1881.

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Aftermath

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their voice.”79 Indeed, Bostonians quickly set to work to promote phrenology, inspired by the amiable and impressive visitor they had only briefly met, and the unexpected calamity that had just taken place in the city they were promoting as the New World’s “Cradle of Civilization” and the “Athens of America.”

Aftermath Establishing a Boston Phrenological Society was discussed the evening of Spurzheim’s funeral. This organization had its first official meeting on December 31, Spurzheim’s birthday. It took place in the building housing Marsh, Capen and Lyons, Booksellers.80 The first resolution the new society’s members adopted had to do with naming the organization. They then wanted to state its purposes; specifically, how it would encourage investigations into “the science of Phrenology and its bearings on the physical, intellectual and moral conditions of man.” With these objectives in mind, its members set forth to build a skull and cast collection, launch a new journal called Annals of Phrenology, and start research projects. Those attending that night must have discussed other things as well. One might have been translating Gall’s Sur les Fonctions du Cerveau et sur Celles de Chacune de ses Partes. This was his six-volume, inexpensive set of books from 1825 that was based on the earlier Anatomie et Physiologie. Neither set of books had been translated into English before. But a faithful English translation of Gall’s “small edition” came out in 1835, three years after Spurzheim’s death, which might have stimulated the translation.81 Physician-phrenologist Winslow Lewis Jr. (“Councillor” to the phrenological society) translated the French, Nahum Capen (the society’s “Recording Secretary”) served as editor, and Capen’s firm, Marsh, Capen and Lyons, Booksellers, published it as On the Functions of the Brain and Each of Its Parts. After Spurzheim’s funeral, John Collins Warren continued to discuss phrenology at Harvard’s Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, the Boston Medical Association, and elsewhere. He utilized the skull collection Spurzheim had left behind and presented examples from his 79 80 81

Capen, Death, 1833, 127. For an introduction to the rise and fall of phrenological societies in America, see Fulton, Phrenological societies, 1927. Gall, Functions, 1835.

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personal collection to make his points. Other Boston physicians joined in the torrent of activities that followed Spurzheim’s demise. But few conducted new, revealing experiments, and there was minimal interest in carefully examining and evaluating Gall and Spurzheim’s “evidence,” especially their craniological tenets.82 George Combe’s lengthy visit to the United States, which began in 1838, was a notable follow-up attempt to promote phrenology on American soil. Combe delivered more than 150 lectures, most on the East Coast. He mentioned the crowds that greeted him and some of the important people he met in his three-volume Notes in the United States of North America during a Phrenological Visit in 1838–39–40. The elite included educator Horace Mann and three presidents: John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, and William Henry Harrison.83 But not being a physician, and with his emphasis on happiness, Combe was less than successful when it came to enticing American physicians to reengage in the new science of man. No mass movement with physicians providing strong American leadership followed his visit. As medical historian Frank Freemon noted, “By the late 1830s, the leaders of American medicine stopped using phrenological doctrine, in some notable instances ignoring it, calling it unproven, or rejecting it.”84 One such highly placed person was Philadelphia physician and textbook author Robley Dunglison, who contended in his popular physiology book that phrenology was “unestablished.” This was a well-chosen word that both reflected and influenced how most American physicians seemed to be feeling about phrenology at this moment in time.85 The decline of phrenology as a science should not be construed to imply that it had now run its course on what was previously thought to be fertile American soil. True, it had lost much of its appeal among physicians and scientists.86 But it was now garnering considerably more interest from the laity – men and women interested in knowing and improving themselves, and living happier and more fulfilling lives, by following a few easily understood rules. 82 83 84 85 86

Davies, Phrenology, 1955. G. Combe, Phrenological Visit, 1838–1840. Freemon, Phrenology, 1992, 139. Dunglison, Human Physiology, 1838. Psychiatrists, however, remained more interested in phrenology because it presented mental disorders as brain diseases, an orientation toward the insane that they favored. The fact that earlier physicians and caretakers had not made great strides in treating the insane was also important. Properly understanding, classifying, and treating the insane had been of great importance both to Gall and Spurzheim (Finger and Eling, Gall, 2019, 363–382).

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The pragmatism and democratic ideals that had become so important a feature of early American culture, along with the entrepreneurial spirit and optimism that many Americans were now displaying, would be the ingredients needed for phrenology to become a growth industry in America – a business that would capture the popular imagination and turn what had started as a science or an academic pursuit into a fad for having one’s head professionally read. Having people with ambition and the skills to run and grow a business that would make itself known across the country and worldwide would provide the missing ingredients for phrenology’s remarkable expansion into popular culture, especially in the United States.

The Fowlers Two enterprising young men, Orson Squire Fowler and his younger brother Lorenzo Niles Fowler, saw the opening and had the business acumen to take full advantage of the opportunities they perceived (Figure 2.6). The brothers began thinking of phrenology as a business after Spurzheim’s death in 1832 and before Combe made his way to America six years later.87 There had been nothing quite like what they would now do. No one else seemed to be thinking about phrenology as a business on such a grand scale. The Fowlers came from upper New York State and were expected to become ministers. Orson, born in 1809, became entranced with phrenology while still a student at Amherst College in Massachusetts, where he studied mental philosophy. Lorenzo, born two years later, shared his brother’s interest in the new science. Recognizing its potential as a moneymaker, he joined Orson in launching the business venture that would bring phrenology to the people, while hopefully making both brothers wealthy. The Fowlers were not focused on the few American physicians who saw a need for adequately testing the doctrine. But they were happy to provide physicians with phrenological charts and other materials, and to publish some of their writings. “What do the common people, or even scientific men, care about the arguments adduced in support of any new subject or science?” they asked rhetorically in 1836. And in the next sentence: “Before they will believe in it, or even listen to it, they must see its truth practically demonstrated.”88 As Orson astutely recognized, nothing worked better in 87 88

The authoritative source on the Fowlers and their business ventures is Stern, Phrenological Fowlers, 1971. O. Fowler and L. Fowler, Phrenology Proved, 1836, vi (italics in original).

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Figure 2.6  Brothers (a) Lorenzo Fowler (1811–1896) and (b) Orson Fowler (1809–1887), who turned phrenology into a highly profitable industry.

attracting and confirming converts to phrenology than successful insights about a client’s character. Orson began his forays into paying phrenology by reading students’ heads at Amherst, charging a mere two cents for a reading. Successful in his initial endeavors, he gave a lecture on phrenology in the Vermont town of Brattleboro in 1834. “Armed with a simple chart and a few handbills, a knack for reading character and a conviction that with his new science he could solve the riddle of the Sphinx, Orson Squire Fowler cleared forty dollars and began his professional career.”89 Soon after, he and his brother set forth to lecture and read heads along up and down the East Coast and into the Midwest, even venturing to St. Louis, Missouri, more than a thousand miles from New England on the western bank of the Mississippi River. The brothers opened their first phrenological office in New York City in 1836, helped by their younger sister Charlotte. Their second was in Philadelphia two years later, and a third followed in Boston in 1851. Samuel Robert Wells, impressed by the Fowlers, joined the growing enterprise in 1844 after marrying Charlotte, who was also involved in the business. With the help of additional family members and a bevy of outsiders, these entrepreneurs strove to make phrenology attractive to people everywhere. 89

Stern, Phrenological Fowlers, 1971, 15.

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Figure 2.7  A head reading, ca. 1848.

The Fowlers and their associates read heads – lots of heads. But they did not begin their examinations by visually inspecting and palpating a client’s head for bumps. Instead, they started with the overall size and shape of the skull, the “relative size of its several parts,” and the temperaments.90 Only after doing these things did they set forth to determine the relative sizes of thirty-seven phrenological organs, meaning how the organs compared to each other within the same subject, as contrasted with an “average” subject. The Fowlers followed Combe in using calipers in their phrenological examinations (Figure 2.7). But going beyond the few measurements that Combe presented, they used this instrument to identify the sites of organs too small or crowded out by neighboring organs to produce noticeable bumps. Further, they provided detailed instructions giving the distances from one organ to the next and a stock diagram to make the locations of overlying parts of the skull clearer (Figure 2.8). 90

Gall dismissed theories of temperament as nonsense, particularly those rooted in the four humors of antiquity. Spurzheim and Combe, however, promoted a greater appreciation of the basic temperaments, which were now called sanguine, nervous, bilious, and lymphatic, with each based on different organ systems.

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Figure 2.8  The standard Fowler diagram showing thirty-seven phrenological organs.

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The directives the Fowlers gave in many of their books are notable. They begin: Let us take, then, for our starting-point the outer angle of the eye, and draw a line to the middle of the top of the ears, and Destructiveness is exactly under this point, and extends upward about half an inch above the top of the ears. In proportion to its size will the head be wide between the ears. Secretiveness is located three quarters of an inch above the middle of the top of the ears. When this organ is large, it rarely gives a distinct projection, but simply fills and rounds the head at this point. When the head widens rapidly from the junction of the ears as you rise upward, Secretiveness is larger than Destructiveness; but when the head becomes narrower as you rise, it is smaller than Destructiveness.91

Nonetheless, visually examining and palpating heads, what others would call “bumpology,” still figured in phrenological examinations. In the 1840 edition of Fowler’s Practical Phrenology, Orson even advised that when “applying the fingers to the head, the balls should be used instead of the ends.”92 Nonetheless, his brother would urge phrenologists to be more focused on “the general form of the head that gives the true index to the character” and whether it is “large or small, narrow or broad, high or low,” reflecting whether the “preponderance of the brain is in the base, or in the coronal region,” and so on.93 For people unable to have their heads assessed in person, the Fowlers and their minions would work from photographs sent through the mail. Such clients would still receive a chart revealing their basic character traits and the relative strengths of their individual faculties, using a simple scale from 1 (smallest) to 7 (largest) for a particular organ’s relative size. For a larger fee, one could obtain a more elaborate pamphlet or even a book with their personalized chart, an even more impressive memento of the head reading.

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O. Fowler, Practical Phrenologist, 1869, 164–165. Nonetheless, the Fowlers, like Combe, did not think it was possible to measure the exact sizes of the individual phrenological organs. “The difficulties in the way of accomplishing exact measurement of each individual cerebral organ appear to me insurmountable,” Combe maintained, “1st, Because each has a depth which cannot be mathematically measured, seeing that during life the bottom of it, or the bottom of the convolutions, cannot be ascertained; and 2dly, because each has a peripheral expansion in length and breadth, which cannot be measured, owing to its boundaries not being ascertainable with exact mathematical precision” (e.g., Combe, 1881, 174; for more on this subject, see Finger, Objectivity and measurements, 2022). O. Fowler, Practical Phrenology, 1840 (italics in original). L. Fowler, Objections to phrenology, 1875.

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Figure 2.9  Clinton Hall, headquarters for the Fowler phrenological enterprises from 1838 to 1854.

The Fowler emporia were like magnets. People flocked in droves to have their heads professionally read and to gawk at the items in their wonder cabinets. Their early Philadelphia establishment was even called the Phrenological Museum and Athenaeum because it displayed a large collection of skulls and casts. By 1842, Clinton Hall (Figure 2.9), their New York headquarters, would have over 1,000 specimens and related items on display. Visitors to Clinton Hall were surrounded by busts and casts, specimens and mummies, paintings and drawings of animal and human, the savage and civilized, the criminal and virtuous. They were surrounded indeed by human nature, whose varying aspects and astonishing forms a guide was ever eager to expound. Since admission was free, visitors often came in droves, and either Orson, Lorenzo, Samuel, or Charlotte would take time to conduct them round the Cabinet.94

The Fowlers also sold skulls and casts. Many cost just a few dollars, but choice skulls from a “rare race” could command up to ten times this amount. If a collection of forty plaster casts (including Voltaire, Sir Walter Scott, and a United States president) was wanted, it could be had for $25. 94

Stern, Phrenological Fowlers, 1971, 59.

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And for those desiring an attractive porcelain head showing the phrenological organs, these started at $1.25. Prints and charts were also available. For those wanting more, private lessons and group classes could be had. Books on phrenology provided still more profits for the enterprising Fowlers. Although the organization published phrenology books by other authors, its founders were not bashful about writing and promoting their own works. Orson took the lead in this domain, first publishing Phrenology Proved, Illustrated, and Applied in 1836, a practical manual that would go through more than sixty editions over the next two decades. He followed it with Fowler’s Practical Phrenology in 1840, Fowler on Matrimony in 1842, Hereditary Descent and also Self-Culture and the Perfection of Character in 1843, and Physiology, Animal and Mental in 1847 – these being the shortened titles of just another five of his phrenology books, most also having multiple editions.95 The Fowlers reached even more people with their popular Phrenological Almanac, with sales exceeding 20,000 copies a year by midcentury. They also had a flagship periodical, the Phrenological Journal and Miscellany (Figure 2.10). The latter made its debut in 1838 and was modeled after Combe’s Edinburgh Phrenological Journal.96 At its peak, it had approximately 50,000 subscribers, not just in America but around the world. Like Combe, the Fowlers were optimistic about how valuable phrenology could be in everyday life, and they expressed this optimism in their lectures, articles, and books. They maintained (albeit without directly proving it) that exercising noble phrenological organs would cause them to enlarge and suppress those involved with undesirable propensities. They also continued to promote phrenology as a way of improving education, the care of the insane, and the like. In 1854, Orson left the family business to lecture and write on sex, marriage, healthier architecture, and other subjects now interesting him. That same year, the firm moved from its downtown location on Nassau Street in New York City to bustling Broadway, so even more people could examine the cabinets, shop, and undergo phrenological examinations. Madeleine B. Sterne, in her scholarly book on the Fowlers, estimated that Americans possessed more than 500,000 Fowler and Wells items of various kinds at this time.97 95 96 97

Fowler and Fowler, Phrenology Proved, 1836; O. Fowler, Practical Phrenology, 1840; Matrimony, 1842; Hereditary Descent, 1843a; Perfection of Character, 1843b; Physiology, Animal and Mental, 1847. Poskett, Materials of Mind, 2019. Sterne, Phrenological Fowlers, 1971, 84.

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Figure 2.10  The Phrenological Journal and Miscellany started by the Fowlers in 1838 underwent several name changes, with one shown here. It boasted large sales in the United States and had a worldwide following by midcentury.

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In his 1955 survey of phrenology in America, John Davies noted how “during the 1830’s and 40’s there was probably not a village in the nation that did not entertain at least one visit from an itinerant practical phrenologist.”98 As he explained: “To be phrenologized was a perfectly routine, even fashionable thing to do in that era.”99 Men and women with no formal training were also practicing phrenology on themselves, their children, their neighbors, and others at this time.100 In the next chapter, we shall see how a phrenologist plied his trade among the ordinary people of Hannibal, Missouri. Hannibal would achieve lasting fame because Samuel Langhorne Clemens, later to write under the pen name of Mark Twain, grew up there and drew on it and some of its colorful characters in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Clemens, as we shall now see, was both inquisitive and an excellent observer, even as a teenager. And with these traits, it should come as no surprise that he was taken by what the visiting head reader was doing and what he was telling his clients. 98 99 100

Davies, Phrenology, 1955, 32. Davies, Phrenology, 1955, 37. Pandora, Popular science, 2009; Sysling, Science and self-assessment, 2018, Average person, 2021.

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chapter 3

Skeptical in Hannibal

One of the most frequent arrivals in our village of Hannibal was the peripatetic phrenologist and he was popular and always welcome. Samuel Clemens (as Mark Twain), Autobiographical Dictation, December 26, 19061

Samuel Langhorne Clemens2 was not born in Hannibal, Missouri, the town he considered home, the one most closely associated with his childhood, and his model for “St. Petersburg” in his two most famous novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He was born on November 30, 1835, in what he described as “a nearly invisible village” about forty miles southwest of Hannibal. Like its betterknown namesake on the southeastern tip of the United States, it was called Florida. Florida, Missouri, was, in fact, a minuscule hamlet. It was not on the Mississippi River, which separated the more populous East from the stilluntamed West. Nor was it on the less navigated river of about the same length, the Missouri River, which famed explorers Meriwether Louis and William Clark navigated between 1804 and 1806, allowing them to see the majestic Pacific Ocean. Rather, the tiny hamlet of Florida had the undistinguished Salt River, which during dry spells would become too shallow to support the trade that overly optimistic businessmen thought could make it a stopping point for commercial traffic. Reminiscing tongue in cheek, “Mark Twain” would write that the town “contained a hundred

1 2

Twain, Autobiography, 2010–2015, 2: 335. The three autobiographical volumes compiled and annotated by researchers affiliated with the Mark Twain Project in Berkeley are currently regarded as authoritative (Twain, Autobiography, 2010– 2015). Among the many other biographical works consulted are Howells, My Mark Twain, 1910; Paine, Mark Twain, 1912; Kaplan, Mr. Clemens, 1966; Lauber, Twain, 1985; Steinbrink, Twain, 1991; Powers Dangerous Water, 2001; Mark Twain, 2006; Scharnhorst, Mark Twain, 2018, 2019.

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people, and I increased the population by 1 per cent … more than the best man in history ever did for any other town.”3 Haley’s Comet drew considerable attention from those able to watch it streak through the night sky that year – an event reoccurring every seventy-­five years. Late in life, the celebrated author, born six weeks after its orbit took it closest to Earth, would jest that he came in with the comet and that if he did not go out with it, this would be the greatest disappointment of his life! His father was John Marshall Clemens, born in Virginia and the owner of a languishing general store in the twenty-one-house village. Jane Lampton, who had a more engaging personality, coupled with some notable quirks that would make her the perfect model for Aunt Polly in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, was his mother. The couple had moved from Tennessee to Missouri in 1835, thinking business opportunities would be better there. They had lost a child and had four surviving children: Orion (b. 1825), Pamela (b. 1827), Margaret (b. 1830), and Benjamin (b. 1831). Jane became pregnant with the child destined to become famous as Mark Twain after the entourage arrived in tiny Florida. Her last child, Henry, would be born there in 1838. Florida failed to be like a fabled El Dorado with gold for the taking. The town never came close to becoming a commercial hub – it was not on a reliably navigable river and was fifty miles away from the Mississippi River with its amenities. When Samuel Clemens passed away in 1910, it only had 200 residents. With few people wanting to move there, elders dying off, and children moving to bigger cities or heading west to pan for gold, it was already well on its way to oblivion. When it came to needing rescuing, either by making the Salt River more navigable or by discovering something precious in the ground, Florida was not alone during the 1830s and 1840s. “Sammy” or “Sam,” as the newest child was informally called, also needed help. He entered the world prematurely, and there were doubts about whether he would survive – concerns that would linger for several years. Decades later, he would jest about how he asked his mother if she feared he would not survive. Her answer: “No – afraid you would.”4 He also mentioned the family physician of his youth who “saved my life several times” but still seemed to be “a good man and meant well.”5 3 4 5

Twain, Autobiography, 2010–2015, 2: 209. Twain, Autobiography, 2010–2015, 1: 119. This was Dr. Meredith. Twain, Autobiography, 2010–2015, 1: 119.

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The family coffers also needed help. John Marshall Clemens continued to struggle to make the money that the family needed. Starting as a partner in a general store, then having his own store, and occasionally practicing law and serving as a justice of the peace (hence “Judge”), he found himself unable to provide the financial stability he hoped to achieve. Just before Sam’s fifth birthday, he sold his property in Florida. He moved with Jane and their children to the more promising Missouri town of Hannibal, located about forty miles to the northeast on the Mississippi River.6

Hannibal Hannibal benefited from being a stopping point for boats going up and down the Mississippi River. It had approximately 1,000 inhabitants and a viable downtown business district with offices and shops where various local and imported products could be purchased. Its fertile land was suitable for growing grains, fruits, and vegetables, and its trees provided ample lumber for buildings, furniture, boats, and more. Although many of Hannibal’s men derived their livings in one form or another from the boats (keelboats, rafts, faster scows, and from 1830 a growing number of steamboats), transporting people and commodities to various destinations on the Mississippi River, John Marshall stayed with the business he knew best. He opened another grocery and dry goods store on the first floor of the family’s first residence, a structure that also had rooms for rent. In 1844, the Clemens family moved to a nicer house, where Sam would spend his next nine years. This two-story wood structure at 206 Hill Street is still standing and is now part of the Mark Twain Museum complex. Sam’s health improved in Hannibal, although he still sleepwalked, suffered from terrible nightmares, and had seizures thought to be caused by intestinal worms. He was now growing nicely, sporting blue-gray eyes and a great ruck of sandy hair on a head that seemed too large for his body. He had learned how to flash an engaging smile and had a measured way of speaking that drew attention to himself when he wanted to attract an audience. Without question, he also had some less-than-desirable traits. One, which he would display throughout his life, was a propensity for abrupt mood swings that could make him slightly, moderately, or completely irrational. Being a risk-taker was another concern that could not be treated 6

For the history of Hannibal, see Hagood and Hagood, Hannibal, 1976.

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with some home remedy or concocted patented medicine from his mother’s pantry. By his own admission, though this might be just another of his exaggerations, he was lucky to escape drowning seven or nine times while growing up in Hannibal, which was not quite as idyllic as he would make it out to be for adventurous boys in his novels and quasiautobiographical pieces.7 John Marshall, who seemed incapable of showing deep affection for his wife or children, died of pneumonia in 1847. The demise of the family patriarch, who had failed as a businessman and had been forced to sell his assets,8 created considerable stress for his widow. Jane had been hoping to raise her brood as proper young men and women, ideally churchgoing Presbyterians. Her husband’s death and the loss of income made this aspiration more difficult. Financially constrained, Jane felt compelled to take Sam out of school. He had started formal schooling at Mrs. Horr’s “dame school” in a log house when he was about five. He was then sent to Mary Ann Newcomb’s school and afterward to one run by Mr. Samuel Cross in the center of town.9 When his father died, he was enrolled in John Dawson’s school, which would provide more vivid memories. Dawson would serve as his model for the schoolmaster in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. But now his formal education ended. True, he regarded school as a curtailment of his freedom, preferring swimming, fishing, and other outdoor adventures to being “chained” to a desk in some dreary room. But despite equating school time with a harsh jail sentence, Sam left the equivalent of the fifth grade loving books, excelling at memorizing passages, and with a reputation for being an excellent speller. He now took odd jobs to help his family financially, working in a grocery store and at a drugstore, helping a blacksmith, and delivering newspapers. Yet he remained drawn to the printed word and had a propensity to immerse himself in works such as Ivanhoe, Robinson Crusoe, Robin Hood, and Don Quixote, even getting angry when interrupted. He would later

7 8

9

Powers (Dangerous Water, 2001; Mark Twain, 2006) shows why Sam’s boyhood was far from idyllic. Finding himself desperate for money, John Marshall felt compelled to sell Jennie, a young slave girl he had brought with his family from Tennessee, and then other tangible assets, including his properties. During this era, most of Hannibal’s citizens owned slaves and treated them as personal property, though not always unkindly. John Marshall’s moralistic son Sam was more conflicted about slavery, having enjoyed listening to Uncle Dan’l (a model for Jim in Huckleberry Finn) and Aunt Hannah tell wonderful tales in Florida, while also befriending the slave children. Like other children of this era, he was first brought up on the McGuffy Reader, spelling books, and the Bible.

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write: “I had been a bookseller’s clerk for awhile, but the customers bothered me so much I could not read with any comfort, and so the proprietor gave me a furlough and forgot to put a limit to it.”10 Jane recognized her son’s strength and thought it best to apprentice him to a printer, much as the Franklin family had done with their gifted son Benjamin in Boston. In 1848, Sam began working for Joseph P. Ament, who owned the local Gazette, soon to become the Missouri Courier. As a “printer’s devil,” he set type, did press work, and performed odd jobs. He was not salaried, but Ament gave him meals and two suits of clothes a year, removing these burdens from his family. In 1850, Sam’s brother Orion, who had gone to St. Louis eight years earlier to learn the printing trade, returned home to start his own newspaper, the Western Union.11 A year later, he was able to buy the Hannibal Journal, the newspaper he really wanted. He then merged the two periodicals into the Journal and Western Union, but soon afterward just called it the Journal. With Sam’s apprenticeship now completed, Orion enticed his 15-year-old brother to join him as a journeyman printer and editorial assistant. Henry, their younger sibling, who had also been taken out of school, joined the family enterprise. Sam wrote and published some pieces for Orion’s newspaper and sent others to Philadelphia’s Saturday Evening Post. Always looking for something worth writing, he followed the town’s newsworthy events and watched the people walking its streets. Murderers, local drunks, optimists heading to the distant gold fields of California, and visitors disembarking riverboats to ply their trades in the growing port town all interested him – or could be made interesting with some imagination.

Assisting the Mesmerizer During the mid-1840s, the residents of Hannibal were more than used to all sorts of “entertainers” arriving on horses, in wagons, and on the rapidly growing number of boats that were docking on the waterfront. The city had its fair share of visiting circuses, minstrel shows, lecturers on the occult (e.g., spiritualism, witchcraft, demonology), and actors eager to perform skits or more extended plays before paying audiences. There were also sweet-talking “professors” and other healers touting “proven” panaceas for restoring even those close to death back to health. And there were 10 11

Twain, Roughing It, 1876; see Ch. 42. For more on Orion, see Fanning, Twain and Orion, 2003.

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the mesmerizers, who might have made Sam Clemens suspicious of other potential tricksters stopping to pry their wondrous services for a fee. During the late-eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, German physician Franz Anton Mesmer donned a fancy robe and used an iron rod to treat various disorders.12 He even staged elaborate séances with music to create the perfect ambiance for his cures. Mesmer attributed his treatments, some involving touching, some at la baquet (a large tub filled with ironized water), and some by just pointing his metal wand, to “animal magnetism.” This form of magnetism, he proclaimed, involves an invisible force that he, being unusually gifted, could direct and control, allowing him to make sick people better. In 1784, at the request of the French government, Benjamin Franklin, then in his late seventies and a leading authority on all things electrical, joined with esteemed French physicians and natural philosophers (then the term for scientists) to test Mesmer’s claims.13 Franklin had met Mesmer previously. Now he and his French associates employed the latest instruments to see if they could detect the magnetic forces Mesmer claimed to be manipulating. They performed many clever experiments, sometimes telling people they were being mesmerized when they were not, and at other times not telling people they were being mesmerized when, in fact, a mesmerizer hidden behind a screen was attempting to do things to them. The Franklin Commission concluded that Mesmer’s unorthodox methods did seem to cure some people.14 Nonetheless, its investigators concluded that the cures had nothing to do with an invisible magnetic fluid, a force that their instruments could not detect. Rather, the cures seemed to stem from patients believing in what the therapist was doing and saying. They also seemed to correlate with high expectations about getting better. Involving an authority figure, a touted treatment, and gullible minds, many of Mesmer’s successes amounted to what we would now call placebo effects. Other cures might have come from some disorders simply running their courses.15 Despite Mesmer’s fall from grace, mesmerism led to hypnotism, which has surgical and medical uses. Further, it made for wonderful entertainment, putting food on the table and money in the bank for those with good theatrical skills. 12 13 14 15

Mesmer, Mémoire, 1799; Buranelli, Wizard, 1975; Pattie, Mesmer, 1994; Lanska and Lanska, Mesmer, 2007. Finger, Franklin, 2006, 219–234, 247–248. Franklin et al., Rapport, 1784; Report, 1785. The word “placebo” has ancient roots, originally meaning “I shall be pleasing.” See Shapiro, Placebo, 1968; Shapiro and Shapiro, Powerful Placebo, 1997.

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Figure 3.1  Daguerreotype of Samuel Clemens, ca. 1851 (courtesy of Google Images).

Samuel Clemens believed he was about fifteen years old when he first saw a mesmerist (Figure 3.1). He penned this in 1903 and inserted what he remembered into his autobiographical dictations for December 1 and 2, 1906.16 In his words: “I think the year was 1850.” But he was less than certain, adding: “As to that, I am not sure, but I know the month – it was May; that detail has survived the wear of fifty-five years.”17 In his seventies, Clemens recalled how much he had wanted to be part of the visiting mesmerist’s show in Hannibal. He believed in the man’s power and wished to know first-hand what it was like to be in a trance. He also admitted how vain he was at the time – he knew that going on stage would make him the envy of the other boys and the talk of the town. Hence, he went to the platform for volunteers, where he sat patiently and hoped he would be chosen to be the mesmerist’s local assistant. He stared for three consecutive nights at a “magic disk” placed in the palm of one of his hands. To his regret, he found himself unable to become sleepy. No matter how hard he tried, he could not force himself into a trance, which he knew was critical if he had any hope of becoming the mesmerist’s assistant. Going into a trance, however, seemed to be no problem for Hicks, “our journeyman,” he would recall. Hicks would “scamper 16 17

Twain, Autobiography, 2010–2015, 2: 297–303. Twain, Autobiography, 2010–2015, 2: 297.

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and jump when Simmons the enchanter explained, ‘See the snake! see the snake!’” He would also remark, “My, how beautiful!” when he was told he was observing a splendid sunset. These things irritated Sam, who wanted Hick’s job. In his words, “it filled me with bitterness to have others do it, and to have people make a hero of Hicks” – how “I couldn’t stand it.” By the fourth night, Sam caught on to what he had to do to get on stage. He gazed at the disk, pretended to be sleepy, and faked nodding off until the mesmerizer snapped his fingers in the air “to discharge the surplus electricity.” Faking being in a trace state, he passed imaginary buckets to douse a fire, feigned excitement while watching invisible steamboat races, struggled to land a giant catfish, and even kissed imaginary girls. And by doing these things, he succeeded in replacing Hicks. Years later, he would contend that Hicks lacked imagination, was inattentive, and was born too honest, whereas he was a lad “without that incumbrance.” He now proceeded to put on a show that did, in fact, make him the talk of the town. Unlike Hicks, who seemed oblivious to the mesmerizer standing behind him, he recognized that he could correctly guess what the mesmerizer wanted him to do by watching the audience. With ingenuity and creativity, he spied “a rusty and empty old revolver” (an earlier stage prop) on a table and eyed the bully in the audience who had tormented him just a few weeks earlier. As he recalled: I crept stealthily and impressively toward the table, with a dark and murderous scowl on my face, copied from a popular romance, seized the revolver suddenly, flourished it, shouted the bully’s name, jumped off the platform and made a rush for him and chased him out of the house before the paralyzed people could interfere to save him. There was a storm of applause, and the magician, addressing the house, said, most impressively – “That you may know how really remarkable this is, and how wonderfully developed a subject we have in this boy, I assure you that without having spoken a single word to guide him he has carried out what I mentally commanded him to do, to the minutest detail. I could have stopped him … by a mere exertion of my will, therefore the poor fellow who escaped was at no time in danger.”18

Sam emerged victorious, realizing that, even if he could not guess exactly what the professor was willing him to do, he “could put on something that would answer just as well.” And he quickly learned that “the magician, not being a fool, always ratified it.” He even trained himself to endure more pain than Hicks could withstand, not wincing or crying out when members of the audience were invited to stick him with pins. 18

Twain, Autobiography, 2010–2015, 2: 299.

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Perhaps most astonishing was how he used earlier knowledge to dupe the last of the village doubters. This was something he would draw on in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn when describing the frauds working the river towns as phrenologists and fortunetellers (“I k’n tell a fortune pretty good when I’ve got somebody along to find out the facts for me”),19 as well as in other writings (see Chapter 6). This part of the charade was based on what he had overheard a few years earlier. He had come across three Hannibal residents from Virginia describing how they were present when a theater in Richmond burned to the ground, killing several people. The men also described how old Dr. Peake was then living in a mansion that had a hole as big as a saucer by the front door, the result of a British cannonball. Now, with Dr. Peake in the audience and the professor asking Sam to concentrate and describe what he was envisioning, he recounted what he had overheard, pretending it to be coming to him in a vision. Peake was aghast. The doctor, now in his seventies and clueless, told the audience that there was no way this boy could have known these things about his past. Yet he was accurate in every detail. As Mark Twain would later put it, the last doubter, the final holdout, was now converted! Looking back on his trickery decades later, he remarked: “When the magician’s engagement closed there was but one person in the village who did not believe in mesmerism, and I was the one.” “How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again.” And it was in this context that he related how he had visited his mother thirty-five years after having astonished the audience and fooled the mesmerizer. He told her everything truthfully, including how he had used earlier information to surprise Dr. Peake. Having witnessed his performance, Jane Clemens would have none of it! “And so the lie which I played upon her in my youth,” he wrote, “remained with her as an unchallengeable truth to the day of her death.”20

The Question of When and Its Importance But when exactly did this event occur, and how old was Sam at the time? Clemens, as noted, thought this was in 1850, making him about fifteen years old. He also stated: “The village had heard of mesmerism, in a general way, but had not encountered it yet.” Nonetheless, the editors of the 19 20

Twain, Huckleberry Finn, 1884/2003, 121 (italics added). Clemens also had a piece on a mesmerist he had met in Vienna in 1897, which he added to his autobiographical pieces on December 3, 1906.

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authoritative Autobiography of Mark Twain point out in a footnote that two mesmerists had visited Hannibal in May 1847, and that they performed for two weeks using a local subject in their act.21 Dr. Gary Scharnhorst, a Twain biographer and university professor, researched what “Lorio” wrote in a St. Louis newspaper, the Daily Reveille, on May 20, 1847. “Lorio,” Scharnhorst stated, “was almost certainly” Sam’s brother Orion ([L]orio [“n” deleted]), who was informing St. Louis readers about various happenings in Hannibal at that time. Lorio’s piece makes for interesting reading, and this is what he wrote about the mesmerists entertaining people in Hannibal in 1847: What do you think of Mesmerism now-a-days? We have had some queer experiments in that line, lately. Two gentlemen made their appearance here, a few days ago, one of whom delivered a series of very dull lectures, and the other illustrated them by a series of really interesting experiments; the said lecturer, it is presumed, being too much exhausted by his lofty mental exertions to perform the experiments himself. These men do not carry a subject with them, but choose some one out of the crowd, either children or adults. There is certainly something about Mesmerism that is rather perplexing. I wish I had room to report one of the learned lecturer’s addresses entire, for I am not of a very logical turn myself; and I fear that any remarks I might make on the subject would not have much weight with you. Perhaps, however, Mesmerism stands, towards its opponents, in pretty nearly the position described by him: “People,” said he, “are trying to beat down the science; but you know what Santa Anna said to Taylor – says he, ‘You don’t know when they’re whooped, and when they are whooped they won’t stay whooped!’ That’s a rather low illustration, but it’s the way with Mesmerism – the more people say against it, it keeps going higher in the scale of science!” I think he is rather mistaken in ascribing the above remark to Gen. Santa Anna; however, if ignorant people will deliver lectures, let them do so. Excuse Haste, LORIO.22

Lorio did not give the names of the two mesmerists or identify the local boy assisting them. So was Sam volunteering for these two mesmerists in 1847 or for another mesmerist who showed up in 1850, the date he gave half a century later? Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Powers reminds us how Mark Twain’s prodigious memory often found congenial company with a contrary impulse: the tale teller’s impulse to improve memory with fiction. 21 22

Twain, Autobiography, 2010–2015, 2: 589. Scharnhorst, “Lorio” letters, 2008.

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Skeptical in Hannibal Mark Twain took a democrat’s view of fact and fiction; he privileged neither above the other and let them mingle in his work without prejudice, joking famously later in life about being able to remember anything whether it happened or not, and about too much truth as an impediment to good literature. This habit of mind produced good literature indeed, and left biographers over two centuries stumbling into one another as they tried to sort out what actually happened from what actually didn’t.23

Powers is certainly correct about how “Mark Twain” went about telling stories, including those involving his own life experiences. Nevertheless, his creator was usually accurate when it came to dates, and also importantly, he provided a different name for the mesmerist he had assisted. He referred to him as Simmons and made no mention of a second mesmerist accompanying him. In contrast, the two mesmerists working the crowds in 1847 were identified as Sparhawk and Layton in a Hannibal newspaper. Twain further stated that Simmons passed himself off as a “professor” and promised wondrous, unforgettable experiences for those willing to pay the 25 cents admission fee, “children and negroes half price.” In the aforementioned 1847 Gazette piece, we are told that Sparhawk and Layton charged only 10 cents for their show, which had a two-week run in Hawkin’s Saloon. As for the mesmerist’s earlier assistant, the previously mentioned Urban East Hicks was a journeyman for the Gazette during the mid-1840s. Then, from 1848 and probably into the fall of 1850, he worked for the Hannibal Journal, subsequently moving to Orion Clemens’s Western Union, where he worked alongside Sam. The fact that Clemens used the term “our apprentice” is significant here. It signifies that Hicks was then working for Orion and his brothers on the family paper after Sparhawk and Layton visited Hannibal. Lastly, what Sam did on stage and how he performed his deception are more in line with what a teenager would do to impress himself, his friends, and others, than with what would be expected from an eleven- or twelve-year-old boy. Together, the converging evidence suggests that his adventures with the mesmerist did indeed take place in 1850, the date he provided more than half a century later. His statement that “The village had heard of mesmerism, in a general way, but had not encountered it yet” is where he seems to have been in error. Some of Hannibal’s men and women had observed two mesmerists in action just three years earlier. 23

Powers, Twain, 2006, 51.

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In 1851, the year after Clemens (as Mark Twain) recalled going on stage with the mesmerist, the family’s newspaper ran a piece about mesmerism. Its August 21, 1851 edition had an “editorial comment” titled “What is Mesmerism?” Its author was not named, but that person opined that no one highly suspicious of mesmerism was ever put into a trance. As Sam Clemens might have recognized a year earlier, and as was clearly stated in this newspaper piece: “The true explanation of mesmerism is to be found, as we have said, in the weakness or infatuation of human nature itself … This constitutional infirmity of body and of mind furnishes to the mesmerist a basis for his operations, and the source of all the wonders which he works.” Dating precisely when Sam met the visiting mesmerist is important for historians trying to reconstruct the chronology of his boyhood. It also bears on what he might have thought about another potentially suspect visitor to Hannibal, an itinerant phrenologist. Knowing what he did for the mesmerizer, was the lad now more skeptical, thinking the head reader was also relying on trickery? Alternatively, was he still largely inexperienced and naive, not yet having the great awakening that would also make him suspicious of the phrenologist, questioning whether he was really reading heads, as he was claiming? Recognizing that who came first, the mesmerizer or the phrenologist, is still unclear, let us now turn to what Clemens recalled about the phrenologist passing through Hannibal, how it registered on him, and how he presented it as Mark Twain.24

The Itinerant Phrenologist As noted in the previous chapter, in 1835, the year of Sam’s birth, the English translation of Gall’s less expensive set of books came off the presses. Bearing the title On the Functions of the Brain and Each of Its Parts, the translation had been stimulated by Spurzheim’s premature death in Boston three years earlier. It provided physicians and other interested Americans with a much better appreciation of the origins and development of what Spurzheim had been calling “phrenology,” a doctrine that resonated with the pragmatic inhabitants of the young nation, who wanted to know more about themselves and how to better themselves through science. As also noted, the reception Spurzheim received in the New World and what followed after his death in 1832 stimulated Orson and Lorenzo Fowler to start their phrenology business. Just reading heads and selling 24

For a synopsis, see Finger, Twain, 2019.

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their wares in New York City or other major East Coast cities was not enough for the enterprising Fowlers or for Samuel Wells, who joined the firm in 1844. These men also wanted to exploit markets in rural America. They did this through their travels and by sending others across the country to seek out new markets. Although situated 1,020 miles from New York City, Hannibal had become a stop for riverboat traffic by midcentury. Its commercial importance and population growth did not go unnoticed by ambitious phrenologists. A town of its size was certainly not big enough to warrant a separate trip from the eastern seaboard. Still, for a businessman plying his trade in Chicago, Louisville, Cincinnati, or St. Louis, it was not such an out-of-the-way place for a potentially lucrative stop. For itinerant phrenologists, much as was true for mesmerizers, Hannibal was indeed a town worth visiting. The doctrine laid down by Gall, promoted and extended by Spurzheim and Combe, and turned from a scientific endeavor into a lucrative business by Orson and Lorenzo Fowler, was known in Hannibal before the middle of the century. Local newspapers and magazines had published pieces about it, as had periodicals from bigger cities that could be purchased locally. Phrenology was also covered in widely circulating foreign magazines that one could buy in Hannibal, such as the Edinburgh Review, the London Quarterly Review, and Gentleman’s Magazine. How skull features might reveal a person’s true character was being discussed throughout America by this time. What Mark Twain included in his autobiographical dictation of December 26, 1906 is worth remembering in this context. “In America, forty or fifty years ago,” he stated, “Fowler and Wells stood at the head of the phrenological industry, and the firm’s name was familiar in all ears.” He continued: “Their publications had a wide currency and were read and studied and discussed by truth-seekers and converts all over the land.”25 Precisely how much Sam personally knew about the “phrenological industry” created by the Fowlers before he observed a head reader is difficult to ascertain. But two things can be mentioned with certainty. One is that he knew something about phrenology and phrenologists. And the second is that the head reader he observed in Hannibal made an indelible impression on his youthful and fertile mind. This intriguing episode from Clemens’s boyhood lay dormant until historian Charles Neider included it in his 1959 volume The Autobiography of 25

Twain, Autobiography, 2010–2015, 2: 335.

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Mark Twain, Including Chapters Now Published for the First Time.26 The episode can also be found in the second volume of the newer, authoritative Mark Twain autobiography from Berkeley, from which many of the quotations in the present book, including what immediately follows, are drawn. Clemens, now late in life and again as Mark Twain, dictated the following lines right after his two sentences about Fowler and Wells, and how their phrenological enterprise had become well known across the nation: One of the most frequent arrivals in our village of Hannibal was the peripatetic phrenologist and he was popular and always welcome. He gathered the people together and gave them a gratis lecture on the marvels of phrenology, then felt their bumps and made an estimate of the result, at twentyfive cents per head. I think the people were almost always satisfied with these translations of their characters – if one may properly use that word in this connection; and indeed the word is right enough, for the estimates really were translations, since they conveyed seeming facts out of apparent simplicities into unsimple technical forms of expression, although as a rule their meanings got left behind on the journey. Phrenology found many a bump on a man’s head and it labeled each bump with a formidable and outlandish name of its own. The phrenologist took delight in mouthing these great names; they gurgled from his lips in an easy and unembarrassed stream, and this exhibition of cultivated facility compelled the envy and admiration of everybody. By and by the people became familiar with these strange names and addicted to the use of them and they batted them back and forth in conversation with deep satisfaction – a satisfaction which could hardly have been more contenting if they had known for certain what the words meant.

He did not stop at this point, having more to say about the visitor, who knew how to milk his audience. It is not at all likely, I think, that the traveling expert ever got any villager’s character quite right, but it is a safe guess that he was always wise enough to furnish his clients character-charts that would compare favorably with George Washington’s. It was a long time ago, and yet I think I still remember that no phrenologist ever came across a skull in our town that fell much short of the [George] Washington standard. This general and close approach to perfection ought to have roused suspicion, perhaps, but I do not remember that it did. It is my impression that the people admired phrenology and believed in it and that the voice of the doubter was not heard in the land.27 26 27

Neider, Twain, 1959, 63–67. Twain, Autobiography, 2010–2015, 2: 335.

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Suspicions? The phrenologist Sam watched in Hannibal furnished his clients with charts showing the strengths of their various mental faculties. Although the men and women of Hannibal believed this practitioner was focusing on cranial features, Clemens’s choice of words in 1906 raises the possibility that he might have been having his doubts. His skepticism might have stemmed partly from his experience with the mesmerizer, if his deceptive trance state had occurred first. But, even if this were not the case, it shows that he had always been a skeptic, even as a teenager. What surprised him the most was that the good people of Hannibal did not seem in the least suspicious of the phrenologist, even though he always provided his paying clients with positive assessments. The visiting phrenologist never seemed to bring up any of his customers’ negative traits: their uncontrollable tempers, inabilities to accept criticism, selfcenteredness, infidelities, propensities for cheating, and the like. Instead, it seemed as if the phrenologist wanted to make everyone feel good, if not great, about themselves. He wanted them to feel as if they really were like George Washington, the leader they held in the highest esteem. Yet not every citizen of Hannibal was above average in intelligence or a model of morality! As Samuel Clemens most certainly knew, the fact of the matter was that Hannibal, like every other town, big or small, east or west, had its share of unsavory characters. Everyone in the town knew people who did not attend church regularly, if at all, and individuals who attended services but were not following the Ten Commandments. In 1845, he had personally witnessed a murder, and he also saw how some townspeople abused their slaves. In one notable incident, a man bashed his slave’s head with a piece of iron ore, killing him. The fact that not everyone the phrenologist catered to in Hannibal could approach, much less meet, the George Washington standard could well have led Sam to wonder what the head reader was really up to at the time. Was he reading heads or just pretending to do so? Did he believe in what he was doing? And on a practical level, was he motivated to deliver glowing reports because he knew this would generate more business? It is important to remember that “Mark Twain” dictated this information a half-century after observing the phrenologist. Hence, one can only speculate about what was going on in his mind in or about 1850. Stated another way, it is impossible to know how his memories might have been colored by subsequent events, some which will be described later in this

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book. Still, it is intriguing to think that the seeds for how he would go on to test what a leading phrenologist was actually attending to could well have been planted along the banks of the muddy Mississippi River at this time. Clemens never identified the name of the phrenologist with good busi­ ness acumen and an impressive vocabulary. But this person could well have been associated with the Fowlers and Wells, maybe even Orson Fowler himself. Orson traveled extensively and did visit small towns in the Midwest at midcentury. In her authoritative study of the Fowlers, Madeline Stern noted that the Fowlers visited Hannibal, although she did not provide dates.28 Examining extant local newspapers also failed to reveal this pertinent information. Until more revealing documentation can be found, historians can only guess at the name of the itinerant phrenologist, along with whether he arrived before or after the mesmerist that Sam had so ably assisted. What is clear is that the Western Union included several pieces about phrenology while Sam was working on the paper. The articles appearing in the family newspaper are important, because they tell us more about what Sam must have known and how phrenology was being presented to the residents of a small town in the middle of the United States. On January 9, 1851, for example, the same year in which there was an “editorial comment” on mesmerism in this paper, there was a lengthier piece under the heading “Abstraction.” It dealt with an essay written by Dr. Robert McIntosh, and it cited Edinburgh phrenologists (almost certainly George and Andrew Combe) on the “organ of Concentrativeness.” Readers were informed that this is the organ that deals with the power to think “steadily on one subject.” Sir Isaac Newton was the prime example. The September 25 and October 2 issues had a considerably lengthier piece, this time extracted from a French newspaper. Bearing the title “More Wonderful Still,” it presented a fictional account of an intrepid balloonist blown off course by a storm. Disembarking on the moon, the man discovered that “the entire social and political organization of this people and empire is dependent on the sciences of Phrenology and Animal Magnetism.” He observed that the moon’s inhabitants were educated in accord with their innate abilities and placed in satisfying jobs, and that the best of all possible leaders was selected from them. The underlying message of what could be achieved through phrenology could not have been more straightforward. On October 7, 1852, the local paper ran yet another piece. This time it was on how Whigs could be distinguished from Democrats by examining their heads. If nothing else, it showed how phrenology had become an 28

Stern, Phrenological Fowlers, 1971, 19.

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integral part of popular culture and even American politics by the middle of the century. In the same year, there were also some advertisements offering head readings and books on the subject. For example, there was a brief notice under the heading “The Phrenological Journal” in the February 3 issue. It informed readers how to subscribe to this periodical, adding, “Mr. Fowlers [sic] has long been distinguished as a phrenologist, and persons can depend upon this as a first-class phrenological work.” Also noteworthy is how Dr. B. H. Washington repeatedly advertised his services as an agent of “Mssrs. Fowlers and Wells” in 1853, this being Sam’s last year in Hannibal.29 The agent informed readers that he would “procure theirs or any other works on accommodating terms” and was now “respectfully soliciting” orders.

A Time to Say Goodbye Orion’s Hannibal Journal never made serious money, and it sometimes made no money at all. Its death knell began to sound late in January 1853, after a fire destroyed its presses, though it was not laid to rest in some potter’s field on that day. Having bought insurance, Orion was able to restart his paper, turning it into a “daily” in the anteroom of the family house on Hill Street. But a cow broke into the house soon after he resumed printing the newspaper, eating some of the rollers and scattering the type. The omens were bad and the chances of reviving the paper became even more uncertain. Being adventurous and realizing his ambitions could not be filled in Hannibal, Sam headed south to St. Louis in May 1853. His departure devastated Orion, who was still hoping to keep his Hannibal newspaper afloat at the time. Orion now decided to leave Hannibal. Unlike his younger brother, he would head north, to Muscatine, Iowa, to try to start another newspaper. Having marketable skills, Sam thought he could support himself by working for a printer in St. Louis, a far larger city on the Mississippi River. St. Louis was then home to about 125,000 people, and it had many printing establishments. He would find printing jobs, and he would use his spare time to read and even copy sections from a popular phrenology book, hoping to learn more about the fad sweeping the nation, as will be revealed in the next chapter. 29

E.g., in the August 4, 1853 issue of the Hannibal Journal.

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chapter 4

The River, the West, and Phrenology Abroad

We hesitated no longer, now but took up our march in its [the overland stagecoach’s] wake, and trotted merrily along, for we had good confidence in the driver’s bump of “locality.” Mark Twain’s Roughing It, 18721

Upon arriving in St. Louis in May 1853, Sam resided with his older sister Pamela and her husband. Work was easy to find, and he was soon setting type for the city’s Evening News and doing odd jobs for various publishers. But wanting to see more of the country, he stayed only until mid-August. He then boarded a train on a recently completed railway line and went to New York City. New York had about 500,000 inhabitants, five major newspapers, and a culture unlike any other at this time. But Sam wanted more than just to experience life in the great metropolis – he was intent on seeing the World’s Fair’s Crystal Palace. He did these things and more, and spent time in a free printer’s library, which held approximately 4,000 books. He supported himself by setting type and doing other jobs to help printers in the city that had become the nation’s publishing capital. That October, Sam packed his few belongings and went farther down the coast, to Philadelphia, where he again found ample typesetting work to cover his expenses. Washington, D.C., followed in February 1855. He then backtracked to Philadelphia and New York, before starting the trip back to St. Louis. He would spend his next few years in St. Louis and in Muscatine and Keokuk, Iowa, where he would find his older brother continuing to struggle with his newspaper and printing ventures.2

1 2

Twain, Roughing It, 1872/1913, 252. Unlike Missouri, Iowa was a “free” (non-slave) state. Muscatine, located about 200 miles north of Hannibal, was home to about 5,000 people in 1853. Orion began publishing the Muscatine Journal during the fall of that year.

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Weaver’s Book and Sam’s Notebook Samuel Clemens seems to have started his first notebook during the late spring or early summer of 1855.3 It is among the fifty of his notebooks that are preserved today. Whether he began it in St. Louis, one possibi­ lity,4 or in Keokuk, where Orion and his wife Mollie had moved from Muscatine that June,5 or while traveling between St. Louis and Keokuk, is unclear. The notebook from this poorly documented period began as a lesson book for learning French. It showed how Sam, now approaching his twentieth birthday, was also learning chess, contemplating religion, helping his family, and pondering an uncertain future. Of greater interest in the present context, and as revealed and analyzed by the Twain historian Alan Gribben,6 is an entry showing he was reading and trying to digest George Sumner Weaver’s Lectures on Mental Science According to the Philosophy of Phrenology. This book was based on Weaver’s lectures in 1851 to the Anthropological Society of the Western Liberal Institute in Marietta, Ohio. Like so many other books on phrenology and its virtues, it was published by Fowlers & Wells Co. Backed by the well-known company and now promoted by Weaver, who could buy copies at half price, its 1852 first run had sold out, resulting in 1854, 1855, and even 1876 printings.7 Weaver’s background is notable.8 He was born in Vermont in 1818, studied law and was admitted to the bar, but found theology and the pulpit more to his liking. He approached phrenology as one way to understand people and their peculiarities better. He had listened to Spurzheim’s lecture in Boston in 1832 and subsequently learned more from phrenologist Nelson Sizer, who had joined Fowler & Wells in 1849 and would long be prominent in the field. With interests in theology and phrenology, Weaver moved to Marietta, where he joined the faculty of the Western Liberal Institute, a churchaffiliated institution. Located in the southeastern part of the state, this 3 4 5

6 7 8

Twain, Notebooks, 1975–1979, v. 1. St. Louis is favored by Gribben (Temperaments, 1972, 51; Literary Resources, 1: 143). MacDonnell and Scharnhorst both suggest that the phrenology in Clemens’s 1855 notebook was penned in Keokuk (MacDonnell, Sweetheart, 2015; Scharnhorst, Mark Twain, 2018–2019, 1: 89). Orion had purchased the Ben Franklin Book and Job Office in Keokuk and offered Sam $5 per week plus boarding for help. Sam spent fifteen months in the town, which only had about 650 people, but was growing rapidly. Gribben, Temperaments, 1972; expanded in Literary Resources, 1: 139–159. Weaver, Mental Science, 1852, 1876. Weaver (1818–1908) published over twelve books. Self-betterment is a recurrent theme. Weaver, Autobiography, 1914/1965; C. Wells, Weaver, 1895; Gribben, Temperaments, 1972.

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institution was run by Weaver’s brother-in-law, whose wife was also on the faculty. Weaver became the third faculty member at the institution, which had an enrollment of about 125 students. He taught “mental and moral science” and enthusiastically incorporated phrenology into his lectures, while also serving as the pastor of Marietta’s Universalist Church. Weaver’s next stop was Galesburg, Illinois, and it was only after spending time there that he became a minister of the Universalist Church in St. Louis. He would maintain this position in the largest Missouri city from 1852 until 1860.9 And here he would continue to promote phrenology as a helpful guide for personal betterment, goodness, and love. His feel-good, pragmatic message resonated through many of his books, not just the one Samuel Clemens obtained and read so intently in 1855. Weaver conveyed the same feel-good message when on the lecture circuit. He even brought it to Hannibal on July 4, 1853. As noted in the Missouri Courier: “Rev. G. S. Weaver of St. Louis, will address the Temple of Honor and Social Degree at Collins’ Grove in the vicinity of Hannibal, on next Monday, the 4th.”10 Since Sam had left the town a little over a month before Weaver’s arrival and did not leave St. Louis for New York until August 19, he was probably still in Missouri at this time. He did not, however, include anything about hearing Weaver in Hannibal, nor for that matter in St. Louis, where he had many more opportunities to meet and listen to him. Weaver opened his Lectures on Mental Science with a “Preliminary Review.” It largely followed the template used by the Fowlers and presented the fundamentals of phrenology, the only real difference being how Weaver frequently referred to a person’s soul. In his second lecture, on “The Organs of the Brain, Brain and Skull,” he argued that there will always be a correspondingly large and strong cerebral organ whenever a particular mental power is strong. This can be discerned by studying the head, since, as he put it, “every man has a chart of his soul on his cranium.” Importantly, and consistent with what the Fowlers were claiming about how the phrenological organs could enlarge and shrink, even in adulthood, he wrote: “Any portion of the brain that is rigidly and strongly put to labour will acquire an increase in size and strength by that labour.” This means of changing brain anatomy and physiology, which correlates with how we 9

10

Weaver moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1860, where he did not have to witness the horrors of slavery. He later served as pastor in Canton, Ohio, and Providence, Rhode Island. He died in Canton in 1908 (for an obituary: Anon., Weaver, 1908). Missouri Courier, June 30, 1853; see Gribben, Temperaments, 1972, 52.

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think and act, he continued, makes phrenology “most eminently practical in balancing, harmonizing, and perfecting our mental natures.”11 In brief, men and women have been granted the ability to improve their character, overcome sinfulness, and become better citizens and more virtuous Christians by “cultivating” the most noble organs of mind. Improving oneself is analogous to building up individual muscles with special exercise programs. Weaver stated that the size of each organ is not the only factor of importance when evaluating a person’s propensities and higher faculties. Temperament, the subject of his third chapter, is another factor that could affect how the various organs of the mind function. Weaver listed four basic temperaments or character types, following George Combe and then the Fowlers, associating them with “the four great systems of the corporeal economy”: bilious (muscular, skeletal), lymphatic (digestive), sanguine (respiratory, circulatory), and nervous. He even included an illustration from one of Combe’s books showing idealized heads of people dominant for each of the four basic temperaments (Figure 4.1).12 Weaver added some details of his own when explaining that a person with a sanguine temperament was “fond of change” and of “avocations that require but little hard labor,” and was “impulsive,” enjoyed “excitement, noise, bluster, fun, frolic, … big crowds,” and made “warm friends and fiery enemies.” He added that this sort of individual was “very sensitive” and “first deeply hurt at a slight,” noting that “the next emotion is violent rage, and in a few moments the cause and the result are both forgotten for the time being.” Further, such a person “often forgives, but never entirely forgets an injury” and “can cry and laugh, swear and pray, in as short a time as it would take some people to think once.” Sam was so intrigued with what Weaver wrote about the temperaments that he copied parts of the work into his 1855 notebook.13 He presented first the “burning, flaming, flashing temperament” associated with “a ready tongue; [that] is quick and sharp of speech” and “passionate appeals,” but which could also be “pathetic and tender.”14 His reason for giving the temperament associated with “hot bloods” first billing, rather than following Weaver and listing it third, is easy to understand. Of the four basic temperaments, the sanguine temperament was the one that best described him! William Dean Howells, who probably knew Samuel Clemens better than any of his later friends and associates, described his hot-headedness this way: 11 12 13 14

Weaver, Mental Science, 1852, 56, also 1876, 32 (italics added). G. Combe, System, 1835; Elements, 1836. Gribben, Temperaments, 1972. Twain, Notebooks, 1975–1979, 1: 21–23.

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Figure 4.1  George Combe’s illustration of the four basic temperaments (Combe, System, 1835).

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The River, the West, and Phrenology Abroad He was generous without stint; he trusted without measure, but where his generosity was abused, or his trust betrayed, he was a fire of vengeance, a consuming flame of suspicion that no sprinkling of cool patience from others could quench; it had to burn itself out. … In his frenzies of resentment or suspicion he would not, and doubtless could not, listen to reason.15

Orion did not share his brother’s sanguine disposition. He had more of a nervous temperament. Sam even wrote his brother’s name in brackets next to what he had copied about the nervous temperament in his notebook. “When this system is strongly predominant,” he scribbled, “it gives the countenance a strong expression of intellectuality, a deep, clear, serene thoughtfulness, a brilliant dawning of mentality.” And in his following sentence: “It generally is shown in light, fragile, active forms; narrow, flat chests; tall stature; large head in proportion to the body, the upper part of the head being the larger.” These people “seek mental pursuits rather than physical.” “It is the temper, which makes geniuses, precocious children, people of purely intellectual habits and tastes” – people whose “feelings are all ardent passions,” such that it can also be considered “the poetic temp.”16 Sam made several changes to what Weaver had presented.17 For example, he added “or gray” (his own eye color) in the place where Weaver had associated blue eyes with the sanguine temperament. He also provided “Notes” when summarizing each temperament. Concerning his own sanguine temperament, he added: Sandy hair; light gray eyes – flash and glitter under excitement . Also, light or red hair, florid or sandy skin; blue eyes; round, full features; ample chest; thick, stout build; sometimes chestnut hair. Quick action, quick speech & quick decision; when under no compulsion, is restless, & will not sit long in one place; constantly casts his eye from one place to another.18

The remainder of Weaver’s book focused on the organs of mind. It included a stylized diagram of the head facing right showing the locations of the different organ groups (Figure 4.2). Sam found this diagram particularly intriguing. He even copied it into his first notebook, though the head he drew faced in the opposite direction. He listed a dozen faculties, briefly describing each one in his notebook in Weaver-like terms. All were related to love. Adhesiveness loves friends; Veneration loves God; Self-Esteem loves self; Conscientiousness loves truth, right, holiness; Hope loves a glorious future 15 16 17 18

Howells, Twain, 1910, 69. Twain, Notebooks, 1975–1979, 1: 28–29 (italics added). Gribben notes this in Temperaments, 1972; Literary Resources, 2019. Twain, Notebooks, 1975–1979, 1: 23.

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Figure 4.2  Weaver’s organ groupings.

Benevolence loves an object of need; Ideality loves beauty; Comparison loves analogies; Wit loves differences, incongruities. Causality loves the relations of cause and effect; Acquisitiveness loves money; Constructiveness loves mechanics; Tune loves music; Man’s whole active nature is expressed by the word Love.19

In a later entry in this notebook, Sam used some of the phrenological terms he had familiarized himself with when describing a young lady from Keokuk, whom he seemed to want to know better.20 He wrote that she had “scarcely enough pride” but overwhelming vanity and an affectionate nature. He viewed her as a passionate and ambitious dreamer. He further mentioned that she had an oblong face, but he did not write how this physical trait correlated with her personality. Nor did he provide any more information about her cranial features. Everything he wrote about character in his first notebook would suggest he thought positively of phrenology at this time in his life. Yet there are no compelling reasons to believe that he was contemplating phrenology as a 19 20

Twain, Notebooks, 1975–1979, 1: 32–33. MacDowell, Sweetheart, 2015.

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career during the 1850s, and numerous reasons to think this was not the case. Most likely, he only wanted to learn more about himself, his calling in the world, and the wide assortment of people he was meeting on and away from the river. For a young man of about twenty, who liked to mingle, play cards, and mix with laborers and outcasts snubbed by polite society, phrenology did seem to have helpful, practical uses. Most importantly, it provided an astute observer and student of human nature with a way to understand oneself and a quick means for assessing another person’s character. In Mark Twain and Human Nature, Tom Quirk emphasized the latter point. He wrote that, for “a young man who meant to fend for himself in the world … one necessarily had to be on the lookout and know how to size up a situation,” and that the “ability to ‘read’ character in the human face was a prudent art, if nothing more.”21 Weaver, as a phrenologically oriented minister, had also written that phrenology “enables us to read character, to study both ourselves and our fellows, to go in, as it were, into the sanctuary of their souls, and sit in meditation there when they know not what we are doing.”22 A point that should not be overlooked is that phrenology also provided ways for portraying people, especially people who behaved oddly, outlandishly, or nonsensically, in rich, lively, and colorful ways. Sam had already started to use phrenological terminology when writing about the attractive young lady from Keokuk in his first notebook. He would continue to use it to color his verbal pictures and in other ways in his letters and most beloved books.

The Observant Riverboat Pilot Samuel Clemens was about 5 feet 8 inches tall and somewhat lanky in his early twenties. He also had sloping shoulders. But he had the stamina to continue to support himself by laboring in the printing business. St. Louis, where he would reside during the mid-1850s, maintained twenty-one newspapers and twelve magazines at this time. Sam joined the newly formed International Typographical Union to make himself more marketable. And in his free time, he made his way to the city’s libraries, where he read for more than just enjoyment. Reading good material, he knew, would help him increase his vocabulary, teach him more about good writing, and expand his knowledge of the world. Based on what he had found in Weaver’s book, reading the right books could also improve character. Nonetheless, he was now forced to make some crucial decisions. One had to do with whether he should remain in St. Louis, return to Hannibal, 21 22

Quirk, Human Nature, 2007. Weaver, Mental Science, 1876, 28.

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Figure 4.3  Samuel Clemens asking Horace Bixby to teach him the river (from Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, 1883).

go back to Iowa, head to a larger city on the East Coast, or set out for some other part of the country. Another was whether he should remain in the printing trade, which paid the bills but left much to be desired for someone who enjoyed the great outdoors and had dreamed about adventuring on the mighty Mississippi River since childhood. He briefly thought about becoming a preacher, which would have pleased his mother. But he waxed and waned when it came to organized religion. Later in life, he would reflect on how he lacked true religion, being bothered by the observation that, while there might be a God for the rich, there did not seem to be one for the underclasses – no God willing to tend to the sick poor. Preaching, he now recognized, was not the profession for him. But what would satisfy his restless soul? In 1856, he began to fixate on going to South America to start a business using coca leaves collected from jungles in the Amazon. He had learned that the powder derived from these leaves had miraculous properties. Just a pinch could provide a perceptible boost. Among other things, the leaves were known to give laborers trekking up and down steep mountain paths in South America needed stamina. Sam’s wonder powder, as might be guessed, was cocaine. While on a steamboat from Cincinnati to New Orleans, where he had been planning to depart for Brazil, Sam befriended the pilot, Horace Bixby, a clean-cut man then nursing a sore foot. Bixby asked him if he would like to learn a little about the river (Figure 4.3). When Sam said that he would, Bixby allowed him to take the wheel in the pilothouse on the

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Figure 4.4  Bixby offered Clemens the wheel of the Paul Jones in 1857. The City of Baton Rouge, shown here, was one of the steamboats Bixby piloted at a later time. Clemens joined Bixby on this classic sidewheeler after going downriver to New Orleans, and he took it back to St. Louis in 1882. He was then gathering material for his travelogue, Life on the Mississippi.

hurricane deck, while he sat down to nurse his foot.23 Sam now abandoned his plans to head to South America, finding piloting much more to his liking. Bixby was impressed with how much the young man enjoyed piloting one of the steamboats going up and down the Mississippi River (Figure 4.4). He also recognized how Sam loved the ever-changing river, his enthusiasm, how quickly he could learn, and his ability to retain what he was being taught. These were important qualities, and they led the experienced pilot to encourage the attentive young man at the wheel to join the fraternity. When the boat docked in New Orleans more than a week later, Sam was certain he had found his true calling. Being a pilot was even more prestigious than being a captain, a position with a higher rank but one that did not require as much skill. True, the work was dangerous, but it was also immensely satisfying and lucrative. As he would later write, “even in 23

The hurricane deck was also called the texas deck. For more on steamboats going up and down the Mississippi River and its tributaries, see Hunter, Steamboats, 1949.

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those days of trivial wages,” a pilot “had a princely salary – from a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars a month, and no board to pay.”24 Sam would start as a “cub pilot,” with Bixby personally teaching him how to navigate the river with its many dangers, including submerged tree stumps, sandbars, and wrecks. His training would extend over two years and cost $500. What he could not pay Bixby up-front he could pay after he had completed his apprenticeship. Agreeing to these terms, Sam boarded the Paul Jones on April 30, 1857, joining Bixby for the trip back up the Mississippi River. Upon disembarking in St. Louis, he borrowed $100 from his sister Pamela’s husband, William Moffett, and handed Bixby his initial payment. The pilot and his new cub pilot then made a 700-mile trip back down the muddy river to New Orleans, with Bixby pointing out the nuances of the river and encouraging his student to commit every channel and even the smallest landmark to memory. Sam would base his semi-autobiographical novel Life on the Mississippi on what he learned transporting cargo (cotton, cattle, machinery, grains) and, less lucratively, people (businessmen, farmers, slaves, gamblers, prostitutes) on the river.25 He would explain how he was attentive to every marker along the river, to the idiosyncrasies of the people coming on the boat, and to the inhabitants of the cities and towns where it docked, in this widely admired book. He would also state how “I am to this day profiting somewhat by that experience; for in that brief, sharp schooling, I got personally and familiarly acquainted with about all the different types of human nature that can be found in fiction, biography, or history.” And here he added: “When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before – known him on the river.”26 Nonetheless, he did not seem to be thinking about writing a mixed travel, adventure, and personal history book while he was a cub pilot. His Life on the Mississippi, with its notable phrenologically based character descriptions, would come considerably later, after he returned to the river as a famous author wanting to refresh his memory and collect more information for this book, which would not be published until 1883. In 1857,

24 25 26

Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883/2012, 60. Kruse, Twain and Life, 1981. Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883/2012, 144.

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he just wanted to take the wheel, learn the river, earn a nice living, and impress others with his dream job. Showing himself able to navigate his boats safely, Sam received his pilot license on September 9, 1858. It is estimated that he then made about 120 trips up and down the river on as many as twenty different steamboats. He would have been happy to continue piloting boats on the great river that ran from Minnesota to Louisiana. But the onset of the American Civil War, which had erupted on April 12, 1861, changed everything. Some of the southern states that formed the Confederacy had borders on the Mississippi River, which was closed to traffic when the fighting spread.27 Sam’s boat, the Nebraska, was the last to make its way upriver past a Union blockade at Memphis in May 1861, after being shelled.28 The question he now faced was what to do until the fighting ended and he could get back on the river.

The Stagecoach to Nevada Samuel Clemens, now in his mid-twenties, knew he could stand on his own two feet and accept challenges, even dangerous ones, as his piloting revealed. But he was also impulsive and that June, with the river closed, he joined an irregular Confederate militia in Missouri. The group was called the Ralls County Rangers though Twain called his unit the “Marion Rangers.” Within two weeks, and upon learning that Union troops were heading in his direction, he realized that he was probably in mortal danger. He also recognized that he had no stomach for the military life and had little understanding of what each side hoped to achieve in the war. Wishing to live a long life, he chose to desert his unit. He felt lucky to be able to flee with his body parts still intact, as Ulysses S. Grant was approaching with well-armed soldiers determined to crush small rebel bands in the region, such as his Rangers.29 27

28

29

Sam’s own state, Missouri, remained a slave state until the Civil War ended. Nonetheless, in contrast to its southern neighbors, it did not join the Confederacy. There would be three times as many Missourians fighting with the Union Army than with the Confederacy during the Civil War. Sam’s experiences on the river were not always idyllic. He was haunted to his dying day by how his brother Henry, then nineteen years old, lost his life on the Mississippi __ a tragedy for which he took the blame. The event occurred shortly after he had helped Henry secure a position as a “mud clerk” responsible for checking freight at stops on a sidewheeler Sam had previously piloted. Sam’s own boat was two days behind Henry’s when the Pennsylvania’s boilers exploded near Memphis. He was at his younger brother’s side when he died on June 21, 1858 (see Powers, Mark Twain, 2006; Dangerous Water, 2001). Ulysses S. Grant was a colonel in the Union Army at the time.

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With his skin still free of bullet holes, Sam now decided to join Orion, who was preparing to head west as Secretary for the Nevada Territory – a “thank you” for campaigning for President Abraham Lincoln, who signed the official document. Nevada was then a desolate, barren land where fortunes were not yet being made in all-night casinos, although considerable money was being won and lost in straight and crooked card games in its hotels and saloons, and pretty much anywhere else men could congregate. For most people heading to the territory, however, its allure lay not in the card games but in the ground. Vast fortunes were being made every day by men with the muscles to scrape, dig, or blast for silver and gold, with the means to hire others to do the back-breaking work for them, or with the resources and acumen to purchase stock in the right ventures. Sam thought he could help Orion and make enough money to support himself by working for local Nevada newspapers. He also visualized himself wielding a pick and shovel and trying to “strike it rich” on his own. Thinking the war would probably be short, he did not head west envisioning an extended stay. Having saved some money from working as a riverboat pilot, he paid for the boat that took him and Orion from St. Louis to St. Joseph, Missouri. St. Joseph was in the northwest part of his home state, with the new state of Kansas just across the Missouri River. After disembarking, he paid the $150 per person fee for himself and his brother for the overland stagecoach to Nevada, which could be pulled by sixteen horses, or by mules when needed. The stagecoach left St. Joseph on July 26, 1861, with no guarantees – the route was known to be long and dangerous, with robbers, hostile natives, breakdowns, and the weather being potential impediments. In the first half of Roughing It, which was published in 1872, he described their arduous 1700-mile, nineteen-day journey in memorable and sometimes exaggerated ways.30 In one part of this book, he described how sighting another stagecoach helped the worried passengers overcome their feelings of being lost forever in the middle of nowhere. And it is here that Samuel Clemens, now writing under the penname of Mark Twain, employed some of what he had learned about phrenology from Weaver’s book and other sources. “We hesitated no longer, now,” he wrote, “but took up our march in its wake, and trotted merrily along, for we had good confidence in the driver’s bump of ‘locality.’”31 30 31

Its provisional title had been Innocents at Home. Twain, Roughing It, 1872/1913, 252 (italics added).

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As noted by Alan Gribben,32 George Weaver had, in fact, described the organ of locality as “the pilot-general of the traveler … the faculty that never gets lost.” With its location toward the front of the brain, as supposedly evidenced by a bump in the forehead in people with an abundance of this trait, phrenologists considered it one of the higher organs of mind. Of course, there are endless stories of dogs, horses, and other animals traveling long distances to return to their owners. But what distinguishes humans from other animals is how we can use our intellect to think, choose, and reason about how best to approach and navigate challenging landscapes. The stagecoach driver was blessed in this regard, his excellent sense of locality being among the reasons he was chosen for this challenging job. Sam might have recognized that he too was blessed with a large, physiologically active organ for the sense of locality. After all, this was an essential ingredient for being a successful riverboat pilot. Horace Bixby, another person with an exceptional sense of locality, must have noticed Sam’s exceptionality in this domain right away. Whether Bixby embraced phrenology and the idea that there is a localizable brain organ for this trait is, however, unclear.

Letters from Nevada Thanks to the stagecoach driver and his strong faculty of locality, Sam and Orion reached Carson City, the town named after army scout Kit Carson, on August 14. They did not encounter hostile natives or have disastrous wagon breakdowns in the middle of the Great Plains, though they did encounter a notorious murderer, who caused them no harm. What they saw when they stepped off the stagecoach in Carson City was a far cry from the cattle ranching town founded there three years earlier. Because gold and silver had been discovered about twenty miles away on a slope falsely claimed by Henry Comstock, Virginia City had come into being and nearby Carson City, where the legislature now met, saw its own population explode to about 2,000 people. Both Virginia City and Carson City played important roles in Nevada’s own version of the spectacular 1849 California Gold Rush. As expressed by Sam in a letter written during the fall of 1861 to his mother: “The country is fabulously rich in gold, silver, copper, lead, coal, iron, quicksilver, marble, granite, chalk, plaster of Paris (gypsum),” to which he added, with 32

Gribben, Temperaments, 1972, 57; Weaver, Mental Science, 1852, 2: 191.

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his wry sense of humor, “thieves, cuyotès (pronounced ki-yo-ties), poets, preachers, and jackass rabbits.”33 On February 8, 1862, he wrote another letter to his mother and a sister, Pamela, telling them not to worry about his safety. He also wanted to raise their hopes about seeing him back home before long. But then he paused, dutifully reminding them of his history of high hopes and repeated failures. And here he brought up something else he had learned by reading Weaver. Above and beyond having a sanguine temperament, he also possessed an overly developed organ for Hope. As he asked his mother and sister: Don’t you know that people who always feel jolly, no matter where they are or what happens to them – who have the organ of Hope preposterously developed – who are endowed with an uncongealable sanguine temperament – who never feel concern about the price of corn – and who cannot, by any possibility, discover any but the bright side of a picture, – are very apt to go to extremes, and exaggerate, with 40-horse microscopic power?34

In this same letter, he remarked that “if the Devil were set at liberty and told to confine himself to Nevada Territory, he would come here and look sadly around awhile, and then get homesick and go back to hell again.” He did not, however, go on to evaluate the Devil’s skull phrenologically. A few days earlier, he began to sign some of his letters “Mark Twain.” “Twain” was a familiar term to people working on the river during the steamboat era. It signified a safe depth of two fathoms, meaning 12 feet (3.7 meters). Sam knew precisely what “mark twain” meant when a crewmember assigned to plumb the river shouted these two words to the pilot. It was the most welcome sound a riverboat pilot could hear on dark, stormy, and foreboding nights, when there was little light and a need to judge the depth of a channel before continuing forward. “Mark Twain” was Sam’s latest entry on his list of pennames. He also wrote under “Rambler,” “W. Epaminondas,” “Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass,” and “Josh.” The newcomer to his list debuted with his “Letter from Carson” of February 3, 1863. He was twenty-eight at the time and knew that he was not being original when he signed this letter “Mark Twain” and handed it to the editor of the Enterprise, a local newspaper, for printing.35

33 34 35

Paine, Mark Twain, 1917, 1: 54. Twain, Letters, 1988–2002, 1: 157. Fatout, Nom de plume, 1962.

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Sam had pilfered the name from Isaiah Sellers, a steamboat pilot with a sterling reputation for knowing the Mississippi River inside out. Sellers was also a journalist for New Orleans newspapers. Sam had previously parodied him in an 1859 piece in the New Orleans Crescent. He had signed that bit of journalism with yet another pen name, “Sergeant Fathom.” Sellers was not amused. After reflecting on what he had done, Sam deeply regretted hurting a member of the usually tight riverboat cabal so thoughtlessly. Now, with the passage of time, he justified usurping Seller’s penname. He did not do this by asking Sellers for permission or by working with a lawyer to find a legal way to pilfer it. Instead, he did so in a way befitting the image he was creating for his alter ego, writing: Mark Twain was the nom de plume of one Captain Isaiah Sellers, who used to write river news over it for the New Orleans Picayune. He died in 1869 and as he could no longer need that signature, I laid violent hands upon it without asking permission of the proprietor’s remains. That is the history of the nom de plume I bear.36

Thus, “Mark Twain” came into being. This would now be the name he would use for his books and articles, and when lecturing. In the words of the Twain historian Tom Quirk: “‘Mark Twain’ was Samuel Clemens’s most impressive creation.” Moreover, “So compelling was this living character that, later in his life, Clemens would object to the common misapprehension that he was ‘Mark Twain,’ and nothing more.”37 Family members and most friends would continue to call him “Sam,” though his future wife would sometimes call him “Youth,” and in business he was almost always addressed respectfully as “Mr. Clemens.” Bearing this in mind, “Mark Twain” will be used on the pages that follow when Samuel Langhorne Clemens wrote under that name, chose to use it in lectures or elsewhere, or was being addressed with it. In other instances, he will be addressed as Sam, Samuel, and (Mr.) Clemens, the names he went by before adopting his widely recognized pen name. Sam nearly became wealthy in Nevada and neighboring California, not as a writer of short newspaper pieces but as a prospector. But fate, bad luck, and poor decision making always seemed to block his path to riches. Most notably, he and a partner tried their hands at prospecting and actually 36

37

Letter from 1877; see Fatout, Nom de plume, 1962, 1. He would provide the same history in jovial ways in his Life on the Mississippi and in an autobiographical dictation. The alternative idea that this term originated with his running bar tab at a saloon in Virginia City, Nevada, has received minimal support. For more on Twain in Virginia City, see Fatout, Virginia City, 1960a. Quirk, Human Nature, 2007, 49.

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discovered a parcel of land rich in gold. All they had to do was erect a shack and get their plot registered to make it theirs and exploit its riches. But Sam set off to help a sick friend while his partner in the venture was also away. Consequently, the requisite papers were not filed quickly enough, allowing another prospector to claim the land and reap the fortune that should have been theirs. With blistered hands, little money in his pocket, no desire to continue writing for a local newspaper, and his insatiable wanderlust – and after nearly getting himself killed in a duel because of what he had written – Samuel Clemens departed Nevada and headed farther west into California.

Of California’s Frogs and Phrenology Mark Twain would include several of his more memorable adventures in California in Roughing It. And it would be in California that he would come forth with his breakthrough literary piece, Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog. This tall tale was first published in the New York Saturday Press on November 18, 1865.38 He now reworked the story, which was already circulating throughout the country. His revision appeared as an essay in his first book, a collection called The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches, published in 1867. As now presented by Mark Twain, Jim Smiley was the owner of a wonder frog named Dan’l Webster. He resided in California’s hill country, and the year was 1849, the year of the Gold Rush. Jim would bet on just about anything, and while at the Angels Camp Hotel he boasted that his frog could out-jump any other frog in the region. A stranger doubted him and wagered $40, provided Jim could catch a frog for him to challenge Dan’l Webster. While Jim searched for a challenger, the stranger opened Dan’l Webster’s mouth and filled his stomach with quail shot. Now having the weight of “an anvil,” the unbeatable Dan’l Webster was easily beaten. Jim Smiley dutifully paid the stranger the money he was owed. After the wily stranger departed, Jim picked up his frog and realized how he had been tricked.39 The frog story did not have any phrenology in it. But it heralded Mark Twain’s start as an important literary figure – a man whose voice was new and distinctly American, and one that would draw audiences near and far.

38 39

For Twain’s story-telling and wry sense of humor: Wonham, Tall Tale, 1993; Lynn, Southwestern Humor, 1959; Cox, Fate of Humor, 1966. There are several collections of Mark Twain letters, starting with Morse, Letters, 1896 (also 1939) and Paine, Letters, 1917. The most complete is the six-volume collection from Berkeley: Twain, Mark Twain’s Letters, 1988–2002.

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Encouraged, Sam continued to support himself in California with more freelance writing. While in San Francisco, he befriended Charles Farrar Browne, better known as Artemus Ward, a humorist about the same age. Ward wrote and edited funny stories, and made a good deal of money telling them to paying audiences. He encouraged Sam to think about lecturing in halls and auditoriums. He also met Bret Harte, whose fame rested on the short stories he was writing about the miners, gamblers, and business people in the California hill country at the start of the Gold Rush, most notably The Luck of Roaring Camp and The Outcasts of Poker Flat. Harte, then writing for the Californian and the Golden Era, helped Sam with his writing career, starting with several pieces for the Californian.40 Frederick Coombs was another notable individual Sam had the opportunity to meet in San Francisco, and he was also a writer. Unlike Ward and Hart, he was not only using phrenology as a source of income, but had been doing so for a long time. In 1841, he published a book on the subject titled Popular Phrenology.41 And in 1860, he opened a phrenology establishment in the City by the Bay.42 Sam had maintained his early interest in phrenology and might have gone to meet Coombs for this reason. Nonetheless, he did not depart San Francisco with a glowing opinion of Coombs. Moreover, he found no reason to change how he felt about him when the two men crossed paths again in 1868, this time on the opposite coast, in Washington, D.C. Writing as Mark Twain, Sam published a letter in the Daily Alta California, a Sacramento newspaper, shortly after meeting Coombs in the nation’s capital. He expressed his contempt for “Uncle Freddy Coombs,” stating the “old humbug still infests the Eastern cities.” In the same letter, he also took aim at Ulysses S. Grant. This was a year before the victorious and revered (in the North) Civil War general was sworn in as the eighteenth President of the United States. It was also before Clemens and Grant became good friends, and before Clemens successfully published Grant’s autobiography while the great man was dying in New York. But this was in 1868, and at this time, he had a low opinion of Grant, the army officer who had been out to kill him in Missouri and was now a politician, a whitecollar job he associated with corruption. Twain described him in disparaging 40

41 42

The two writers later teamed up to worked on several projects. Harte even moved into the Clemens home in Hartford for a while. But Harte became a drunkard and Sam increasing viewed him as his major competitor on his climb to the top, derailing their once-friendly relationship. Coombs, Popular Phrenology, 1841. Cowan, Bancroft, and Ballou, San Francisco, 1964, 4–7.

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terms, using phrenology to emphasize what he thought of him. He stated that his “head is large, square in front and perpendicular in the rear.” He even explained that the rear is “where the selfish organs of the head lie.”43 Twain also began to use phrenology in his literary pieces at this time. His first such work might have been Jul’us Caesar, a short sketch he did not date or submit as a final draft to a publisher. This early satirical work appeared to be based on a young man named Pet McMurray, whom he had known in Hannibal.44 McMurray was a journeyman printer, and had worked alongside Sam when he had been apprenticed to Joseph Ament. He frequently used the Roman Emperor’s name as an exclamation, much as others would say “my gosh.” In the story, the narrator met this less-than-noble Jul’us Caesar in a Philadelphia boardinghouse. He had a “lymphatic” personality and a “very thick heavy build; long fiery red hair, and large, round, coarse face, which looked like the full moon in the last stage of smallpox.” As for this Caesar’s skull features, propensities, and intellect, Twain wrote that he was “a phrenological curiosity.” Going into greater detail, he explained that “his head was one vast lump of Approbativeness; and though he was as ignorant and as void of intellect as a Hottentot,45 yet the great leveller and equalizer, Self-Conceit made him believe himself fully as talented, learned and handsome as it is possible for a human being to be.”46 The editors of the Sacramento Union, highly impressed with Twain’s frog story, wanted him to provide their paper with twenty or more short and humorous pieces about the sights and people on the Sandwich Islands (later Hawaii).47 It might have seemed like a gift at the time – a free trip plus a good salary to explore places that seemed like paradise in exchange for some easily written letters. What Mark Twain described in these letters exceeded expectations and provided the material he needed for his first public lectures. His well-publicized talks started in Maguire’s Academy of Music, an opera house in downtown San Francisco. And with his signature humor, he knew just how to advertise these lectures: 43 44 45

46 47

Gribben, Library, 2: 1980, 751. Gribben, Temperaments, 1972, 55. Clemens’s works are laced with terms, phrases, and connotations that could be judged racist and unacceptable today. In many ways, he was a man of his times and his writings on “savages,” people of color, etc., should be put in historical context to understand his real positions on matters of race. For scientific attitudes on phrenology and race in pre-Civil War America, see Stanton, Leopard’s Spots, 1960; for a recent monograph with insights on phrenology and race, see Poskett, Materials of Mind, 2019. Twain, Early Tales, 1979, 1: 111–117. Chapters 62–78 of Roughing It cover the Sandwich Islands.

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A SPLENDID ORCHESTRA is in town but has not been engaged

ALSO

A DEN OF FEROCIOUS WILD BEASTS will be on exhibit on the next block MAGNIFICENT FIREWORKS were in contemplation for the occasion, but the idea has been abandoned A GRAND TORCHLIGHT PROCESSION may be expected; in fact, the public are privileged to expect what they please. Dress Circle $1.00 Family Circle, 50c.

Doors open at 7 o’clock. The Trouble to begin at 8 o’clock.

As Artemus Ward had predicted, and as Bret Harte dutifully noted in his newspaper reviews, Twain’s early lectures were received with sustained applause. They also made him considerable money, which he needed. Clemens continued to make notebook entries while in the west, some related to phrenology. For example, in Notebook 4 from 1865, when writing about mining, he penned: “An expert can tell no more about what kind of rock is underneath the croppings on the surface here than he can tell the quality of a man’s brain by the style & material of the hat he wears.” And in 1866, while returning by ship from California to New York, he included an entry in Notebook 7 that reads: “Kingdom’s fellow who went on stage & examined prof’s head & said it was the first time he ever saw such a peculiar head – ever saw ignorance & pusillanimousness so remarkably combined – prettiest fight there in about a minute you ever saw.”48 A year later, he composed a fictitious piece in the form of a funny letter, signing it “Mrs. Zeb Leavenworth.” His fictional feisty lady was fighting for women’s suffrage and wanted Twain’s scalp. “If I get my hands on that whelp,” she (he) wrote, “I will snatch hair out of his head till he is as bald as a phrenological bust!”49 The reference, of course, was to the table-top pieces showing a man’s head marked with the territories of the underlying phrenological organs. Sold in great numbers by Fowler and Wells, these porcelain busts were more than familiar to Twain’s readers.

Europe and the Middle East Aware of his successes with the Sacramento Union, the editors of the Alta California, the region’s largest newspaper, wanted Clemens to do more of what he had just done on the Sandwich Islands, but this time while touring Europe and the Middle East. They agreed to pay his ship and land excursion expenses in exchange for a series of Mark Twain travelogues. 48 49

Gribben, Library, 1980, 2: 750–751. For all three quotations: Gribben, Library, 1980, 2: 750–751.

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Figure 4.5  The Quaker City.

The ship he would now board was very different from the one captained by Edgar (“Ned”) Wakeman, which had taken him back to New York.50 He would now travel across the Atlantic on a pleasure ship – a twomasted sidewheeler christened the Quaker City (Figure 4.5) that could do about 10 knots per hour using steam and auxiliary sails. A few years earlier, the Quaker City had been employed as a Union gunship. But after being decommissioned, she was refitted with an emphasis on comfort, and her uniformed soldiers were replaced with a crew trained to cater to the wants and needs of society’s upper crust. Almost all Sam’s fellow passengers were respectable, wealthy, non-­ gambling, non-drinking people, who attended church regularly and immersed themselves in the Bible. The trip was organized and promoted by Reverend Henry Ward Beecher of Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church, who had attended Amhurst College with the Fowlers and was also intrigued by 50

Because there had been an outbreak of deadly cholera on board this boat, the surviving passengers, including Clemens, were relieved when it finally made its way into New York’s harbor. Captain Wakefield, admired by Clemens, would become Ned Blakely in Mark Twain’s Roughing It and the title character in Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.

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phrenology. “All my life long,” Beecher would write, “I have been in the habit of using phrenology” and “I regard it as far more useful, practical, and sensible than any other system of mental philosophy which has yet been evolved.”51 Beecher’s devout followers were less interested in phrenology as a system of mental philosophy than in walking in the footsteps of Jesus – so much so that they paid $1,250 for the voyage and another $500 for land travel, huge sums at the time. Beecher and Union General William Tecumseh Sherman were supposed to join the group. With apologies, they opted out just before the ship departed. This left the man widely known as Mark Twain as the only real celebrity on the ship that departed New York on June 8, 1867. The ship’s only celebrity was also the most conspicuous misfit in how he dressed, spoke, and acted. As told by Twain, he had even signed the papers for the cruise professing to be a Baptist minister while smelling of whiskey. The less-than-respectable outlier did, however, find a kindred spirit in a fellow passenger, Dan Slote. He described Slote as “a splendid, immoral, tobacco-smoking, wine-drinking, godless roommate who is as good and true and right-minded a man as ever lived.”52 Twain sent more than fifty letters to the Alta California, six to New York’s Tribune, and three to New York’s Herald, covering the ship’s stops in the Azores, Morocco, France, Italy, Greece, the Crimea, Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and other ports of call. His letters and notes would provide the material for The Innocents Abroad, a new sort of travel book based on personal experiences, regional history, and the ability to take even a boring incident and weave it into a funny story. Not only would he describe the Middle East as a dangerous, bandit-infested, intolerably hot, and altogether miserable place, but when it came to the Holy Land, the very place the ship’s pilgrims most wanted to see, he would write irreverently, “Christ had been here once, he will never come again!” The Innocents Abroad was published in 1869.53 Twain employed his knowledge of phrenology in several parts of his unique travelogue, which received excellent reviews and was an immediate bestseller. In one place, he used it to poke fun at one of his own shortcomings. This was his irreverence, which he displayed often, most notably when commenting on the Christian martyrs depicted in Italian works of art. He promised his fellow passengers that he would show more respect in the future. “But alas!” he lamented, “I could never keep a promise.” 51 52 53

Knox, Beecher, 1887, 466. Paine, Mark Twain, 1912, 1: 320. Hill, Elisha Bliss, 1964, esp. 1–20. This book was first sold as a “subscription book” by commissioned salesmen who knew how to get a foot in a door to prevent it from being slammed shut, rather than in bookstores.

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He explained that “the fault must lie in my physical organization.” Gall, Spurzheim, and their followers frequently used “physical organization” to signify the organs of the mind. Every phrenologist knew that successfully overriding one’s physical organization was extremely difficult, if not impossible. Tongue-in-cheek, Twain pointed out how he possessed a large organ “which enables me to make promises,” while “the organ which should enable me to keep them was crowded out.” He even boasted in jest about having a physical organization that often got him in trouble, stating: “I had rather have one faculty nobly developed than two faculties of mere ordinary capacity.”54 He did not name the phrenological organs usually associated with making and keeping promises in this chapter, but Alan Gribben tried to identify them, writing: “The narrator’s facetious excuse denotes that an excessively developed organ of Hope has taken over the contiguous cranial position of his Conscientiousness. George Combe stated that people in whom Hope is magnified ‘promise largely, but rarely perform’; likewise, those in whom Conscientiousness is deficient suffer a loss of ‘the sentiment of obligation, duty, incumbency, right and wrong.’”55 Twain also drew on phrenology when describing sites in Egypt. He and the pilgrims were taken to see Giza’s great pyramids and Sphinx. When describing the site, he explained how he imagined the mysterious “Sphynx” (his spelling) to have “an attribute of man – of a faculty of his heart and brain … MEMORY – RETROSPECTION – wrought into visible, tangible form.”56

Back on the East Coast The Quaker City returned to New York City on November 19, 1867. There is nothing in the Mark Twain letters or the book based on these letters to hint that he was rejecting any part of phrenology at this time. Rather, what he wrote shows that he was still using what he had read in Weaver’s book and had learned elsewhere about character. He also seemed to enjoy employing phrenology’s descriptive words and phrases, because they gave his verbal portraits more color, in some instances even making his characters absurd, though in funny ways. And he did not shy from more phrenological self-deprecation, which he did masterfully, mixing what he knew about phrenology with his signature humor. 54 55 56

Twain, Innocents Abroad, 1869/2003, 169. Gribben, Temperaments, 1972, 56; Literary Resources, 1, 2019: 147. Twain, Innocents Abroad, 1869/2003, 473.

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Clemens was, in fact, continuing to learn more about phrenology and to find uses for it through the 1860s. When Samuel Well’s newest book on phrenology and marriage came out in 1869,57 he obtained a copy and complained that it was filled with platitudes and advice, being devoid of order or reason. He was kinder to the phrenologists in his 1868 copy of Thackeray’s Lectures. The famed British author William Thackeray mentioned how Jonathan Swift’s skull had been unearthed in 1835. Because it did not seem like the skull of a genius, it disappointed the phrenologists examining it. Clemens took this occasion to defend the phrenologists, writing: “Possibly it was some poor parish idiot’s skull they got instead.”58 Whether he meant by accident or as part of a trick was not mentioned. A day after disembarking in New York, Clemens headed to Washington, D.C., to start a short-lived job as a secretary to William Morris Stewart, a Senator from Nevada. He returned to New York for Christmas, not finding serving as another man’s private secretary or Washington politics to his liking. Back in New York, he met up with Charles Langdon, a young shipmate from the Quaker City. “Charley” was staying at the St. Nicholas Hotel with his parents and his sister Olivia, the woman Sam had been fantasizing about ever since he had seen a picture of her while in the Bay of Smyrna (Turkey). The Langdons were a wealthy and cultured family from Elmira, New York, and staunch abolitionists.59 They nonetheless welcomed Sam and invited him to hear Charles Dickens read parts of David Copperfield that evening. After managing to spend some time with Olivia, he decided he wanted to marry her. The challenge he faced was to convince her and her family that he could and would mend his uncouth ways. With this objective in mind, he began courting “Livy,” the shortened name he preferred for her. Finding she was an avid reader,60 he even asked her to help him sanitize his writings to make them (and him) more acceptable for polite society. One of their projects was The Innocents Abroad, which he had previously been thinking of calling The New Pilgrim’s Progress, adding “New” to the title of John Bunyan’s bestseller from 1678. S. Wells, Wedlock, 1869. Taylor, Thackery’s Swift, 1935, 33. William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863), born in India, was a leading nineteenth-century British novelist and journalist. He is best remembered for Vanity Fair, published in 1848. Irishman Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) wrote many memorable books, shorter pieces, and poems, including Gulliver’s Travels in 1726. Swift was also Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in London, hence “Dean Swift.” 59 Frederick Douglas, later a distinguished author and abolitionist, was among the runaway slaves the Langdons helped escape through a network of safe houses and other hideouts known as the “Underground Railroad.” 60 Livy kept a commonplace book in which she copied passages from her favorite authors, including Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and, as will be seen, Oliver Wendell Holmes. 57 58

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Needing money, he returned to the lecture circuit, where he was able to collect $100 per appearance.61 His earnings were sufficient to support himself and also to buy a one-third interest in the Buffalo Express. With his drinking and cursing temporarily controlled and his finances looking up, and with Jervis Langdon’s blessings, the couple married in Elmira, New York, in 1870. They then moved into a home in Buffalo, one part of a generous wedding gift from Livy’s parents. Jervis died that summer, leaving Livy $300,000 and her married sister, Susan Crane, a beautiful property on a hill overlooking the city of Elmira. The Cranes would call their newly acquired property “Quarry Farm.” It would become Sam and Livy’s summer getaway for years to come – a place where Sam would have a separate, tailor-made study. Here, surrounded by beautiful scenery, he would ponder new projects and work on some of his most admired books, with phrenology finding a place in some of his projects. Livy gave birth to their first child, Langdon, in 1870. He was a premature infant and not expected to survive. Livy’s own health was not robust, and she was lucky to survive a bout of typhoid in 1871. During her convalescence, the couple began talking about leaving Buffalo for Hartford, a then-thriving city of about 50,000 people in central Connecticut. It had become a magnet for writers and publishers, being close to New York City and Boston, two centers of America’s flourishing publishing industry. After the parents of one of Livy’s friends offered to lease their spacious Hartford house to them, they moved to the Nook Farm section of the city that October. Just before their move, Sam had been close to completing Roughing It and was brooding over his belief that “the most celebrated man [author] in America today, the man whose name is on every single tongue from one end of the continent to the other,” was not Mark Twain.62 Rather, it was Bret Harte, who was now living in New England and publishing in one of the country’s most prestigious periodicals, The Atlantic Monthly. But, unlike Harte’s star, which would continue to fall, arguably because of his alcoholism, Sam’s own star would continue its ascent on the East Coast. But before turning to the phrenology in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the book considered its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the novels that would secure Mark Twain’s reputation as “the most celebrated man in America today,” it is essential to examine why he would pivot and assail the head readers in these two masterpieces of American literature. 61 62

Lorch, Lecture Tours, 1968; Fatout, Twain Speaking, 1976. Letter from March 1871 to the newspaperman and adventurist James Henry Riley.

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Mark Twain’s “Small Test”

However, he found a cavity, in one place; a cavity where a bump would have been in anybody’s else’s skull. … He startled me by saying that that cavity represented the total absence of the sense of humor! Twain on his head reading (ca. 1872) with L. Fowler1

Young Sam Clemens was an acute observer of the people in Hannibal and the happenings taking place there. Based on what he dictated in 1906 about his childhood, he noticed how the itinerant phrenologist had a way of making his customers feel as if they were a George Washington, which was absurd. Yet, as we have seen, the citizens of the Missouri town did not seem in the least suspicious of their always-wonderful head readings. As he later dictated, “It is my impression that the people admired phrenology and believed in it and that the voice of the doubter was not heard in the land.”2 It is hard to know exactly what was going through the boy’s head while watching the visiting phrenologist ply his trade. But he obviously thought it worthwhile to learn more about the skull-based doctrine that seemed to have various uses. Hence, he read George Sumner Weaver’s Lectures on Mental Science in 1855 and remained aware of what was being written for and against phrenology after this time. In particular, and as will be seen in Chapter 11, what American physician and author Oliver Wendell Holmes had written in the Atlantic Monthly in 1859 about phrenology being a pseudoscience might have made him pause and think more deeply about the head readers and their deceptions. Nonetheless, Sam never revealed his feelings about phrenology or its purveyors while working as a steamboat pilot or as he headed west. Nor 1 2

Autobiographical Dictation, December 26, 1906, in Twain, Autobiography, 2010–2015, 2: 336. Twain, Autobiography, 2010–2015, 2: 335.

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did he praise or assail phrenology as he crossed the Atlantic and trekked through southern Europe and the Middle East in 1867. He did no more than apply phrenology’s rich vocabulary and general concepts to his verbal portraits, giving his descriptions more life and making them even funnier, particularly when he brought up some of his own quirks and failings. With an increasing need to see with his own eyes what the phrenologists were up to, and probably with some growing skepticism about the head readers, which would have been consistent with the times, he decided to put not just any phrenologist but the world’s leading practicing phrenologist to the test. Exactly when he started planning his experiment is hard to date.3 But the charade he would conduct in or about 1872 would distinguish him from all other literary figures interested in phrenology. In America, these people of letters included not just Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was unique in his background in medicine and science, but also numerous men and women with literary backgrounds, who, like Clemens, were using phrenology in their writings for several reasons. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville stand out as elite members of this group.4

Putting Charlatans to the Test Despite his limited formal education, trying to see through charlatans and frauds was never out of character for Samuel Clemens. What he did as a teenager with the mesmerist who visited Hannibal had already shown this side of him. In 1871, Clemens went to see James Vincent Mansfield, one of the most famous mediums of the era. Mansfield made considerable money plying his trade through the mail (offering readings for $5 and four three-cent stamps) and seeing wealthy clients at his fashionable home in New York City. He wanted to determine if Mansfield could contact his dead brother Henry to hear more about how he was mortally injured in a riverboat explosion (see Chapter 4, note 28) – information that the famous medium could not have known beforehand. 3 4

For a briefer look at Clemens’s ploy, see Finger, Phrenological experiment, 2020a. Each of these famous authors was born early in the nineteenth century and died before the twentieth began: Emerson (1803–1882), Poe (1809–1849), Whitman (1819–1892), and Melville (1819–1891). For more on American authors and phrenology, see: Hungerford, Whitman, 1931; Arvin, Whitman, 1938; Hillway, Pseudo-sciences, 1949; Melville, 1949; Allen, Solitary Singer, 1955; Conroy, Emerson, 1964; Aspiz, Phrenologizing the Whale, 1968; Mackey, Phrenological Whitman, 1997. And for Stern on these authors and phrenology, see: Poe, 1968, Phrenological Fowlers; 1971, Emerson, 1984.

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Mansfield would become “Manchester” in his Life on the Mississippi. In Chapter 48 of this bestselling book, Mark Twain described visiting the medium with some friends, one of them wanting to inquire about a dead uncle. But this was not what he had penned in an earlier draft. With some parts crossed out, others changed, and an addition, he was the visitor. And he questioned the medium about Henry’s death in 1858.5 As he wrote on the draft: “I asked the questions & my brother wrote down the answers by the hand of the medium, – I mean the medium said it was my brother.” It quickly became apparent that “Manchester” knew nothing about Henry’s death. As pointed out by Lin Salamo and Harriet Elinor Smith, who edited Volume 5 of Mark Twain’s Letters where this information can be found, this was not Sam’s first visit to a spiritualist. He had also visited one in San Francisco in 1866 and had left underwhelmed. He would continue to visit mediums at later times, mentioning some of these visits in a letter to Mrs. Charles McQuiston dated March 26, 1901. “I have never had an experience which moved me to believe the living can communicate with the dead,” he wrote, “but my wife and I have experimented in the matter when opportunity offered and shall continue to do so.” He mentioned Mrs. Piper, a famous medium, who had been discredited. And he also brought up having visited two mediums whom he and Andrew Lang considered quite wonderful, but they were “transparent frauds.”6 In this same letter, he revealed that he had been in contact with Mr. Myers, President of the London- and Cambridge-based Psychical Research Society. This organization was started in 1882 by three dons from Trinity College, Cambridge. Its membership included many non-believers wanting “to examine without prejudice or prepossession and in a scientific spirit, those faculties of man, real or supposed, which appear to be inexplicable on any generally recognized hypothesis.”7 Clearly, one did not have to believe in the supernatural, telepathy, or paranormal activities to join or follow the inquiries of the society. Clemens joined the society in 1884 and remained a member until 1902.8 Although he was a skeptic, there always seemed to be psychics and fortune-tellers cropping up in Clemens’s life. Albert Bigelow Paine, his 5 6 7 8

Twain, Letters, 1988–2002, 5: 41–43. Paine, Letters, 1917, 5: 707. Also see Paine, Mark Twain, 1912, 3: 1405–1410; and Gribben, Amusements, 1983. Haynes, Society for Psychical Research, 1982, 6. Twain, Autobiography, 2010–2015, 3: 510.

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first biographer, knew this and even included a chapter called “Matters Psychic and Otherwise” in his groundbreaking biography.9 A meeting of considerably greater significance given the subject matter of the present book took place before his encounters with these spiritualists. It happened while he was still piloting boats on the Mississippi River. It involved a famous New Orleans “clairvoyant” known as Madame Caprell. Some of Sam’s friends were impressed with her abilities and urged him to visit her, which he agreed to do. Madame Caprell took him into a small parlor, closed the door, and sat down in front of him. After asking his age, she put her hands in front of her eyes and proceeded to tell him that he made a living on the water but was also gifted as an orator and writer. She further pointed out that he was self-educated, smoked too much, and was more like his mother than his father – again valid. What she said about him having a brother jumping from one job to the next (definitely Orion) and the family’s landholdings (John Marshall’s unrealized Tennessee land investment) was also accurate. She even predicted that his future pursuits would be literary or in the field of law, and that he was destined to become unusually successful. Sam mentioned how he visited Madame Caprell in a letter dated February 6, 1861, to his surviving brother, Orion.10 In his words (with italics added): I asked a few questions of minor importance – paid her $2 – and left, under the decided impression that going to a fortune teller was just as good as going to an opera, and the cost scarcely a trifle more – ergo, I will disguise myself and go again, one of these days, when other amusements fail. Now isn’t she the devil? That is to say, isn’t she a right smart little woman?

Madame Caprell was indeed a “right smart” woman, being particularly attentive to how Sam dressed and spoke. She also knew how to utilize what she must have gleaned previously from his friends, information that made her pronouncements even more impressive. But what this encounter shows that bears directly on phrenology in his life is that his idea of doing a test or experiment on a practitioner in a trade that seemed to be based on trickery has roots that can be traced back to 1861, if not earlier. Switch a phrenologist for the medium, and he would “disguise myself and go again,” which is exactly what he would plan and do while in London in or about 1872. 9 10

Paine, Mark Twain, 1912, 3: 1405–1410. Also see Gribben, Amusements, 1983. In his 1917 collection of Mark Twain’s Letters, Paine mistakenly dated this letter February 6, 1862. He gave the 1861 date in Mark Twain, 1912.

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Trips to London Sam was pleased to see Roughing It published in 1872, the year he and Livy welcomed Olivia Susan Clemens into the world. Photographs from this time show him looking youthful and confident (Figure 5.1). The following year was different. Their son Langdon died from diphtheria in June. Sam became despondent, thinking he had contributed to his son’s death by taking him out on a cold day. Wishing to get away, wanting to protect his work from being “stolen” by unscrupulous British publishers, and thinking about gathering material for a book about England, he set off for London two months later. Livy remained in Hartford. “Mark Twain” was treated like royalty and honored everywhere he turned from the moment he arrived in England – so much so that he told his mother and sister, “I came here to take notes for a book, but I haven’t done much but attend dinners and make speeches.” He returned to America for the year-end holidays and began a charm offensive, successfully convincing Livy to go to England with him on a return visit in May. That trip lasted five months. He made another brief trip to England alone late in 1873. What Sam would later call his “small test” of a leading phrenologist took place during one of his trips abroad, probably in 1872. His deception involved showing up as a man of no importance for a first head reading, allowing sufficient time to pass, and then returning weeks or a few months later for a second head reading as Mark Twain, the widely celebrated author and humorist.11 His targeted phrenologist was Lorenzo Fowler, co-founder of the family’s phrenology empire. Lorenzo had previously examined his share of famous American heads, including that of the poet Walt Whitman and, as will be seen in Chapter 10, the head of the physician-poet Oliver Wendell Holmes. In 1860, Lorenzo opted to leave the United States, which was now being ripped apart by the Civil War, and test the soil in more sedate Britain, where he believed he could do well with his phrenological expertise and name recognition. He started in Liverpool with a lecture on character, which garnered considerable attention. He then lectured in other British cities, including Edinburgh, which figured prominently in the “phrenology wars” earlier in the century, and in London during the 1862 International Exhibition.12 11 12

For more on blind and double-blind experiments in medical history, see Kaptchuk, Intentional ignorance, 1998; Podolsky, Jones, and Kaptchuk, Trials, 2016. Samuel Wells also crossed the Atlantic, doing so to lecture on phrenology at the 1862 International Exhibition in London.

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Figure 5.1  Samuel Clemens in 1871 (courtesy of Google Images).

After briefly returning to the war-torn United States, Lorenzo decided Britain was more to his liking. He emigrated to London in 1863 and opened the Fowler Institute on Fleet Street near Ludgate Circus.13 This was not far from the Langham Hotel where Clemens liked to stay, and its proximity to Fowler’s Institute might have led him to decide to conduct his test on Fowler while in London. His ploy was both brilliant and practical. After all, if the before-andafter charts revealed the same features, it would validate phrenology as a quick means for assessing character – unquestionably a valuable tool for anyone, but especially so for a writer and lecturer who excelled at describing the physical and mental features of his characters. In contrast, any suspicions he might have harbored about the head readers and phrenology would be confirmed if the head readings differed significantly. This, in turn, would provide him with a wonderful subject to lampoon, while conveying a serious message to the public about its gullibility. 13

Lorenzo would later move to the Imperial Building, Ludgate Circus and launch the Phrenological Magazine in London, but this would be several years after reading Twain’s head (Stern, Phrenological Fowlers, 1971, 182, 238; also Twain, 1969).

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Clemens would take his time, decades in fact, before disclosing his clever deception. Interestingly, he would never explain why he waited before revealing it and how it affected his thoughts about the head readers and phrenology. As for his phrenological chart and Lorenzo Fowler’s notes, these documents seem to have been lost. Nonetheless, and as will be shown, there is convincing evidence to show that he did conduct his clever experiment on Fowler and what he presented humorously and in exaggerated ways in a later autobiographical dictation and literary piece was based on real-life experiences. The Secret History of Eddypus Twain began to utilize what occurred during his two trips to Fowler’s office in a manuscript he started early in the twentieth century, albeit one that he never completed. It was called The Secret History of Eddypus, the World Empire. Given this work’s futuristic orientation and how it denigrated organized religion and quasi-religious cults, its phrenological sections probably would not have been recognized as being based on real-life events were it not for the information he would provide several years later. A notebook entry dated February 3, 1901, indicates that he began working on Eddypus at about this time, while he was feeling depressed and tormented.14 His biographer Ron Powers described this dark period in his life as one in which he wrote furiously now out of a hot dark private place … where angels mock the words of a conscienceless God (whose motto read, “Let no innocent person escape”); where mankind’s “Moral Sense” is shown inferior to the base instincts of animals; where the human hope of free will is exposed as a sham and men are nothing more than self-deceiving machines.15

Further worth noting is that Eddypus’s phrenological segments were written shortly after Clemens had his head read in New York on March 7, 1901.16 While undergoing this head reading with Lorenzo’s surviving daughter, Jessie, he either purchased or was given Orson and Lorenzo Fowler’s New Illustrated Self-Instructor in Phrenology and Physiology.17 The copy in his library was signed “Clemens, 1901,” and he consulted it for the intentionally dull and uninspiring lecture on phrenology that he included in Eddypus. 14 15 16 17

Macnaughton, Last Years, 1979. Powers, Mark Twain, 2006, 16. Tuckey, Introduction, 1962, 20. More will be presented about this head reading in Chapter 7. O. Fowler and L. Fowler, Self-Instructor, 1859.

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The chapter relating how he, now a fictional character, underwent two different head readings seems to have been an “add-on.” Historian John S. Tuckey wrote that it “is not well integrated with what precedes and follows,” and that “it appears to have been thrown into Eddypus for no better reason than that Clemens was interested in phrenology at the time.”18 Robert Hirst of the Mark Twain Project at Berkeley, who kindly showed me the penned section, also described it as “clearly a kind of insertion.” Sam’s oldest daughter, Jean (née Jane), appeared to have been the person responsible for typing up most of the penned text, including the phrenological chapter. She did not type the three subsequent chapters of Book 2, which her father probably composed in 1902. He then stopped, shelved what he had done, and never returned to the project he had started with so much animosity that it might have clouded his better judgment.19 The story has much to do with how he felt about Mary Baker Eddy at the time. Born in 1821, Eddy had been dealing with illnesses throughout her life, some of which were thought to be related to her melancholia and “nervousness.” Anxious to break the vicious cycle, she tried different diets and alternative therapies, including mesmerism, magnets, and homeopathy. In 1862, she consulted Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, a mesmerist now promoting a system he called “Mental Science.” Quimby contended that all diseases are imagined. He claimed that diseases are like illusions and can be overcome through one’s mind. Eddy believed Quimby “cured” her with God’s help. And with this thinking, she became a faith healer. Her emerging version of Christian healing included a state of consciousness that she called “the Divine Mind.” During the next decade, she branded this form of healing “Christian Science” and set about trying to legitimatize it, establishing the Church of Christ, Scientist, in 1879. Two years later, she launched the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, where she presented herself as a professor and taught that all illnesses were imaginary. Like Franz Anton Mesmer a century earlier, Eddy further maintained that she had a special gift that allowed her to make sick minds better. In 1889, she gave a “millennial” talk about her movement’s progress and future.20 Following her speech, a vocal opposition used the media to portray her as insane, a fraud, a tyrant, and as a threat to an enlightened society that should be seeking cures based on proven science.21 18 19 20 21

Tuckey, Introduction, 1962, 24. Tuckey, Introduction, 1962, 24–27. Gill, Eddy, 1998. Squires, Healing the Nation, 2017.

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Although some of his family members had an interest in Christian Science, Clemens joined the opposition forces with his powerful pen, since, as he astutely recognized when dealing with some of his earlier human targets, murdering someone he disagreed with was illegal. He did not, however, set forth to attack or denigrate faith healing when he unleashed his wrath on Eddy. He had read William James’s The Principles of Psychology and, like his fellow countryman Benjamin Franklin in the previous century,22 had been awed by the power of the mind. Indeed, he had witnessed enough to realize that faith healing could function as an adjunct to traditional medicine, at least under some circumstances.23 In particular, the “mind-cure” seemed to work unusually well with “believers,” such as his mother, who turned to faith healing while her family still lived in tiny Florida, Missouri. As he would recall late in his life: “When I was a boy a farmer’s wife [Mrs. Utterback] who lived five miles from our village had great fame as a faith-doctor – that was what she called herself. … She said that the person’s faith in her did the work. Several times I saw her make immediate cures of severe toothaches. My mother was the patient.”24 He also knew how Dr. Newton had successfully treated Livy after she had a nasty fall in Elmira. Livy, then sixteen years old, was confined to her bed for two years. Newton told her he was emitting a stream of subtle electricity from his body, while also praying with her, putting an arm behind her shoulder, and gently compelling her to sit up. He subsequently told her she could now walk a few steps, which she was also able to do. Jervis Langdon was thrilled to have his daughter restored to health and did not question Newton’s methods – or his outrageous $1,500 fee. Livy also felt that mind-cures helped her and her sister Susy overcome their visual problems. Pressured by his wife and daughter, the family’s patriarch finally agreed to lay his glasses aside and try their acclaimed alternative to traditional medicine. He found the treatment somewhat helpful, but only for a short time. As for his daughter Susy, she continued to be treated by faith healers during the 1890s, praising a woman she believed strengthened and improved her singing voice by passing her gifted hands over her throat. Clemens even mentioned how Christian Science had helped many people in a letter he wrote to Joe Twitchell, a Hartford minister and close 22

23 24

For more on Franklin on the power of the mind to heal, as well as to cause both real and imaginary disorders, see Finger, Franklin’s Medicine, 2006; Finger and Zeitler, Glass armonica, 2015; Raz and Finger, Musical glasses, 2018. Ober, Twain and Medicine, 2003, 207–222; Squires, Healing the Nation, 2017, 89–117. Twain, Christian Science, 1907, 35.

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friend, on January 8, 1900. But he considered these people gullible “asses” (one of his favorite expressions) for failing to realize why they felt better. Many an ass in America, is getting a great deal of benefit out of X-science’s new exploitation of an age-old healing principle – faith, combined with the patient’s imagination – let it bloom along! I have no objection. Let them call it by what name they choose, so long as it does helpful work among the class which is numerically vastly the largest bulk of the human race, i.e. the fools, the idiots, the pudd’nheads.25

He knew there had been and would always be asses when he directed his anger at “Mother Eddy,” calling her a “shameless old swindler” and “the queen of frauds and hypocrites.”26 Worse, she appeared to him to be a tyrant intent on deceiving and bilking even the poor. He viewed her grasp on the American public as a threat to democracy. And he predicted that her Christian Science would soon rival (dreaded) orthodox Christianity with its growing stranglehold on everyday life. “I regard it as Standard Oil of the future,” he wrote in one of his rages.27 Twain entered the fight against Eddy in 1899 with a series of satirical articles in the North American Review and Cosmopolitan magazine. He would go on to publish a compilation titled Christian Science.28 Eddypus was a part of his onslaught.29 It combined Eddy’s name with “pus,” since the queen of hypocrisy was, in his eyes, spreading a particularly nasty infection. Like his latest novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, which he had published in 1889, Clemens’s new project involved time travel. In it, he has men living a thousand years in the future discovering a document about the period during which he, as Mark Twain, was now living. Nonetheless, Twain does not appear as a famed writer and humorist in this piece. Instead, he is the “sometimes Bishop of New Jersey.” And when describing his era, readers are informed that it started soon after Christian Science and Roman Catholicism had come together to throw the world into profound darkness. “Bishop Twain,” readers learn, had been a “revered priest of the earlier faith.” Because he was opposed to what was happening and how history was now being rewritten, he dared to challenge the newly formed theocracy. The ancient book that the men in the future had just discovered had been written fourteen years before the Bishop was convicted and marched 25 26 27 28 29

Paine, Letters, 1917, 2: 690. Tuckey, Introduction, 1972, 21. Kaplan, Mr. Clemens, 1966, 366; Wilson, Sarcasm, 1975, 75. Twain, Christian Science, 1907b. Twain, Eddypus, 1972.

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to the gallows. He was hanged in “A.D. 1912 = A.M. 47,” with A.M. signifying the new era. Readers are told that the Bishop of New Jersey had a notable defect offsetting his impressive learning – a “lack of the sense of humor”! This bit of information is conveyed in Chapter 1 of Book 2 of Eddypus, with the narrator explaining how the Bishop could have been funnier. It is followed by a “curious character sketch” of the doomed cleric. This sketch reveals that the humble Bishop had read a poem of praise that he felt had to be about him. He now began to fear that the compliments were causing some of his faculties to change. This metamorphosis was partly suggested by how positively he was now feeling about himself, but more disconcerting was how his head seemed to be growing! The bewildered Bishop realized he had to go to a phrenologist to find out what was happening, mentally and physically, to him. As presented in Eddypus: One perceives that a poet had paid the historian [Bishop Twain] a majestic compliment; that it had produced a physical change in his skull, in the nature of an enlargement, that he had hopes that this might mean a corresponding enlargement of his mental equipment, and also additions to the graces of his character. To satisfy himself as to these matters he went to a magician to get enlightenment. He calls this person a “phrenologist.” He nowhere explains, except figuratively, who or what the phrenologists were, and it seems probable he was not able to classify them quite definitely; for whereas in the beginning of his third chapter he twice speaks of them as “those unerring diviners of the human mind and the human character,” in later chapters he always refers to them briefly and without ornament as “those damned asses.” In this place I will insert the first division of the fragmentary charactersketch; and, with diffidence, I will add a suggestion: Might not the historian have been mistaken concerning the poem? It does not mention him by name; may it not have been an apostrophe to his country, instead of to him?

The Bishop’s own words followed: It was in London – April 1st, 1900. In the morning mail came a Harper’s Weekly, and on one of its pages I found a noble and beautiful poem, fenced around with a broad blue-pencil stripe. I copy it here. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS Untrammeled Giant of the West, With all of Nature’s gifts endowed, With all of Heaven’s mercies blessed, Nor of thy power unduly proud –

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Peerless in courage, force, and skill, And godlike in thy strength of will, – Before thy feet the ways divide: One path leads up to heights sublime; Downward the other slopes, where bide The refuse and the wrecks of Time. Choose then, nor falter at the start, O choose the nobler path and part! Be thou the guardian of the weak, Of the unfriended, thou the friend; No guerdon [reward] for thy valor seek, No end beyond the avow’d end. Wouldst thou thy godlike power preserve, Be godlike in the will to serve!

Joseph B. Gilder.

It made me blush to the eyes. But I resolved that I would do it, let it cost me what it might. I believe I was never so happy before. My head began to swell. I could feel it swell. This was a surprise to me, for I had always taken the common phrase about swell-head as being merely a figurative expression with no foundation in physical fact. But it had been a mistake; my head was really swelling. Already – say within an hour – the sutures had come apart to such a degree that there was a ditch running from my forehead back over to my neck, and another one running over from ear to ear, and my hair was sagging into these ditches and tickling my brains. I wondered if this enlargement would enlarge my mental capacities and make a corresponding aggrandizement in my character. I thought it must surely have that effect, and indeed I hoped it would. There was a way to find out. I knew what my mental calibre had been before the change, and I also knew what my disposition and character had been: I could go to a phrenologist, and if his diagnosis showed a change, I could detect it. So I made ready for this errand. I had no hat that would go on, but I made a turban, after a plan which I had learned in India, and shut myself up in a four-wheeler and drove down Piccadilly, watching out for a sign which I had several times noticed in the neighborhood of New Bond street. I found it without trouble – all in impressive silence. Pollard got his note-book and pencil, and made ready to take down Briggs’s observations in short-hand. Briggs asked my name; I told him it was Johnson. Age? I told him another one. Occupation? Broker, I said – in Wall street – when at home. How long a broker? Five feet eight and a half [this being Clemens’s actual height]. Question misunderstood, said Briggs: how long in the brokering business? Always. Politics? Answer reserved. He got other information out of me, but nothing valuable. I was standing to my purpose to get an estimate straight from the bat and the

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Mark Twain’s “Small Test” bumps, not a fancy scheme guessed out of the facts of my career. Briggs used a tape-measure on me, and Pollard wrote down the figures: “Circumference, 46 inches. Scott! this ain’t a human head, it’s a prize pumpkin, escaped out of the country fair.” It seemed an unkind remark, but I did not say anything, for allowances must be made for a man when his beverages are working. “Most remarkable craniological development, this is,” mumbled Briggs, still fumbling; “has valleys in it.” He drifted into what sounded like a lecture; not something fresh, I thought, but a flux of flatulent phrases staled by use and age. “Seven is high-water mark on the brain-chart of the science; the bump that reaches that altitude can no further go. Seven stands for A1, ultima thule – that is to say, very large; organ marked by 7 is sovereign in its influence over character and conduct, and, combining with organs marked 6 (called large), direct and control feeling and action; 5 (called full) plays a subordinate part; it and 6 and 7 press the smaller ones into their service; 4 (called average) have only a medium influence; 3 (called moderate) below par; medium influence, more potential than apparent; 2 (called deficient) leaves the possessor weak and faulty in character and should be assiduously cultivated; while organs marked 1 are very small, and render their possessor almost idiotic in the region where they predominate.”

The phrenologists were now prepared to sum up their client’s character, not knowing he was really Bishop Twain, a revered and learned man of the cloth: In the present subject we find some interesting combinations. Combativeness 7, Destructiveness 7, Cautiousness 7, Calculation 7, Firmness 0. Thus he has stupendous courage and destructiveness, and at first glance would seem to be the most daring and formidable fighter of modern times; but at a second glance we perceive that these desperate qualities are kept from breaking loose by those two guardians which hold them in their iron grip day and night, – Cautiousness and Calculation. Whenever this bloody-minded fiend would crave and slash and destroy, he stops to calculate the consequences; then he quits frothing at the mouth and puts up his gun; at this point his total destitution of Firmness surges to the front and he gets down in the dirt and apologizes. This is the low-downest poltroon I’ve ever struck.

The Bishop explained that he felt deeply hurt, even stunned, by these unexpected remarks. “This ungracious speech hurt me deeply, and I came near to striking him dead before I could restrain myself; but I reflected that on account of drink he was not properly responsible for his acts, and also was probably the sole support of his family, if he had one, so I thought better of it and spared him for their sake; in case he had one. Pollard had a hatchet by him; I was not armed.”

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“Amativeness 6. Probably keeps a harem. No; spirituality, 7. That knocks it out. A broker with spirituality! oh, call me early mother, call me early mother dear! Veneration 7. My! can that be a mistake? No – 7 it is. Oh, I see – here’s the solution: self-esteem 7. Worships himself! Acquisitiveness, 7; secretiveness, 7; conscientiousness, 0. A fine combination, sir, a noble combination.” I heard him [Briggs] mutter to himself, “Born for a thief.” “Veracity? Good land, a socket where the bump ought to be! And as for –”

The narrator returned at this point, commenting: There the first division breaks off. The Bishop makes no comment, but leaves it so. This silence is to me full of pathos; it is eloquent of a hurt heart, I think; I feel it, and am moved by it, after the lapse of ten centuries; centuries which have swept away thrones, obliterated dynasties and the very names they bore, turned cities to dust, made the destruction of all grandeurs their province, and have not suffered defeat till now, when this little, little thing rises up and mocks them with its immortality – the unvoiced cry of a wounded spirit!

The narrator now goes on to describe what the Bishop proceeded to do: The Bishop did not rest there. He had come to believe that the phrenologists were merely guessers, nothing more, and that they could rightly guess a man only when they knew his history. He resolved to test this theory. He waited several months, then went back to those experts clothed in his ecclesiastical splendors, with his chaplain and servants preceding and announcing him, and submitted his mentalities and his character to examination once more. His “regimentals,” as he calls them, disguised him, and the magicians were not aware that they had seen him before. This is all set down in the seventh chapter of volume IV and forms the first paragraph of the second division of the fragmentary character-sketch. The Bishop then summarises the results of his two visits, under the head of “Remarks of the Charlatan Briggs – with Verdicts.” Thus:

OBSCURE STRANGER “Not a head – a prize pumpkin.” “Low-down poltroon.” “Bloody-minded fiend.” “Probably keeps a harem.” “Worships himself.” “Born for a thief.” “Veracity? Good land!”

RENOWNED BISHOP “A noble head – sublime!” “Lion of the tribe of Judah!” “Heart of an angel!” “Others are dirt in presence of this purity!” “Here we have divine humility!” “This is the very temple of honor!” “This soul is the golden palace of truth!”

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This section closes with the only possible explanation for why Bishop Twain received two such different head readings. Notably, it had nothing to do with his cranial features, which would not have changed. Instead, the phrenologists had to be focusing on other cues. This revelation led the author to redefine phrenology as “the ‘science’ which extracts character from clothes.”30

The Tell-Tale Letter We know from an exchange of letters that began late in 1906 that Samuel Clemens actually did make two trips to a phrenologist in London, and that he did, in fact, receive different head readings on these occasions. What he wrote in a humorless letter after abandoning Eddypus was stimulated by a letter he received on December 6, 1906. It came from a man in London, who had strong credentials as a Reuters correspondent, an editor at Cassell and Company, and an author and translator. Frederic Whyte wanted to have “Mark Twain” write an opinion piece about phrenology for a popular London periodical. Whyte had read Alfred Russel Wallace’s 1898 book The Wonderful Century, in which the British naturalist, anthropologist, and explorer contended it was time for a serious re-examination of phrenology, one that would delve into what it encompassed, the evidence for and against it, and its potential utility. Stimulated by Wallace, Whyte conversed with editors of the Daily Graphic and was granted permission to publish a symposium on phrenology in this periodical. Whyte told Clemens that other revered authors and leading scientists had also been invited to write opinion pieces. British scientist Francis Galton and authors G. K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw were among the high-profile notables contributing. He then wrote: “I am most anxious to have a few lines from you.” Clemens described Whyte as a “Gentleman” from England, who was baffled by “why phrenology has apparently never interested me enough to move me to write about it.”31 Whyte, however, was not entirely correct when he phrased his inquiry in this way. True, “Mark Twain” had not published an article exploring, endorsing, or exposing phrenology, not even after twice visiting Lorenzo Fowler’s offices in London. But Whyte was wrong to think his American correspondent was uninterested in the 30 31

All quotations are from Twain, Eddypus, 1972, 315–382; for the character sketch and head reading: 348–353. The later chapters of the work are devoid of phrenology. Twain, Autobiography, 2010–2015, 2: 334.

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so-called science, as evidenced by how Mark Twain had continued to use head readings and phrenological concepts and terminology in some of his best-known literary pieces, including Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (as will be seen in Chapter 6). Moreover, Clemens had read Weaver’s Lectures on Mental Science, met phrenologist Frederick Coombs, and even had his head read in Cincinnati and New York after conducting his little test in London (see Chapter 7). Consequently, although the American humorist informed Whyte in his return letter of December 18 that he had not published on the subject because “I never did profoundly study phrenology,” he had more than passing knowledge of the doctrine and its purveyors – knowledge based on what he had read and on personal experiences dating from his youth in Hannibal. He did not, however, go into his past with phrenology in his return letter, which was short and to the point. Still, he did explain, and seemingly for the first time, why he had been ridiculing phrenology since the early 1870s. He did this immediately after stating that he had never “profoundly” studied phrenology. In his own words, this is what he wrote back in its entirety: In London, 33 or 34 years ago, I made a small test of phrenology for my better information. I went to Fowler under an assumed name and he examined my elevations and depressions and gave me a chart which I carried home to the Langham Hotel and studied with great interest and amusement – the same interest and amusement which I should have found in the chart of an impostor who had been passing himself off as me and did not resemble me in a single sharply defined detail. I waited 3 months and went to Mr. Fowler again heralding my arrival with a card bearing both my name and nom de guerre. Again I carried away an elaborate chart. It contained several sharply defined details of my character but it bore no recognizable resemblance to the earlier chart. These experiences gave me a prejudice against phrenology which has lasted until now. I am aware that the prejudice should have been against Fowler, instead of against the art; but I am human and that is not the way prejudices act.32

Whyte printed Clemens’s response in London’s Daily Graphic on January 12, 1907. It appeared under the heading “Bumps and Brains.” He called it “Mark Twain’s ‘Small Test’: Why He Is Prejudiced Against Phrenology.”33 Six days later, he sent its author a note of thanks and included a copy of his published letter.34 32 33 34

Mark Twain Papers/Berkeley: UCLC 07599; see Neider, Twain, 1959, 64; and Twain, Autobiography, 2010–2015, 2: 334. Twain, Small test, 1907a. Mark Twain Papers/Berkeley: UCLC 35853.

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Clemens, with his explosive and fiery temper, went into a frenzy. Not understanding that Whyte had asked him for material that would be published, he had sent him what he regarded as a personal letter, not a piece for the public. He had his secretary fire off a scathing return letter, in which he told Whyte that “there was nothing about your first letter that indicated you would use this private answer in a public way.” Whyte was also informed that what he had done violated the contract he (Clemens) had with his publisher, an action that could trigger legal repercussions.35 No more letters from Whyte to Clemens or Clemens to Whyte have surfaced. But this should not be construed to mean that Clemens was quick to calm down. With his tendency to maintain a grudge against anyone he believed had wronged him, he attached a vitriolic addition to the autobiographical piece that he dictated on December 26, 1906. In a footnote bearing on his “small test” that we shall examine next, we find the date “Feb. 10, 1907,” and immediately after it, “The English gentleman was not really a gentleman: he sold my private letter to a newspaper.”36

The Humorous 1906 Dictation The autobiographical dictation Clemens gave on December 26, 1906, eight days after responding to Whyte’s inquiry, is the version of his deception that is most often cited, though rarely in its entirety. Nonetheless, and like the aforementioned letter, this longer and funnier portrayal of what transpired attracted little attention before 1959, when Charles Neider included it in his version of “Mark Twain’s” autobiography.37 After stating that it was his “impression that the people [of Hannibal] admired phrenology and believed in it and that the voice of the doubter was not heard in the land,” Clemens dictated: I was reared in this atmosphere of faith and belief and trust, and I think its influence was still upon me, so many years afterward, when I encountered Fowler’s advertisements in London. I was glad to see his name and glad of an opportunity to personally test his art. The fact that I went to him under a fictitious name is an indication that not the whole bulk of the faith of my boyhood was still with me; it looks like circumstantial evidence that in some way my faith had suffered impairment in the course of the years. I found Fowler on duty, in the midst of the impressive symbols of his trade. On brackets, on tables, on shelves, all about the room, stood marble-white 35 36 37

Mark Twain Papers/Berkeley: UCLC 07632. Twain, Autobiography, 2010–2015, 2: 336. Neider, Twain, 1959, 63–67; also in Twain, Autobiography, 2: 2013, 334–337.

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busts, hairless, every inch of the skull occupied by a shallow bump, and every bump labeled with its imposing name, in black letters. Fowler received me with indifference, fingered my head in an uninterested way, and named and estimated my qualities in a bored and monotonous voice. He said I possessed amazing courage, an abnormal spirit of daring, a pluck, a stern will, a fearlessness that were without limit. I was astonished at this, and gratified too; I had not suspected it before; but then he foraged over on the other side of my skull and found a hump there which he called “caution.” This hump was so tall, so mountainous, that it reduced my courage-bump to a mere hillock by comparison, although the courage-bump had been so prominent up to that time – according to his description of it – that it ought to have been a capable thing to hang my hat on; but it amounted to nothing, now, in the presence of that Matterhorn which he called my Caution. He explained that if that Matterhorn had been left out of my scheme of character I would have been one of the bravest men that ever lived – possibly the bravest – but that my cautiousness was so prodigiously superior to it that it abolished my courage and made me almost spectacularly timid. He continued his discoveries, with the result that I came out safe and sound, at the end, with a hundred great and shining qualities; but which lost their value and amounted to nothing because each of the hundred was coupled up with an opposing defect which took the effectiveness out of it.

He then went on to say: However, he found a cavity, in one place; a cavity where a bump would have been in anybody’s else’s skull. That cavity, he said was all alone, all by itself, occupying a solitude, and had no opposing bump, however slight in elevation, to modify and ameliorate its perfect completeness and isolation. He startled me by saying that that cavity represented the total absence of the sense of humor! He now became almost interested. Some of his indifference disappeared. He said he often found bumps of humor which were so small that they were hardly noticeable, but that in his long experience this was the first time he had ever come across a cavity where a bump ought to be. I was hurt, humiliated, resentful, but I kept these feelings to myself; at bottom I believed his diagnosis was wrong, but I was not certain. In order to make sure, I thought I would wait until he should have forgotten my face and the peculiarities of my skull, and then come back and try again and see if he had really known what he had been talking about, or had only been guessing.

He now described what happened on his return visit: After three months I went to him again, but under my own names this time. Once more he made a striking discovery – the cavity [for Humor] was gone, and in its place was a Mount Everest – figuratively speaking – thirty-one thousand feet high, the loftiest bump of humor he had ever encountered in

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Mark Twain’s “Small Test” his life-long experience! I went from his presence prejudiced against phrenology, but it may be, as I have said to the English gentleman [Whyte], that I ought to have conferred the prejudice upon Fowler and not upon the art which he was exploiting.

In some ways, this autobiographical statement is Mark Twain at his best – the man readers and audiences worldwide loved for his tongue-incheek humor, fanciful allusions, perfectly placed pauses, and memorable understatements. The piece is also classic Twain because it is based on a personal experience wonderfully embellished to convey an important message; in this case, one about how quickly people will accept some things that they hear and read about, even though they seem unable to distinguish facts from wishful thinking, and even when finances or matters of health might be involved. His friend William Dean Howells might have said it best when he wrote: “When filled up with an experience that deeply interested him, or when provoked by some injustice or absurdity that intensely moved him, he [Clemens] burst forth, and the outbreak might be altogether humorous, but it was more likely to be humorous with a groundswell of seriousness carrying it profoundly forward.”38

A Humorist Devoid of Humor! Not included in the previous section but found after the part that started “I was hurt, humiliated, resentful,” Clemens included some of his thoughts about another group he was looking upon with justified skepticism, palmists. He believed palm readers operated in the same underhand way as the head readers to deceive and dupe the public. He had already tested mediums and phrenologists; here he tells us that he also tested palm readers and obtained comparable results. Specifically, he stated that William Stead photographed his right hand some six years ago while on a ship going to Europe. Stead was a radical journalist, a reformer, and a spiritualist, and his palm reading took place in March 1894. He explained that Stead sent copies to twelve palmists, asking them to describe the person whose palms they were seeing. This was not entirely accurate – Stead published the picture in a psychical quarterly and asked for “experts” to provide him with their opinions. He went on to say that about six or seven replied that the unidentified man was average in almost every way. “In none of the estimates was the word humor mentioned – if my memory is not mistreating me – except in one; in that 38

Howells, Twain, 1910, 178.

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one the palmist said that the possessor of that hand was totally destitute of the sense of humor.”39 Actually, there were only four responses published in the October issue of this periodical. In fact, Clemens had sent a letter back to Snead pointing out that only one “claims that the sense of humor exists in my make-up; the other three are silent unto that.”40 He next dictated how his palms were examined on another occasion. Colonel Harvey, then the editor of Harper’s Magazine, had prints made and sent to six distinguished palmists in New York City, again withholding the subject’s name. He commented that “History repeated itself,” since “The word humor occurred only once in the six estimates, and then it was accompanied by the definite remark that the possessor of the hands was destitute of the sense of humor.”41 “Now then,” he concluded wryly in this autobiographical dictation, “I have Fowler’s estimate; I have the estimates of Stead’s six or seven palmists; I have the estimates of Harvey’s half-dozen; the evidence that I do not possess a sense of humor is overwhelming, satisfying, convincing, incontrovertible, – and at last I believe it myself.”42 He returned to palmistry and phrenology in his autobiographical dictation of January 28, 1907. He now stated that the idea that he had no sense of humor, which had wounded him so badly, had to be in error. When a friend came by and told him that “such a verdict must be conclusive,” that “by low artifices I had been deceiving and robbing the people for a quarter of a century,” and that it was time to reform, he responded that “if they had known whose hand it was they might have noticed things in it which they had overlooked.” He was serious in his retort, which is in accord with what he had discovered when testing the medium in New Orleans and Fowler in London. Advance information is immensely valuable for an accurate reading, whether it be reconstructing a past event, dealing with a client’s palms, or carrying out a phrenological examination. Clemens even considered going back to the palmists as Mark Twain. He knew he would fare much better the second time around, provided he identified himself as the famous American author and humorist. And here he again mentioned in a serious way what he had experienced with Fowler: 39 40 41

42

Twain, Autobiography, 2010–2015, 2: 336–337. Twain, Autobiography, 2010–2015, 2: 604 (footnote). Twain, Autobiography, 2010–2015, 2: 337. Clemens details three readings (by Niblo, Fletcher, and Perin) in his January 28, 1907, dictation: see Twain, Autobiography, 2010–2015, 2: 391–400. He included commentaries and raised the possibility that these esteemed men may have mixed up his prints with someone else’s, since such things were known to have happened in the past. Twain, Autobiography, 2010–2015, 2: 337.

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Mark Twain’s “Small Test” It is so with the phrenologist: he can tell better when he knows you. I am sure of this; for in London, once, I went to Fowler as “John B. Smith” and he found no humor in me – said there was an excavation where the humor-bump should have been – yet when I went to him three months later as “Mark Twain” he said frankly and with enthusiasm that there was a pyramid in that place. Now, since knowing me helped a phrenologist, why might it not help a palmist?43

Of Facts and Fiction Twain historians point out that Clemens had a serious interest in the sciences. In 1875, a few years after conducting his “little test,” he had even written on an envelope, “I like history, biography, travels, curious facts and strange happenings, and science.”44 As put by Alan Gribben, he had an “intense wish to be ranked by later ages as the intrepid discoverer of major new truths.”45 And, as a skeptic and also in line with this drive, he had long possessed a strong urge to achieve prominence by disproving silly beliefs that many people accepted as truths. Scholars looking into his scientific pieces also agree on something else. It is that when writing as Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens took considerable liberties in his autobiographical and quasi-autobiographical pieces. Said somewhat differently, his reputation for enhancing facts to produce more memorable accounts is well deserved. As can be imagined, this blending of the truth and fantasy can pose considerable challenges for historians anxious to discern what really might have happened at the time of the event, as contrasted with what he presented as happening. Fowler historian Madeline Stern, for example, questioned how Lorenzo Fowler, an “authority on mnemonics,” could “have forgotten Mark Twain’s unmistakable features in a matter of three months.” She also commented on how the “bumps” and “cavities” he described “were rarely part of the Fowler phrenological vocabulary”; these phrenologists and their followers now being more focused on measuring the distances between organs.46 Yet the letter Clemens wrote to Whyte and his autobiographical note about going back to the palmists as Mark Twain would strongly suggest that Fowler really did not recognize him the second time around. As for 43 44 45 46

Twain, Autobiography, 2010–2015, 2: 391. Paine, Mark Twain, 1912, 1: 512. Gribben, Amusements, 1983, 174. Stern, Phrenological Fowlers, 1971, 183.

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Stern’s statement about phrenology no longer being bumpology, this is not entirely true. The books published by the Fowlers show that the phrenologists were now using calipers to measure distances between parts of the skull overlying specific organs. They also show they were now more involved with delineating organ groups than Gall and Spurzheim had been. Nonetheless, Orson Fowler had even provided detailed instructions on how to position one’s hands to evaluate a bump during a phrenological examination, and many phrenologists were still using their eyes and hands to detect bumps.47 Alan Gribben, in turn, did not question that Twain somehow fooled Fowler. But he warned that “Mark Twain’s efforts at writing truthful autobiography frequently fell into the comic pattern of his fiction.”48 In fact, Clemens never denied that he embellished and colored his stories, and he did not hesitate to admit how much he enjoyed doing so through his alter ego. During the fall of 1900, for example, Clemens was asked by a reporter about the autobiography he was rumored to have started, a work that would be withheld from the public for a century. His reply was published in several newspapers in slightly different forms, all affirming this was true. As reported in the New York Times, he remarked: “You know, I never told the truth in my life that someone didn’t say I was lying, while, on the other hand, I never told a lie that somebody didn’t take it as a fact.” Hearing this answer, another reporter asked: “Well, it’s not wrong, anyway, to tell a lie sometimes, is it?” And this time, he responded: “If you can’t disseminate the facts by telling the truth, why that’s the way to do it, and if you can’t except by doing a little lying, well, that’s all right, too isn’t it?” – to which he added, “I do it.”49 And yet again, this time in Following the Equator, published in 1897, he wrote: “My own luck has been curious all my literary life; I could never tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anyone would believe.”50 Without question, Twain took liberties when describing his deception in his 1906 autobiographical dictation and as a novelist when describing the phrenologists in Eddypus. In both works, he transformed what had taken place in London into funny episodes of quasi-fiction. But what is factual, and what is fiction based on real-life experiences? 47 48 49 50

O. Fowler, Practical Phrenology, 1856; Donovan, Handbook, 1870; Finger and Eling, Objectivity and measurements, 2022. Gribben, Temperaments, 1972, 63. Mark Twain interview in New York Times, October 16, 1900, in Twain, Complete Interviews, 2006, 357. Twain, Following the Equator, 1897; 1989 edition, 610.

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One of Twain’s stand-out embellishments has to do with the striking cranial asymmetries Fowler supposedly discovered on his skull. This is a highly questionable feature that Twain scholars have thus far overlooked. Massive differences between the two sides of the head are rarely encountered in mentally and physically fit people. And he was both mentally and physically fit during the early 1870s when Fowler saw him. In contrast, notable cranial asymmetries are more characteristic of mentally or physically impaired individuals, particularly those with congenital abnormalities or those who have suffered brain damage early in development. Franz Joseph Gall viewed the phrenological organs as symmetrical when he laid out his doctrine late in the eighteenth century and finetuned it early in the new century. Symmetry was also accepted by Spurzheim, Combe, and later phrenologists. As for the Fowlers, they did not provide separate phrenological forms to fill in for the two sides of the head, believing the phrenological organs would be the same on both sides in healthy people.51 That Samuel Clemens never had some Matterhorn or notable depression on just one side of his head can also be surmised from his two documented later head readings. There is no mention of asymmetries in the head reading he would have in Cincinnati or when examined even later in life by Lorenzo’s surviving daughter, Jessie (see Chapter 6 and Chapter 7). That Clemens had been told on his first (incognito) visit to Fowler’s office that he had no sense of humor is also perplexing. Here we must recognize that this was the perfect character trait for Mark Twain, one of the greatest humorists of all time, to single out for a good laugh. Although this is speculative, he might have deliberately guided Fowler into saying something about this faculty, perhaps by dropping a few hits or by how he deliberately responded to the famous phrenologist’s questions. For all we know, he might even have set his examiner up by telling him that he was accused of being deficient in this domain. If so, Fowler’s remarks about the deficiency he discovered on his first visit would seem much less surprising and have at least an element of truth. Another possibility, of course, is that he was told nothing about a cranial marker for his sense of humor, but knew it would elicit laughs if he transformed this absence into no sense of humor in his narratives. The finer details of what transpired in each of his head readings, particularly about the other faculties on each side of his head, might raise additional questions. Here, we might again want to remember how he 51

Eling and Finger, Hemispheric symmetry, 2020a.

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once stated, “I don’t believe these details are right but I don’t care a rap,” to which he added, “They will do just as well as the facts.”52 But as for whether he even visited Fowler in London, this two-part foray into phrenology must be regarded as factual. This is clear enough from his brief, non-humorous letter to Frederic Whyte in 1907, in which he mentioned two visits with two different outcomes. The same can be said about concealing his true identity on his first trip but not the second, the ploy he used in other situations. Similarly, there is little reason to doubt that Fowler’s two assessments differed in notable ways. And, of course, Clemens was correct in concluding that much of what Fowler told him was based on how he dressed and answered questions, and on other cues that had nothing to do with his cranium. As he now astutely recognized, the importance of having advance information about a client, be it for conjuring up the past or facilitating a head or palm reading, cannot be overestimated.

In Perspective In closing this chapter – which has included long quotations so that readers know exactly what Samuel Clemens as Mark Twain wrote and said – it must be emphasized that Clemens was not the first person to try to trick a leading phrenologist. Shortly after lecturing in Berlin in 1805, Gall went to nearby Potsdam, the site of the magnificent Sanssouci (French for “without concerns”) Palace. Queen Louise of Brandenburg had extended an invitation for him to meet the royal family and educate them and their guests about his novel doctrine. Gall accepted the invitation and lectured before an audience of over 200 people that May.53 The queen was impressed and honored him with a medal and valuable gifts. But the king, Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia, had his doubts and decided to conduct a test to see just how good Gall was at divining character from heads. He invited Gall to a banquet where he was introduced to a group of “army officers.” These well-mannered gentlemen were actually prisoners instructed to dress and act the part. Gall recognized bumps signifying Angriffslust (hostility) and Zerstörungswut (destruction) on one of their skulls and conveyed this information to the king. The monarch then revealed his deception and handed Gall a ring with precious stones as a reward for passing his test. 52 53

Neider, Twain, 1959, xiv. Finger and Eling, Gall, 2019, 235–236.

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After Gall satisfied the King of Prussia, Spurzheim failed a different test in Paris. It featured François Magendie, the famed French physiologist thought to be the first physician to label phrenology a “pseudo-science” in a medical book.54 This time, the test item was a brain. Spurzheim was told it was from Pierre-Simon, the Marquis de Laplace, who was admired for his contributions to mathematics, physics, and astronomy. Magendie had preserved Laplace’s brain after he died in 1827, and Spurzheim wanted to see it. “To test the science of phrenology, Mr. Magendie showed him the brain of an imbecile rather than that of Laplace. Spurzheim, who had already worked up his enthusiasm,” wrote (Marie Jean) Pierre Flourens, “admired the brain of the imbecile as he would have admired that of Laplace.”55 What transpired in Potsdam and Paris provide but two instances showing how skeptics tested the most important head readers of the era. In Gall’s case, it was with disguises; in Spurzheim’s, by switching brains. In both cases, the deception involved feeding the phrenologist false information. But were the laity also testing phrenologists in various ways when Clemens conducted his test? Katherine Pandora, an American historian, described the culture leading up to the Civil War years (1861–65) as an “emergent period,” during which ordinary people set forth to test all sorts of things for themselves. In effect, this was precisely what Gall and Spurzheim had recommended at the turn of the century. Additionally, it was what the Fowlers, Wells, and other leading phrenologists were now recommending in their phrenology books and journals.56 Carla Bittel looked at archival documents (letters, diaries, etc.) showing how ordinary Americans tested the head readers and phrenological thinking.57 Many did this through self-examinations, some studied the heads of people they knew, and a minority even tested professionals to see if their assessments would agree with certain truths about themselves. There were several variations on this testing-to-confirm theme. One was being seen by different phrenologists to see whether the head readings would be the same. Another was for people who might be recognized to assume false identities. 54 55 56

57

Magendie, Élémentaire de Physiologie, 1834, 89; Finger and Eling, Gall, 2019, 480–481. Flourens, Psychologie Comparée, 1864, 234. Pandora, Popular science, 2009. The Fowlers’ “Rules for Finding the Organs” can be found in the phrenology books they published (see Chapter 2), as well as in the 1849 issue of the American Phrenological Journal. Bittel, Testing the truth of phrenology, 2019. For more on the laity engaging in phrenology, see Sysling, Science and self-assessment, 2018; Sysling, Average person, 2021.

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Bittel presented some instances of people using false identities. One was Theodore Dwight Weld, the husband of then-famous abolitionist Angelina Grimké Weld, also known for his impassioned speeches against slavery. When meeting with the head reader, he posed as a lowly omnibus driver and might have dressed and spoken the part. The phrenologist emerged victorious in this trial, finding his client’s head nonetheless magnificent. Bittel also detailed a case of false identity where the phrenologist did poorly. But were there cases before Clemens’s own of people going to the same head reader twice, once under a false identity and once under their real identity? The answer to this rhetorical question is yes, though pending further evidence, not with such a famous personality. Nelson Sizer, who was associated with the Fowlers and their organization, described one such instance in 1882, approximately ten years after Clemens’s little test, though the event took place in 1841.58 It occurred in Maryland with a man Sizer identified as Christian Piper, who disguised himself and returned the day after his first head reading “so as not to be known, even by his intimate friends.” Sizer wrote that he was fooled by the man’s disguise but still came forth with two identical head readings. Thus, Samuel Clemens was not unique when he set out to test a phrenologist. He was a man of the times from a country where people wanted to see and test things for themselves. But with his two trips to Lorenzo Fowler, one as some unimportant John Doe and the second as Mark Twain, what he did was considerably more imaginative than withholding one’s identity on a single visit to a head reader, which is what Weld had done. And although Christian Piper dressed differently when he returned to Nelson Sizer for a second head reading, he was hardly famous and his ploy was not revealed until 1882. Hence, it is tempting to think that “Mark Twain” might have made a bit of phrenological history with the clever ruse he pulled off on perhaps the most famous phrenologist of this era. Would or could any other American or even British writer of stature have done the same? Still, there are some mysteries here. One is whether Clemens devised his plan for testing a phrenologist by himself. Could he have heard or read about ways to test phrenologists from others? And even if he did design his own test, might he have discussed it with others? A related issue is whether he might have been closely following someone else in how he humorously portrayed the phrenologists in Eddypus and perhaps his autobiographical 58

Sizer, Recollections, 1882, 50.

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dictation. Was he less than original? Some of these questions will be answered later in this book, where what Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes had to say about phrenology in earlier venues will be presented. For now, it is worth remembering that Clemens did not reveal his ploy right after conducting his little test on Fowler. In fact, and for reasons unknown, he waited decades before doing so. He wrote to Whyte late in 1906, his autobiographical statements were not discovered until well after he died in 1910, and Eddypus, never completed, was also published posthumously. But his little test did affect how he would now portray the head readers in his writings. In this way, by using fictional characters and humor to express his thoughts and concerns about the head readers, his opinions would be known and discussed worldwide, opening at least some closed eyes.

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chapter 6

Tom, Huck, and the Head Readers

One bill said, “The celebrated Dr. Armand de Montalban, of Paris,” would “lecture on the Science of Phrenology” at such and such a place, on the blank day of blank, at ten cents admission, and furnish charts of character at twenty-five cents apiece. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884)1

Although Samuel Clemens writing as Mark Twain incorporated phrenology in writings before the 1870s, he did not ridicule it. This had been the case in The Innocents Abroad, his travelogue from 1869, and it remained true in his first novel, which he worked on during the early 1870s. Published in 1873, it was titled The Gilded Age. Unlike his other books, he wrote this novel with a co-author, Charles Dudley Warner, who was his neighbor in Hartford.2 In his biography of Mark Twain, Justin Kaplan included a chapter called “Era of Incredible Rottenness.” He put this title in quotation marks because this was how Clemens viewed what was occurring during the post-Civil War period. According to Kaplan, “Mark Twain’s disgust with his times was partly the index of his involvement in them, and his disgust grew increasingly bitter through the 1870s, the decade which was at the core of what he called the Gilded Age.”3 Clemens was more than familiar, with how common materials could be thinly plated with gold, or “gilded,” to make something of little worth look valuable when he came up with the title for this book. It was a perfect term for the era. Although Colonel Sellers with his endless schemes to make money is one of Twain’s most memorable characters, the central figure in the book is Laura Hawkins, a beautiful and talented girl from backwoods Missouri. 1 2

3

Twain, Huckleberry Finn, 1884/2003, 128. Twain and Warner, Gilded Age, 1873. Some of the underhanded dealings involved buying parcels of land sure to soar in price if the railroads could obtain the legislation needed to lay tracks on them. In effect, it was a story of “if you vote for my legislation, I’ll vote for yours, and we’ll both be richer for it.” Kaplan, Mr. Clemens, 1966, 158.

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She marries a dashing soldier fighting for the Confederacy. While he is away, she is enticed by a large salary and Washington’s many amenities to move there and work as a lobbyist. She bears witness to the nonstop graft, corruption, and vote-buying scams that elected officials were engaged in every day. She also discovers that she too has been duped, that her dashing soldier husband was still married. Corruption and spouse betrayal were pervasive at this time, and these facts of life further irked Clemens and Warner, two happily married men dedicated to their wives and families. Phrenology first appears in this novel with Ruth, an intelligent young woman determined to break down barriers by studying medicine. Twain, who knew more than a little about people with sanguine temperaments, could not resist mentioning his own personality type when introducing her. “Inheriting from her father an active brain and the courage to undertake new things,” he wrote, “she had little of his sanguine temperament which blinds one to difficulties and possible failures.”4 He also brought up foreheads. A sloping forehead, many believed, was associated with limited intelligence and more animal-like behaviors. Phrenologists, as noted earlier, had located the organs for our highest mental faculties in the front of the brain, assigning those faculties we share with animals to more posterior locations. Hence, a high, prominent forehead, like that Spurzheim displayed, was a sign of a very intelligent person. A low, sloping forehead signified the opposite. This widely accepted association made its way into The Gilded Age in a chapter in which Twain described people congregating at a small-town church to hear a highly respected politician, Senator Dilworthy. He wrote that the Senator (Figure 6.1) was “a sort of god in the understanding of these people, who never had seen any creature mightier than a county judge.” He then described the considerable pushing, pointing, and screaming that accompanied the accomplished the man’s arrival, with one person shouting, “There! that’s him, with the grand, noble forehead.”5 After conducting his little test and finishing The Gilded Age, Clemens moved beyond just using phrenology to color his verbal portraits, like the one of the Senator with the noble forehead. No longer a young man merely suspicious of itinerant phrenologists always providing feel-good head readings to paying customers, and now considerably less certain about the usefulness of head readings in everyday life, he began ridiculing 4 5

Twain and Warner, Gilded Age, 1873/2017, 201. Twain and Warner, Gilded Age, 1873/2017, 214. Senator Dilworthy was modelled on Samuel C. Pomeroy, a Republican Senator known as a vote buyer, whom Sam knew from his brief stint in Washington. Many readers made the association when the novel was released.

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Figure 6.1  Senator Dilworthy, the sweet-talking politician with the “grand, noble forehead” (from Twain and Warner’s The Gilded Age).

phrenologists, sometimes without mercy. Being an inquisitive native of Missouri, later to be dubbed the “Show-Me State,” he had seen enough with his own eyes to expose his quarry and shoot, albeit with a pen. Given his poor marksmanship, the laws of the day, and the audience he was hoping to educate, bringing down his prey with a pen and ink was consi­ derably wiser than gunning down a hapless phrenologist with a pistol. Of all Twain’s writings from this era, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn best reveal his new, negative feelings about the head readers working the cities and even backwater towns along the rivers in the middle of the country. And it is to these paired classics of American literature that we must now turn.

Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Polly The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published in 1876 (Figure 6.2). Twain worked on this book intermittently for three years, struggling with its contents and organization, and continuously revising passages. He wrote some

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Figure 6.2  Tom Sawyer (1876).

parts in his octagonal study in Elmira, the building that Livy’s sister, Susan Crane, had constructed just for him at Quarry Farm.6 He also worked on it in the study of the house he and Livy leased in Hartford. And he continued with his writing in the magnificent house he built for his family in the same Nook Farm neighborhood. Located at 351 Farmington Avenue, the family moved into this fairyland castle, which had every conceivable amenity including a bevy of servants, in 1874.7 It would be here that Livy would raise their daughters Susy and Clara, and where he would receive and entertain a steady stream of visitors. The house would later become a museum and, for some visitors, a shrine. But the costs of building and maintaining it would also make it a financial burden, one of several that would lead him to file for bankruptcy before the end of the century. Initially, Clemens thought he was writing a “book for boys, pure and simple.” But while completing it he realized that it also appealed to young 6 7

Now part of the campus of Elmira College. The Clemens house had nineteen rooms, including five bathrooms, a library, and a semicircular glass conservatory. It also had indoor plumbing (a new development) and ostentatious furnishings that added to its ambiance and uniqueness. The Clemenses hired servants to care for their house, themselves, their children, and guests: a cook, a butler, a housemaid, a coachman, a nursemaid, a l­ aundress, and possibly others. The upkeep of the house required a large, steady cash flow, which proved challenging at times, because of the owner’s poor business decisions and rash of bad investments.

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girls, adults, and a wider circle than just Americans wanting to be transported back to a small, Midwestern, river town during the steamboat era. To his credit, this adventure story broke all previous molds, including introducing regional and group dialects, which other authors had shunned. In so doing, it added new features to the American literary landscape – sounds deeply rooted in the ways ordinary people and children spoke far from the big cities on the Atlantic coast. This was a new sort of distinctly American literature with a realism that even readers on other continents found fascinating and entertaining. Clemens felt sure he had achieved yet another milestone with the book, though this amounted to little more than a footnote in publishing history. He witnessed how many words per minute could be written on a new, time-saving machine while on a trip to Boston in 1874. He was so impressed with the “type machine” that he paid $125 to buy his own typewriter. In a 1907 autobiographical dictation, he claimed to be “the first person in the world to apply the type machine to literature.” But when pointing to Tom Sawyer as the breakthrough book, he was leaving out an important detail. Although he might have typed parts of Tom Sawyer on his machine, this was not the case for the whole manuscript. He found typing so arduous that he preferred to write out or dictate his material and have family members and assistants do the typing for him. In this context, his Life on the Mississippi was, in the words of one of his biographers, “likely the first book ever typed before being sent to the printer,” though Samuel Clemens did not do the typing.8 Tom Sawyer is a mischievous fourteen-year-old orphan living in St. Petersburg, a small town on the Mississippi River, during the 1840s. Clemens’s choice of names for his fictional character came from a San Francisco fireman he had met in 1863, a local hero who had been one of his drinking and gambling friends. But Tom’s character is very much Sam in his early teens, a boy living life to its fullest in Hannibal.9 Tom does all sorts of devilish things that rambunctious boys in rural America then enjoyed doing, such as smoking a pipe, playing hooky, and running away to go swimming. He is fiercely independent and not about to be confined to a schoolroom, coerced into attending church services, or forced to spend his valuable time doing chores not to his liking. After all, why whitewash a fence when you can sweet talk others into doing this sort of work for you – ideally even paying you for the privilege? 8 9

Powers, Mark Twain, 2006, 363. Blair, Twain’s Hannibal, 1969.

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Tom is not totally deficient in what the phrenologists were calling the moral faculties. Moreover, he is very much a dreamer and a romantic for a boy of his age. His love interest is the new girl in town, the pretty but somewhat snobbish Becky Thatcher, a character based on Annie Laurie Hawkins, a blonde girl who lived just across the street from his own house. She was seven when he first met her. Coming from a proper family (her father is a judge), Becky wants nothing to do with the lovestruck boy from the wrong side of the tracks with a less-than-stellar reputation. She repeatedly ignores and brushes off his advances. And her actions send him into a swoon. Seeing Tom’s “charm of life was gone” and that “there was nothing but dreariness left,” his well-meaning Aunt Polly, whom Clemens modeled on his mother, tried her best to help him out of his depression. Yet she is clueless about what might be causing his melancholia. Hence, she turned to some of the wondrous cures she had heard about. Aunt Polly is, in fact, “infatuated with patent medicines and all new-fangled methods of producing health or mending it.” Besides, she is “a subscriber for all the ‘Health’ periodicals and phrenological frauds; and all the solemn ignorance they were inflated with was breath to her nostrils.” In fact, Tom continues, “She was simple-hearted and honest as the day was long, and so she was an easy victim.”10 After being presented as a scam targeting gullible people in this section, phrenology resurfaces later in the book. The author again draws on what he had witnessed as a boy growing up in Hannibal, though it is hard to know if he as a young observer really thought the phrenologist was as boring as he is now made out to be (and would be shown to be in Eddypus). Perhaps influenced by what he experienced when he went to Lorenzo Fowler’s office in London or by what he encountered in a book published by Fowler & Wells, he now wrote: “A phrenologist and a mesmerizer came and went again and left the village duller and drearier than ever.”11 Twain introduced Huckleberry Finn as Tom’s more knowledgeable and free-spirited friend in Tom Sawyer. The primary model for the even more carefree Huck was once again a real person, his friend and neighbor Tom Blankenship, a boy with little schooling, an abundance of “street smarts,” a fertile imagination, and a notoriously drunken father. Graced with leadership qualities but too often at the mercy of his lower faculties, his childhood chum and idol would display an amazing propensity for getting into – and somehow out of – dangerous situations. He would get first billing in the book that is usually considered the sequel to Tom Sawyer, one even more critical of the head readers – and one that will reveal some of their many tricks. 10 11

Twain, Tom Sawyer, 1876/2011, 73 (italics added). Twain, Tom Sawyer, 1876/2011, 124.

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Huck and the Hucksters Huck played an important role when the boys set off hunting for Injun Joe’s hidden gold in Tom Sawyer. But Clemens held back before honoring Huck with his own book. In the interim, his creator spent more time abroad, notably a good part of 1878 and 1879 collecting material in Germany, Switzerland, and elsewhere for A Tramp Abroad.12 This Mark Twain travel book was published in 1880, the same year the Clemenses welcomed Jane (“Jean”), their last child, into their family. He also worked on completing The Prince and the Pauper in 1880, an enchanting, moralistic story with a happy ending, during the interim.13 And then there was Life on the Mississippi, which began in 1875 as a series of seven essays called Old Times on the Mississippi and was almost three times longer when it came off the presses in 1883.14 Hence, he was unusually busy writing and revising, as well as tending to family needs, investments, and other business ventures, between the start and the considerably later completion of his Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Finally, to the delight of rambunctious boys and fans of Tom Sawyer everywhere, he completed the manuscript he had started during the summer of 1876 and had worked on sporadically since that time. His Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was first released in Britain and Canada in 1884, eight years after Huck appeared in his first adventure story for boys (Figure 6.3). An American edition followed a year later, the difference having to do with copyrights, a thorny subject for Clemens, who was fighting for better copyright protection laws. Interestingly, Tom Sawyer was not the runaway success its author hoped it would be when it came out. It did well enough, selling 27,000 copies in its first year. Nonetheless, this paled when compared to Roughing It, which had three times the sales after one year. It was only after Huckleberry Finn came out that sales of Tom Sawyer really took off. Even today, these two books have remained paired like Siamese twins in the minds of school children, university students, and other readers around the world. The new book drew heavily from Tom Sawyer, along with some of the memories and notes compiled for Life on the Mississippi. And as with Tom’s, Huck’s adventures start in fictional St. Petersburg, Missouri. Nonetheless, Twain devoted most of this book to the challenges and dangers Huck faced going down the Mississippi River after running away from his drunken and abusive “Pap.” Dates are not given, but Huck is again a boy in his 12 13 14

Twain, Tramp Abroad, 1880a. Twain, Prince and the Pauper, 1881. Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883/2012.

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Figure 6.3  Huckleberry Finn (1884).

mid-teens, perhaps fourteen years old, the same as Tom Sawyer, or just a bit older. The story unfolds before the Civil War, most likely during the late 1840s or early 1850s, corresponding to the author’s time in Hannibal. Huck starts on his Mississippi River adventures after faking his own death and running away from his abusive father. He chooses to hide out on nearby Jackson Island. While in hiding, he encounters another runaway, a slave from Hannibal named Jim, who is a good-hearted, trusting, and moral individual. Believing he is about to be sold “down the river,” where his life would be worse than in the slave-holding state of Missouri, Jim had decided to try to make his way to a northern state. He hopes that he will be reunited with his family in a free state at some time in the future. Working together, the two renegades formulate a plan. They would float down the Mississippi River to its junction with the Ohio River, the waterway that would take them to the northeast, where Jim either could begin life anew or work his way farther north into Canada, a country that had outlawed slavery. Plan in hand, the two runaways push off on a raft. But owing to foggy conditions, their craft drifts by the junction of the Mississippi with the Ohio River in Cairo, Illinois. Huck now realizes that they have ventured too far south, into the dreaded slave-holding states

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where, if detected, it would be a disaster for Jim and serious trouble for him, having assisted a runaway slave. While making their way past some small settlements on the Arkansas side of the river, their raft is spotted by two unsavory men fleeing a miserable riverfront town, a place where “the streets were just mud.” These disreputable characters manage to make their way onto the raft while Jim goes into hiding. Huck now tries everything to get these unwanted “guests” to leave, only to find that they have no intention of being dislodged. It is here that Clemens shows more of his newfound disdain for the head readers. He takes what he had written in Tom Sawyer to a higher level, revealing some of what the frauds passing themselves off as head readers do to bilk the public. This part of the story starts with Huck listening to the two passengers boasting about what each did for a living, with their bragging showing how they would lie and cheat at any opportunity to get money. These exchanges would set the stage for what he would include in a later chapter about how easy it was for anyone to pretend to be a knowledgeable head reader. With italics now added for effect, the younger man states: “Jour[neyman] printer by trade; do a little in patent medicines; theatre-actor – tragedy, you know; take a turn at mesmerism and phrenology …; sling a lecture sometimes – oh, I do lots of things – most anything that comes handy, so it ain’t work.” Not to be outdone, the “baldhead” chimes in: “I’ve done considerable in the doctoring way in my time. Layin’ on o’ hands is my best holt – for cancer and paralysis, and sich things; and I k’n tell a fortune pretty good when I’ve got somebody along to find out the facts for me. Preaching is my line, too, and workin’ camp-meetin’s, and missionaryin’ around.”15 The expression “layin’ on o’ hands” refers to what once had been called the “king’s touch.” This medical myth had long been associated with “divine” rulers. The belief was that these exalted men, being almost godlike, could make sick subjects better merely by touching them. This myth about the healing powers of the king’s touch had been challenged and deflated during the Age of Enlightenment. More recently, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes had presented it as laughable in his writings and lectures. But now, as recounted by Mark Twain, the practice of touching, widely used by faith healers, was still prevalent in small towns in rural America. It was, in fact, in such a setting that the “baldhead” was using it to “cure” people. Then again, both unsavory characters claimed to be nobility! 15

Twain, Huckleberry Finn, 1884/2003, 121 (italics added).

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The younger man explains that his great-grandfather was the eldest son of the Duke of Bridgewater, who had come to America, where he died, with his first son, his father. The Duke’s other son survived and he usurped the title and the estates that should rightfully have been passed on to him, the real Duke, even though he was an infant at the time. In brief, standing before Huck was none other than the real Duke of Bridgewater. His companion is not about to be outdone, and he shows his prickliness when the younger man asks to be addressed as “Your Grace,” “My Lord,” or “Your Lordship.” Hearing this, the older man proclaims: “I am the late Dauphin” – the “pore disappeared Dauphin, Looy the Seventeen, son of Looy the Sixteen and Marry Antonette.” “Yes gentlemen,” he continues, “you see before you, in blue jeans and misery, the wanderin’, exiled, trampled-on, and sufferin’ rightful King of France.” Bearing this higher title, he asked to be addressed as “Your Majesty” and to be served first when they dined.16 The linking of the various “professions” these men were engaged in with having advanced information about their intended targets is noteworthy. Clemens had personally witnessed how fortune tellers relied on advanced information and could look bad without it. Similarly, when he had identified himself as Mark Twain, who was then widely known for his sense of humor, Lorenzo Fowler supposedly discovered things about him that had evaded him when his client was just some “John B. Smith”. Consistent with what he had experienced in London, Clemens had become certain that having prior information about a person from printed matter, eavesdropping, spies, or by other means, was one of the reasons why phrenologists could seem so proficient when merely pretending to be focusing on skulls. In effect, he was now using Huckleberry Finn to warn and educate the public about this kind of trickery. With an abundance of street smarts and having a devious mind of his own, Huck knows that the two men are charlatans. As he expresses it, “these liars warn’t no kings nor dukes at all, but just low-down humbugs and frauds.”17 But he could not say or do anything more than try even harder to entice them to leave the raft. If he mentioned them to the authorities in Parkville, Arkansas, they could send men to the raft, where they might discover and capture Jim. They could also take him into custody for hiding and helping a runaway slave. In a later chapter of this book, the Duke explains how he sometimes passed himself off as a phrenologist. He knew that anyone could pretend 16 17

Twain, Huckleberry Finn, 1884/2003, 123–124. Twain, Huckleberry Finn, 1884/2003, 125.

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to read heads for a living or some extra cash, and he had already successfully played the game. He now went down into his carpet-bag, and fetched up a lot of little printed bills and read them out loud. One bill said, “The celebrated Dr. Armand de Montalban, of Paris,” would “lecture on the Science of Phrenology” at such and such a place, on the blank day of blank, at ten cents admission, and “furnish charts of character at twenty-five cents apiece.” The Duke said that was him. … In other bills he had a lot of other names and done wonderful things, like finding water and gold with a “divining-rod,” “dissipating witch spells,” and so on.18

The two frauds, always looking for ways to get more money, were willing to try anything they could on the ignorant, unsophisticated people living in the wretched, shabby towns along the river. And, as seen through the Duke’s eyes, phrenology was an ideal business for a sweet-talking man with some acting in his blood to exploit. Twain relates how the conmen discover Jim, successfully abduct him, and put him up for auction in Parkville while Huck was off the raft (Figure 6.4). After Huck returns to the raft and discovers Jim missing, the story takes on elements of an ancient Greek tragedy. Like choosing between saving a loved one or saving an entire village, the story’s hero is forced to make a hard choice – with each alternative having serious and even unthinkable consequences. Huck could write a letter to Miss Watson, Jim’s owner in St. Petersburg, telling her what had happened and where her stolen property could be retrieved. This would, of course, be the proper thing for a law-abiding person to do. But the more he thinks about Jim as a loving and trusting human being, a man who had called him “the best friend” he had ever had, the less Huck is interested in traveling down the path of righteousness. His preference is for an alternative. Huck now decides that he will do everything in his power to free Jim, even if it means breaking the law and committing an unpardonable sin. With his decision now made, he tears up the letter he was writing to the widow Watson and utters the most famous words in the novel. Huck’s seven monosyllabic words reflect Mark Twain’s feelings at this stage of his life, and they have been remembered ever since. “All right, then,” Huck tells himself, “I’ll go to hell.” Twain’s rebellious boy will now permit his “moral sense” or “moral sentiments” to rise to the fore, suppressing his less noble propensities and more 18

Twain, Huckleberry Finn, 1884/2003, 128.

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Figure 6.4  The phony King and Duke at an Arkansas slave auction.

animal-like instincts.19 The Fowlers, Wells, and other American phrenologists included several organs under the umbrella terms “moral sense” or “moral sentiments,” which relate to conscience and knowing right from wrong. Some of the moral faculties on their usual list of thirty-seven organs, along with their numbers and synonyms, are: 13. Self-Esteem (dignity); 14. Firmness 19

This point is made in Blair, Twain and Huck, 1960; also see Quirk, Human Nature, 2007, 153–157.

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(tenacity of will); 15. Conscientiousness (love of right); 16. Hope-Expectation (enterprise); and 19. Benevolence (goodness, sympathy).20 Although Mark Twain did not provide a good description of Huck’s head, George Sumner Weaver, following George Combe, had written that the moral group is located in a middle position (above the ears) at the top of the head. Hence, as stated by Weaver, “If the top of the head is wide and high,” we can surmise that “the moral group is powerful,” whereas if “the base of the head be wide and deep, the animal group is strong,” and “if the front of the head is wide and long, the intellectual group is correspondingly energetic.”21 The remainder of Huckleberry Finn deals with how Huck, with his aroused moral sense, and Tom Sawyer, who suddenly appears on the scene, join forces to rescue Jim. Although the two could steal the key to unlock the door of the cabin where Jim is imprisoned, the boys opt for a more swashbuckling kind of rescue, like those found in penny thrillers. They decide to employ disguises and props and use bloodhounds and real bullets. One will make its way through Tom’s leg, an unexpected consequence of their heroic scheming. Not only do the boys manage to free Jim, but with their help the phony King and Duke are caught, tarred and feathered, and “railed” out of town.22 That Clemens might have had mesmerists and phrenologists in mind when he came up with this punishment for the two scoundrels is an intriguing possibility. It would have been in line with how he would talk and write about wanting to inflict pain on, and even annihilate, the wretches he believed were cheating or taking advantage of him (and others) in different ways. And so this novel, harrowing at times, comes close to ending like Tom Sawyer did eight years earlier: with grit, courage, and heroism – an altogether glorious ending for imaginative readers. But there is a twist. Tom now reveals that Jim was freed before they engaged in their daring rescue. The widow Watson had died two months earlier, and she had set him free in her will! Tom knew this but had held back, telling his idol, “I wanted the adventure of it.” With this revelation, Tom proposes that he, Huck, and Jim head west, “because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”23 20 21 22 23

For example, in S. Wells, Character, 1868. Weaver, Mental Science, 1876, 54. Literally tied to a wooden fence rail. Twain, Huckleberry Finn, 1884/2003, 293.

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The reviews of Huckleberry Finn have become almost as legendary as some of the passages in the book. As might be imagined, the storyline did not go over nearly as well in the South as it did in the North, where there was great sympathy for the plight of the slaves before, during, and after the Civil War. Yet, although Twain presented Jim as a man of high values and deep feelings, traits that appealed to abolitionists, there were readers, librarians, and school boards in northern states that were upset with the vocabulary he dared to use. When the Concord Public Library in Massachusetts banned the book in 1885, it drew considerably more attention to both The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Their author predicted that this action and related negative publicity would boost sales, even sending them skyrocketing, which is precisely what happened.24 Clemens was, for at least a while, able to fill his nearly depleted coffers with a badly needed cash infusion. And unlike the phony Duke and King, he did not make his windfall by indulging in trickery!

Phrenological Life on the Mississippi “Mark Twain” did not lampoon phrenology or even employ phrenological terms in all of the books he authored from the 1880s. He did, however, have another heralded success that included phrenology during this decade. This was his Life on the Mississippi. As noted in Chapter 4, this masterpiece was mainly based on his four years of piloting steamboats. This period started in 1858 when Bixby gave him the wheel and he began his training to become a riverboat pilot, and it ended in 1861, shortly after the start of America’s Civil War. Needing to refresh his memory and gather more information about the lengthy river, its towns, people, legends, and rich history, Clemens decided to return to the country’s interior during the spring of 1882. The result was six weeks of collecting more facts and stories (with the assistance of a stenographer), while refreshing faded memories. Some of the phrenology in this book, which is a mixture of travelogue, history, and embellished stories, stemmed from a fight he was having with a powerful and influential man in New York City. Whitelaw Reid (Figure 6.5) was a newspaperman approximately 1,000 miles and a world apart 24

The administrators of the Concord Public Library were not alone when it came to panning Huckleberry Finn. The book was also trashed in the Boston Advertiser and the Springfield Republican, and author Louisa May Alcott branded it smut. Many editors have attempted and are still attempting to “sanitize” the book, which has remained controversial since its release.

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Figure 6.5  Whitelaw Reid (1837–1912), editor of the New York Tribune.

from St. Louis, Clemens’s point of departure for his river journey back in time.25 In 1872, Reid had succeeded Horace Greeley as editor-in-chief of the New York Tribune, a coveted position he would hold until 1905. Interestingly, though only tangentially related to the fight that transpired, Greeley was also interested in phrenology. Clemens had been on good terms with Reid, who had written a glowing review of The Innocents Abroad on August 27, 1869. He had called this travel book “pure fun” and admired how its “freshness is wonderfully sustained,” despite its length. But in 1873, their friendship began to crack when he could not convince Reid to write glowingly about The Gilded Age in his newspaper. Reid contended, and rightfully so, that it was a bad idea for a friend to serve as a reviewer. Things got worse during the early 1880s, when Charles Dudley Warner, the co-author of The Gilded Age, intimated to Clemens that Reid might be out to get him, utilizing the Tribune as a vehicle for tarnishing Mark Twain’s glowing reputation. Not being one to brush negative perceptions aside, and with his explosive temper, Clemens told Warner that Reid was “a contemptible cur” and he would have “nothing more to do with him.” Whitelaw became 25

Gribben, Temperaments, 1972, 59–61.

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“Outlaw.” And with his anger boiling over, he then decided to punch back. He set forth to attack Reid with his pen, spending three weeks collecting the information he thought he would use to bring Reid to his knees, while also considering litigation. His planned vehicle for revenge was going to be a scathing biography of Reid, one illustrated by none other than the famous artist Thomas Nast, whom he believed was the best man anywhere for the job. But unlike other biographies, which usually begin with a person’s childhood, Clemens thought Reid’s boyhood was “of no consequence,” to which he added caustically, nor “his manhood, which never existed.” Clemens intended to include a phrenological chart of Reid’s faculties, accompanied by a stand-out illustration showing his enormous “Selfish Sentiments” in his exposé. To achieve these ends, he consulted his copy of George Combe’s Notes on the United States During a Phrenological Visit in 1838–39–40, which he had marked up.26 He was particularly taken by the introduction to Combe’s first volume, which dealt with the individual organs of mind and their loci.27 Clemens wrote that Caution was Reid’s dominant propensity and that Constructiveness was only manifested in his “lying and slander.” He added that his organ for “Personal Honor” was minuscule – its skull marker being “too small to read.” In so doing, he was taking artistic liberties. Although the Fowlers and their minions had an organ group called “Selfish Propensities,” which included Vitativeness, Combativeness, Destructiveness, Alimentiveness, Acquisitiveness, and Secretiveness, and four “Selfish Sentiments,” namely Cautiousness, Approbativeness, Self-Esteem, and Firmness, they did not list a higher faculty called “Personal Honor.”28 This was his own contribution to the phrenological dictionary. Nonetheless, after much bluster, name-calling (e.g., “skunk,” idiot,” “missing link”), and blowing off considerable steam, Clemens decided not to assassinate Reid after all. He recognized that what he was writing could prove to be even more detrimental “to the fool who wrote it.” Following his wife Livy’s advice, he had reread what was printed in the Tribune and had two other men (his business partner Charlie Webster and John Russell Young of the Herald) conduct independent investigations. After assessing the new information, he realized that he was blowing things out of proportion – wildly out of proportion. There were a few almost insignificant 26 27 28

Combe, Phrenological Visit, 1838–1840. Gribben, Temperaments, 1972, 60. For how the Fowlers grouped the faculties, see, for example, O. Fowler, Practical Phrenology, 1840, 45–51.

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instances where Reid seemed to have been critical of him, but the newspaperman was never malicious or engaging in anything like a campaign to cut off his legs or other body parts. “Confound it,” he admitted in a letter to William Howells at the Atlantic Monthly on April 16, 1882, “I could have earned ten thousand dollars with infinitely less trouble.”29 With Reid pardoned by the very man who wanted to be his executioner, Clemens pondered what to do with his weeks of research and creative writing. He was not a stingy man, but he was not one to let his efforts to pulverize an opponent go to waste. Consequently, he returned to what he had written and, after editing selected parts, incorporated some of this material into the manuscript that would ultimately become Life on the Mississippi. Robert Styles was the steamboat pilot of the Gold Dust, which he boarded upon his return to St. Louis in 1882. In Chapter 24 of Life on the Mississippi, Styles tells the inquisitive and seemingly unknown passenger boarding his ship some things that had a chance of being true and some things that were blatant whoppers. Having at least a small chance of being true was how a ridge of rocks stretching along the river for two miles had recently been washed away. But what Styles had to say about government ships being commissioned “to dredge out alligators,” so the large boats would not run aground on the giant reptiles inhabiting the river closer to New Orleans, was obviously pure fiction. Styles also provided some steamboat history. And here he talked about the sunken Cyclone. This riverboat, he related, was captained by Tom Ballou, “the most immortal liar that ever I struck.” And it was Ballou who now became the target of some of the invectives Clemens had conjured up when going after “Outlaw” Reid. He became a person who “had more selfish organs than any seven men in the world – all packed in the stern-sheets of his skull, of course, where they belonged. They weighed down the back of his head so that it made his nose tilt up in the air. People thought it was vanity, but it wasn’t, it was malice.”30 This brief description stands in contrast to how Senator Dilworthy was described in The Gilded Age. The Senator was thought to be an honorable and gifted man by the crowd that showed up to hear him speak at a rural church, a perception they believed was undoubtedly confirmed by his “grand, noble forehead.”31 Tom Ballou, in contrast, was a selfish, malicious man, consistent with strong organs for the more 29 30 31

Paine, Letters, 1917, 1: 417. Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883/2012, 171. Twain and Warner, Gilded Age, 1873/2017, 214.

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primitive propensities in the posterior part of his head. With his enormous posterior organs, his skull bulged in the rear, his nose tilted up, and he had the physiognomy associated with a man who should not be trusted. Styles, the pilot of the Gold Dust, was a perceptive man, and he had immediately recognized Clemens when he boarded his boat incognito. And knowing full well who his passenger was, he had decided to have some fun with him before letting him know he had been recognized. As conveyed in Life on the Mississippi, Styles went on to tell him: “Trying to play yourself for a stranger and an innocent! – why, I knew you before you had spoken seven words.”32 Clearly, Styles proved to be a better observer than Lorenzo Fowler had been in London! A day into the trip, Styles smiled and handed his famous passenger the wheel in the pilothouse. This transfer of the wheel from one pilot to another brought back wonderful memories – and perhaps even a few tears. Clemens surveyed the river and remembered some of its landmarks while catching the currents and safely steering the boat downstream to New Orleans, much as he had done before the Civil War. Another of the highlights of this voyage was an opportunity to meet Horace Bixby, his old mentor, in New Orleans. The press nicely covered this emotional reunion. River life had changed with the advent of the railroads, and the two men embraced, both knowing that the golden age of steamboats plying the river was now a thing of the past. Although phrenology was also in sharp decline by the 1880s, Clemens continued to draw on his knowledge of it in other chapters of Life on the Mississippi. He used it as before to add color and humor to his portraits, but now he was finding less need to lampoon it or educate the public about the head readers. In Chapter 41, which deals with his steamboat’s arrival in New Orleans, he remarked: “The city is well outfitted with progressive men – thinking, sagacious, long-headed men.”33 Whether he knew that Fowler and Wells had visited New Orleans at least twice, and had been offering phrenological courses in the city while he was piloting boats up and down the river, is uncertain.34 The purveyors of everything phrenological had even run advertisements in the Daily Picayune, which he read while he was there, some appearing on February 27–28, 1858. When heading back up the river to Keokuk, Twain pointed out that this Iowa city was the home of “that erratic genius, Henry Clay Dean.” 32 33 34

Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883/2012, 171. Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883/2012, 260. See Gribben, Twain, 1972, 61, n. 33; Gribben, Literary Resources, 2019, 158, n. 45.

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Dean was a Methodist Episcopal preacher, lawyer, orator, and politician. He was critical of slavery, the Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln’s administration. Twain described him as totally disheveled, with clothes like those of “a wharf-rat, except that they were raggier.” He even cited an 1861 depiction of how Dean addressed an audience wearing damaged trousers, a coat that was too short, and a soiled shirt that stuck out below a poorly fitting vest. He then turned to Dean’s head. He wrote that he wore a “small, stiff brimmed soldier-cap hung on a corner of the bump of – whichever bump it was.”35 But although this hat and bump statement portended more about phrenology, nothing more followed about his skull or the unnamed large organ that supported his hat. He related, however, that people thought Dean was an escaped lunatic when he began to speak. Still, the man he described as a ragged wharf rat was able to win their hearts. Clemens referred to his own phrenological traits and organs in several places in Life on the Mississippi. He described how, on “one matchless summer’s day, I was bowling down the bend above island 66, brimful of self-conceit and carrying my nose as high as a giraffe’s.”36 And he loosely referred to some of his deficient phrenological faculties in another part, remarking: “If I had really known what I was about to require of my faculties, I should not have had the courage to begin.”37 Interestingly, he also asked whether being a good judge of character owed more to nature or to training and experience. Gall had made a strong argument for nature trumping nurture, though his disciples promoting phrenology as the path to a happier and healthier life were more inclined to think that he might have underestimated the effects of training and experience on the brain, and consequently on behavior. Both Samuel Clemens and his creation Mark Twain placed themselves solidly in Gall’s camp. Twain, for example, emphasized in Life on the Mississippi that “judges of men are born, not made.”38 He would retain this belief about the inherent stability of basic personality traits and temperaments to his dying day, while still recognizing that inborn talents require nurturing environments to manifest themselves fully. In Chapter 7, we shall see how Samuel Clemens continued to involve himself with phrenology. Among other things, it will show that he consented to at least two more head readings. Both would take place back home in America, and both would be well documented. 35 36 37 38

Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883/2012, 339. Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883/2012, 111. Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883/2012, 66. Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883/2012, 144.

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chapter 7

More Head Readings and a Phrenological Farewell

He has very ardent affections, strong love of approbation, sense of justice, firmness, kindness and ability to read character; with small self-esteem, love of gain, or inclination to the supernatural. Clemens’s head reading January 4, 18851

Samuel Clemens’s fascination with phrenology lasted from his childhood in Missouri to his final days as a celebrity on the East Coast. And, as his fame grew, phrenologists grew more fascinated with him. In this regard, Clemens was not unique among famous American writers. The phrenologists were also interested in the heads of other novelists and poets. Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville, to name just three literary greats, had highly desired heads. But, as the century scarred by the protracted Civil War was ending and the new one was beginning, Clemens seems to have had the most sought-after head of all. This chapter will examine the head readings he had in 1885 and 1901. It will also present what a surviving Fowler wrote about Clemens’s phrenological organs when he died in 1910.

The Cincinnati Head Reading In 1884, following the publication of Life on the Mississippi, “Mark Twain” went on the lecture circuit to bolster his finances.2 He was joined by George Washington Cable (Figure 7.1), a southerner Clemens had met on his return to New Orleans in 1882. Cable had been in the Confederate cavalry but was now attaining a considerable following in the North with his novels and tales sympathetic to the plight of Negros in the south. His most famous work was Uncle Remus, which had recently been published as 1 2

W. Clemens, Twain, 1892, 180. For Twain’s lectures, see Fatout, Lecture Circuit, 1960b; Lorch, Trouble, 1968.

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Figure 7.1  A poster announcing the Twain and Cable tour in Montreal, about six weeks after Clemens had his head read in Cincinnati.

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a book (in 1881). Cable agreed to read what he had written about the “Tar Baby” to audiences across the United States and in Canada, joining Mark Twain, who had top billing.3 Their barnstorming performances across the United States were organized and promoted by Major James B. Pond, who served as their agent. He advertised their acts as the “Twins of Genius Tour.” They were a curiously-assorted pair: Cable was of orthodox religion, exact as to habits, neat, prim, all that Clemens was not. In the beginning Cable undertook to read the Bible aloud to Clemens each evening, but this part of the day’s program was presently omitted by request. If they spent Sunday in a town, Cable was up bright and early visiting various churches and Sunday-schools, while Mark Twain remained at the hotel, in bed, reading or asleep.4

Cable was no slouch on the stage. But with his wry sense of humor, pauses, understatements, captivating drawl, and storylines, Twain generated more laughter and longer rounds of applause from the people listening to him as he read selected pieces from an advance copy of Huckleberry Finn and told funny stories.5 After watching Clemens on stage, William Howells called him “the most consummate public performer I ever saw,” adding how “it was an incomparable pleasure to hear him lecture.”6 Clemens was also top dog financially, making $16,000 on tour, more than three times as much as Cable. Their 10,000-mile, four-month tour started close to his landmark home in Hartford. Their first stop was New Haven, on November 5, 1884. Various modes of transportation then shuttled the two performers between some seventy cities. Major stops included Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, DC, on the East Coast; Louisville, St. Louis, and Cincinnati, in the Midwest; and even Toronto and Montreal to the north, in Canada. They also stopped in many smaller towns, two being places where Clemens had lived: Hannibal, Missouri, and Keokuk, Iowa. While in Cincinnati, they performed at the Odeon Concert Hall to a packed house. As reported in the Cincinnati Inquirer, Clemens came across as “self-possessed,” funny, and “almost next to impossible” to describe. Ozias Pond had replaced his brother James as their agent before the performers arrived in the city on the banks of the Ohio River. He 3 4 5 6

Cable, Uncle Remus, 1881. Paine, Letters, 1917, 2: 447. For details of the tour, see Lorch, Lecture Tours, 1966, 161–182. Howell, Twain, 1910, 51.

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kept a diary of what transpired in the “Queen City.”7 Under “Sunday, January 4th [1855],” he wrote that Twain had breakfast with someone from the Commercial Gazette and afterward “had his head examined.” Then, in quotation marks to suggest he might have taken his next five words directly from Twain, he added: “There was nothing in it.” Will M. Clemens, an unrelated contemporary, provided more detailed information.8 He noted that Clemens’s examiner was Edgar Charles Beall, a phrenologically oriented physician (Figure 7.2). He did not state whether Beall approached Clemens or whether Clemens sought Beall because of his continuing interest in phrenology. Most likely, it was the former since newspapers were then employing Beall to provide character sketches of local and national celebrities. Beall was a native of Cincinnati. He had been certified by the American Institute of Phrenology in New York before returning to his hometown to obtain his medical degree in 1877. In 1884, the Phrenological Journal and Life Illustrated included a “Field Notice” from the American Institute of Phrenology informing readers that, “from all we learn, he is doing a good business, and the leading papers in that city speak well of him and his talent as a phrenologist.”9 Beall also engaged audiences as a lecturer and wrote books and articles about phrenology.10 Beall and N. W. Fitz-Gerald would acquire controlling stock in Fowler & Wells eleven years later. And for a while, Beall would edit the Phrenological Journal. But his focus on that cold January day was on the man billed as Mark Twain. He knew reading his head would be a memorable event in his career, a highlight for any phrenologist. Beall first analyzed his subject’s temperament, noting his general appearance and almost certainly asking some questions. He then turned to his skull, looking for bumps that signified the strengths of his underlying organs of mind. Left unmentioned is whether he used calipers and a ruler to guide him to areas over the smaller and more obscure cortical organs, such as those just above the eye sockets. “Some years ago in making a phrenological examination of Mark Twain,” Will Clemens began in his coverage of the head reading, “Professor Beall of Cincinnati made a report.” He distinguished between “wit” and “humor,” writing that wit “is primarily an intellectual perception of incongruity or unexpected relations” and the idea that something 7 8 9 10

Pond, Diary, 1885 (now in the New York Public Library). W. Clemens, Twain, 1892, 176–180. Anon., Field Notes, 1884, 195. Beall, Brain, 1881; Beall, Life Sexual, 1905.

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Figure 7.2  Phrenologist Edgar C. Beall (1853–1930), who read Mark Twain’s head in 1885.

is ludicrous must also involve “the affective faculty of mirthfulness.” Humor, he continued, “introduces another element – namely secretiveness,” … which “enables a joker to ‘keep a straight face’ while telling a story.” He then presented the rest of Beall’s report verbatim. Selected parts read as follows: Mark Twain is excellent in wit, but super-excellent in humor. Secretiveness is very marked in the diameter of his head just above the ears, and is indicated also by the width of his nostrils, the nearly closed eyes, compressed lips, slow, guarded manner of speech, etc. His nose is of the “apprehensive” type in its great length and somewhat hooked point, but it is not thick enough above the nostrils to indicate a taste for commerce. This “apprehensive” or cautious nasal organ … might seem an anomaly in this case but for the explanation that cautiousness and secretiveness are essential ingredients in genuine humor. On this principle we can account for the temperament of our great humorist, which is not the laughing, fat, rotund vital, but rather the spare, angular mental, or mental-motive, which is favorable to hard sense, logic, general intelligence and insight into human nature. His intellect is well balanced, having a strong foundation of perceptive faculties which gather details with the fidelity of a camera.

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He has also a large upper forehead, giving philosophical power, ability to generalize, reason, plan, and see a long way ahead. The middle centers, or memory of events, criticism and comparison, are also well developed. His eyes are rather deeply set, and his language is subordinate to his thought. The hollow temples indicate but little music, and mirthfulness, at the upper corners of the forehead, is by no means remarkable. Ideality or love of beauty is only fair. The head measures 221/2 inches, which is half an inch less than the average intellectual giant, but the fiber of the whole man is fine, close and strong, and the cerebral combination is of a very available sort. He has very ardent affections, strong love of approbation, sense of justice, firmness, kindness and ability to read character; with small self-esteem, love of gain, or inclination to the supernatural. Knowledge of the world and interest in humanity are his leading traits, and, altogether, he is a phenomenal man of whom Americans may well be proud.11

The term “motive-mental temperament” is interesting, given that Samuel Clemens had identified his temperament as “sanguine” in his 1855 notebook and repeatedly alluded to his sanguine temperament. By this time, however, the classification scheme had changed, at least for Fowler and Wells and their ardent followers.12 In the newer schema, “motive,” as in movement, replaced “bilious” (or fibrous). It was associated with the musculature and was used to describe energetic, determined, and persistent people. As for “mental,” this was now the replacement term for “nervous,” the temperament most closely associated with the brain and, more broadly, the nervous system. This temperament characterizes individuals dominated by thought and reason, who also tend to be perceptive and emotional. The third temperament was now called “vital.” This was a combination of the “sanguine” and “lymphatic” temperaments of the past, and was most closely associated with the digestive system, although it also involved the pulmonary, lymphatic, and vascular systems. The vital temperament, as Beall recognized, was by no means the temperament of the famous man he was now examining.

The Connecticut Yankee In 1889, four years after this head reading, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court made its debut.13 This Mark Twain novel featured Hank Morgan, a well-meaning, innovative man from Connecticut who found 11 12 13

W. Clemens, Twain, 1892, 178–180. Anon., Temperaments, 1858. For Twain’s temperament, see Quirk, Human Nature, 2007. Twain, Connecticut Yankee, 1889.

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himself transported back to sixth-century England. Hank is appalled by the dreadful feudal conditions, one being how hard the peasants are being forced to work just to stay alive. Two others are how the downtrodden classes accept being beaten into subservience and how ignorant they are about the world around them. Dismayed by what he sees, Hank sets forth to enlighten and free the serfs, to lift them physically and mentally from their wretched states. Phrenology, still a part of Samuel Clemens’s life, makes its way into this novel in Chapter XXI, titled “The Pilgrims.” In it, readers find Hank joining a procession of friendly pilgrims headed to “the Valley of Holiness” to drink the “miraculous waters.” He compares the procession to the one depicted in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and is eager to learn more about the everyday lives of these pious people. After walking on for some time, he and the pilgrims encounter another procession, one with a line of weary men and women chained to one another. These tattered people are slaves being herded like cattle to a market where they will be sold. Among them is a young mother suffering from fatigue. Hank is forced to watch in disgust as a slave driver jumps off his horse and throws her to the ground, whipping her back “like a madman.” The pilgrims observing this cruelty have been so hardened by such scenes that they are not visibly or mentally upset. They only comment about how skillful the master is with his whip. And it is here that the book’s author opines: “This is what slavery could do, in the way of ossifying what one may call the superior lobe of human feeling; for these pilgrims were kind-hearted people, and they would not have allowed a man to treat a horse like that.”14 When bringing up the “superior lobe of human feeling,” Twain is delving yet again into phrenology. He is now referring to the top and front of the brain, the region in which phrenologists located our most advanced and noble organs of mind. Among these organs is one called Benevolence. As its name implies, it is associated with kindness and compassion.15 What Twain is stating is that the feudal conditions had effectively managed to suppress the brain areas needed to show sympathy and the drive to help others, even in men and women wanting to please God.

The Dark 1890s The end of the nineteenth century proved difficult, even tortuous, for Clemens, as was noted when discussing his unfinished novel Eddypus 14 15

Twain, Connecticut Yankee, 1889, 261. See Gribben, Temperaments, 1972, 58; Gribben, Literary Resources, 2019, 148.

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(Chapter 5). Financial challenges of his own making caused some of the stresses he endured.16 He vastly overspent on the magnificent house he had built and was now maintaining in Nook Farm. Further, his largest investments had failed to pay off. These included his Charles L. Webster publishing company17 and kaolatype, a way to make high-quality engraved illustrations for books, which was rendered obsolete by Frederic Ives’s photo-engraving method. These losses hurt, but they were not nearly as painful as what he squandered on James W. Paige’s typesetting machine, a piece of equipment with 18,000 parts that never worked properly and ultimately lost out to linotype, which further revolutionized the printing industry.18 Twain biographer Ron Powers estimated that his losses on Paige’s device totaled between $3,000,000 and $5,000,000 when converted into 2005 American dollars.19 The amount lost would be even more staggering if converted today. Phrenologically speaking, Clemens seemed to lack the faculty for adhering to a piece of advice he was willing to give to others. “There are two times in a man’s life when he shouldn’t speculate,” he famously said: “When he can afford it, and when he can’t.”20 He would comment similarly about speculating in stocks, saying that October was a particularly dangerous month for doing so. After pausing, he then included the eleven remaining months. Finances were just one part of Clemens’s life that was in freefall. Livy was now suffering recurrent health problems, her most serious being signs and symptoms signifying heart disease. His daughters also had health issues. And making his world seem even darker, both his mother Jane and Livy’s mother passed away in 1890. His own health issues might have led him to believe he was being singled out, even cursed, by a vengeful God for a life marked by blasphemies. 16 17 18

19 20

Hill, God’s Fool, 1973. Although it did make a tidy profit with the Personal Memoires of U. S. Grant, which came out in 1885. Ottmar Mergenthaler’s linotype machine utilized a keyboard to set molds (one for each letter) in lines that were then filled with lead and transferred to galley trays. Linotyping could do 60,000 characters an hour and, once used, its slugs were removed, melted, and reused; it thus worked in an entirely different way from the Paige typesetter, which was unreliable. Powers, Twain, 2006, 561. Clemens’s other investments and creative money-making ideas included an “Adjustable and Detachable Garment Strap,” which failed to earn him anything, and a “Self-Pasting Scrapbook,” which made some money. He was also ahead of his time with his “Memory-Improver,” a game with question-and-answer cards, a board, and pins. But the returns on these projects could not cover his enormous debts.

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He now suffered from rheumatism, and when it flared up it prevented him from writing with his preferred hand. Could there be a more miserable disorder for a vindictive god or a devil to inflict on a writer? He tried to use his left hand to compensate, but with only limited success. Dictating to a secretary or taking advantage of the latest technological miracle, recording on wax cylinders, proved to be better options, but they too had limitations. Further, secretaries and recording machines were of little help when he was sidelined by his other maladies, which included blinding headaches, anxiety attacks, bouts of fatigue, a painful hernia, and chronic constipation. The one-two punch of bad investments and health issues called for cutting back on expenses, finding ways to placate creditors, and a change of scenery. They resulted in Clemens shuttering his over-the-top Hartford house in 1891 and moving to less-expensive Europe for almost a decade. The latter had additional upsides. It allowed them to experience different places, furthered his daughters’ educations, and gave the family access to famous doctors and highly touted health spas. While the Clemens family was residing for varying lengths of time in France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, its patriarch made occasional trips back to the United States for business purposes, every hopeful of getting out of debt. Nonetheless, the family’s financial plight continued to deteriorate. Finally, industrialist Henry Huttleson (“Hell Hound”) Rogers, who directed thirteen companies and was president of six in John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust, stepped in to right the sinking ship. Rogers had two sides. On the one hand, he was a shrewd and ruthless businessman. But on the other, he was a highly cultivated man, an excellent conversationalist, a dedicated family man, and a philanthropist. Needless to say, he wanted to be viewed as a good-hearted man who underwrote libraries, built schools, and helped people in need. Rogers had long admired “Mark Twain’s” writings and humor, and when he first met the author in 1893, the two men found they enjoyed each other’s company. Clemens increasingly believed Rogers was the ideal person to straighten out his finances, and he soon trusted him enough to give him power of attorney to manage his estate. More than a decade later, when he heard someone remark that Rogers “is a good fellow,” but “It’s a pity his money is tainted,” he agreed – and then agreed a second time. It’s “twice tainted,” he responded, “tain’t yours and tain’t mine”!21 21

Powers, Twain, 2006, 562.

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Sam’s new best friend quickly liquidated Charles Webster & Company, the printing company that had been poorly run and was now on life support. He also examined and dutifully dissolved the Paige Compositor Manufacturing Company, which was hemorrhaging Clemens’s bank account. He did not, however, sell the family’s magnificent Hartford house. The Clemens family would continue to own this treasured possession destined to become a national landmark until 1903. Rogers’s plan included sending Clemens on an around-the-world lecture tour to pay down the approximately $100,000 he had accrued in debts. This Mark Twain tour began in the United States in 1895. It took him to Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon, India, South Africa, and several other ports of call, before eventually ending in England. While in England, he learned that his daughter Susy, who had remained in America, had become ill. Livy and Clara quickly sailed home, but he opted to stay on, believing she would soon recover. He was wrong. Susy had contracted meningitis and passed away on August 18, 1896. The news of her death and his inability to attend her funeral further darkened his outlook on life, which had been improving while he was earning money to pay off his creditors.

More Writings, More Phrenology The latest “Mark Twain” lecture tour was not just a financial success. It also provided Clemens with a slew of material for his last travel book, Following the Equator. This book came out in 1897, and its royalties allowed him to pay off his remaining debts.22 Following the Equator is filled with descriptions of people from distant lands, but the only item even remotely related to phrenology is the header at the start of Chapter XVI. It is ascribed to “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.” “There is a Moral Sense, and there is an Immoral Sense,” Pudd’nhead philosophizes in his new calendar, and “History shows us that the Moral Sense enables us to perceive morality and how to avoid it, and that the Immoral Sense enables us to perceive immorality and how to enjoy it.”23 Completing Pudd’nhead Wilson was, in fact, one of the high points for Clemens during the 1890s. First published as a serial in Century magazine 22 23

Twain, Following the Equator, 1897/1989. Twain, Following the Equator, 1897/1989, 161. This calendar does not appear in the novel bearing Pudd’nhead Wilson’s name.

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in 1893–94, and then as a book in 1894, this moralistic novel, set close to the banks of the Mississippi River, featured two infants: a slave woman’s light-skinned son, who is only one thirty-second black but is still considered a slave, and a white child born of privilege at about the same time. Roxanna, wanting a better life for her son, switches the two newborns in their cradles. The white child she now raises turns out to be a monster, the opposite of her biological child, who is virtuous to a fault. The switch is eventually discovered by a local eccentric, an affable man called “Pudd’nhead” by the townsfolk. Pudd’nhead is a fingerprint collector, and thanks to his extensive collection, he is able to expose the novel’s villain and reveal that the outlaw was not Roxanna’s biological son. Collecting and using fingerprints was a new development at the time. When he decided to write Pudd’nhead Wilson, Clemens, an avid reader interested in the sciences, had probably read Sir Francis Galton’s recent book on fingerprinting or heard what the famed British scientist had been doing.24 Galton was not, however, the first scientist to study fingerprints. But he was an early pioneer in the field, its most visible promoter, and the person most people were then associating with making and using fingerprints. At the time, Galton was studying individual differences, trying to determine the extent to which these differences might be hereditary. He published some of his findings in 1892, in a book with the simple title, Finger Prints. Twain’s novel began to appear in serial form a year later. Pudd’nhead Wilson is not laced with phrenology, but it reveals how its author continued to think about character during this bleak period of his life. That phrenology, which brought individual differences to the fore, was still on his mind, is better evidenced by two works that followed this novel. The first is Mark Twain’s Extracts from Adam’s Diary, a spoof from 1893. Here we find Adam observing the baby, Cain, he has had with Eve. Earlier, Adam had thought Cain was a fish, and afterward a kangaroo. Later, he was pretty sure the baby was some sort of a bear. Adam was now watching the baby even more carefully. He observed how he “can laugh and talk like a parrot, having learned this, no doubt, from being with the parrot so much, and having the imitative faculty in a high developed degree.”25 The second piece drawing on Clemens’s knowledge of phrenology was called A Double Barrelled Detective Story. This spoof appeared as a serial in Harper’s Magazine and as a book later in the same year, 1902.26 Rarely 24 25 26

Galton, Finger Prints, 1892. Twain, Adam’s Diary, 1904, 85 (italics added). Twain, Detective Story, 1902b; also see Writings, 23, 1899–1910.

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read today, it is Clemens’s humorous tribute to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was also interested in psychical phenomena. It even featured Doyle’s famed detective, Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes shows up as a stranger in a small town somewhere in the western United States. He is the uncle of one of its residents, who is graced with a similar sounding name, Fetlock Jones. Upon seeing the great detective for the first time, Ferguson, another of the town’s characters, remarks: “Look at that head!” Showing his reverence for the detective, he says this “in an awed voice.” And in his next utterance: “By gracious, that’s a head.” Then, just a few paragraphs later, we read: “Sh! Watch him! There – he’s got a thumb on the bump on the near corner of his forehead, and his forefinger on the off one. His think-works is just a-grinding now, you bet your other shirt.”27 Clemens seems to be poking gentle fun at phrenology and its practitioners in these two late Mark Twain works. That he is no longer being caustic or revealing any of the head readers’ trickery is not necessarily indicative of a sudden change of heart. For many reasons, phrenological head readings were very much a thing of the past at the turn of the century; there was now, for example, a far better scientific understanding of the functional organization of the cerebrum, the part of the brain that most distinguishes humans from other animals (see the Epilogue). Nevertheless, many phrenological words and terms had become part of the vernacular, and phrenological imagery was still helpful to writers, including Twain, who liked to utilize it in humorous ways.

The 1901 Head Reading Mark Twain’s A Double Barrelled Detective Story came off the presses after the famed author had returned to the United States. He arrived in October 1900 and was given a hero’s welcome. It was made even grander by the extensive publicity he had received for having paid off his creditors to the penny, as befitting a true American hero.28 He and Livy now took up temporary residence in a townhouse on 10th Street, near Fifth Avenue in bustling Manhattan. Their home was situated 27 28

Twain, Detective Story, 1902b, 326 (for both quotations). Clemens disembarked hooked on Plasmon, a high-protein health food from Germany. Plasmon granules could be eaten dry or mixed with milk, coffee, etc. Clemens thought it could cure constipation (long one of his miseries), indigestion, and motion sickness, and also reduce hunger. Although the world-famous German pathologist Rudolf Virchow certified it, Clemens lost approximately $25,000 on this investment.

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close to the American Phrenological Institute. Twain, now 65, had a phrenological reading at this institute on March 7, 1901. Most likely, he was evaluated by Lorenzo’s daughter, Jessie A. Fowler (Figure 7.3), whose father had died in 1896. Jessie had long been associated with the family businesses. While in London with her father, she had even analyzed the heads of Arthur Conan Doyle and Herbert Spencer, the social Darwinist, anthropologist, and philosopher who coined the term “survival of the fittest.” Why Clemens decided to have a head reading at this time is hard to say. One possibility is that he had just started to write Eddypus, so it might have been a way of rekindling his memory about phrenology, the phrenologists he encountered, and his earlier head readings. He might also have wanted to discover what a leading phrenologist would have to say about what everyone now thought they knew about him – equating the real man with his creation, Mark Twain. Then again, he had always been both skeptical and curious by nature, and he might only have wanted to discover if anything had changed over the years. What had once been a thriving business in Clinton Hall and then in desirable locations on Broadway was now confined to a brownstone on East 21st Street.29 It was close to Broadway, which was a plus, and it still boasted nice offices, interesting cabinets, lecture rooms, and examination parlors, all also positives. But both Lorenzo and Orson Fowler were now gone, and Lorenzo’s surviving daughter was working on a tight budget, trying to carry on as best she could, selling “her outmoded product to an increasingly indifferent public.”30 Jessie charged as little as $3 but up to $50 for a head reading, which could take as long as three hours. Most likely, she did not charge Samuel Clemens anything; she might have viewed reading his head as a privilege and as a way of generating needed publicity. What is certain is that Clemens made an appointment for 10:30 in the morning and showed up on time. According to Madeline Stern, “With no allusions whatsoever to bumps or cavities, Jessie Fowler made her measurements and read off [to an assistant] Mark Twain’s cranial developments as easily as if she had been reading Tom Sawyer.”31 Clemens probably obtained his copy of Orson and Lorenzo Fowler’s New Illustrated Self-Instructor in Phrenology and Physiology at this time.32 29 30 31 32

Stern, Phrenological Fowlers, 1971. Stern, Phrenological Fowlers, 1971, 248. Stern, Phrenological Fowlers, 1971, 253. Fowler & Fowler, Self-Instructor, 1859; Gribben, Library, 1: 239.

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Figure 7.3  Jessie Allen Fowler (1856–1932), Lorenzo Fowler’s daughter, who evaluated Clemens in New York in 1901 (courtesy of Google Images).

It could have been a part of the package, a gift from Jessie, or a separate purchase. He signed the copy in his library “Clemens 1901.” The chart in the front of the book had markings next to the faculties for Self-Esteem, Veneration, and Calculation, these being the three well-developed faculties Bishop Twain displayed in Eddypus. As noted in Chapter 5, much of the boring lecture on phrenology found in this futuristic piece was derived from this Self-Instructor. His head reading was made public later that year in the long-running Phrenological Journal, now with “and Science of Health” added to the title. The article was titled “Mark Twain – The World’s Greatest Humorist,” and it had the subtitle “Twenty Reasons Why We Say So.”33 Deviating from the number given in the subtitle, twenty-three reasons are in fact listed. The submitting author’s name was not revealed. “By the Editor” is all that can be found in the Table of Contents. In 1969, Madeline Stern, the acknowledged expert on the Fowlers and the vast industry they built, thought Edgar Charles Beall (mentioned earlier), who had purchased a controlling interest in Fowler and Wells and 33

Anon., Greatest humorist, 1901.

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was working at the Institute, might have written the piece. She presented this thought in a literary journal, giving her article the catchy title “Mark Twain Had His Head Examined.”34 Beall had examined Clemens while he was in Cincinnati in 1885. He had described his temperament as “motivemental,” and this term now reappeared. Two years later, however, Stern changed her mind.35 In her book Heads and Headlines: The Phrenological Fowlers, she pointed to Jessie Fowler as the person behind the head reading and article. Twain scholar Alan Gribben agreed that Jessie Fowler was the phrenologist who read his skull and, as editor-in-chief of the journal since 1897, was probably responsible for publishing this assessment.36 Very little phrenology is present among the first twelve reasons spelled out in this piece. But the author does introduce “Twain” in the opening sections as “a very serious man,” with “purpose and philosophy in his writing” and “a humorous way of presenting his thoughts.” Readers are further told that “his moral brain dominates over the remainder of his faculties.”37 Thereafter, there is abundant phrenology. For example, Reason 13 reads: “His Ideality helps give force to his intellect in expressing refinement, taste, and mental criticism, while his Constructiveness joined to Comparison and Causality enables him to find a great deal of enjoyment in treading new ground, in discovering new ideas, and in expressing thought in a variety of ways.”38 Additionally, Reason 22 indicated, “The key-note of his character is his Conscientiousness.”39 Under the last reason presented for why he was the world’s greatest humorist, the author identified what he seemed to have inherited from each of his parents and what “he could claim as his own”: He inherits his active Organ of Benevolence, his large Human Nature, his Conscientiousness, Cautiousness, and social qualities from his mother; from his father he received his rugged, wiry organization, his large Vitativeness [fondness for life] giving him his hold on life, his motive-mental temperament, his executive spirit, and his great determination of mind, while the remainder of his qualities he can claim as his own.40

Interestingly, there is no mention of this head reading in Mark Twain’s 1906 autobiographical dictation, which covered his two head 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

Stern, Head examined, 1969, 213. Stern, Phrenological Fowlers, 1971, 253. Gribben, Temperaments, 1972, 62, n. 3, Literary Resources, 2019, 159, n. 50. Anon., Greatest humorist, 1901, 5. Anon., Greatest humorist, 1901, 7. Anon., Greatest humorist, 1901, 8. Anon., Greatest humorist, 1901, 8.

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readings with Jessie’s father in London. There is not even a footnote on it. Similarly, the Cincinnati head reading went unmentioned in this dictation. Further, there is nothing about these head readings in published collections of his letters.

The Return to Hannibal Samuel Langhorne Clemens made the last of his six visits to Hannibal on May 29, 1902. He was now sixty-six years old. He had returned to his home state to receive an honorary degree from the University of Missouri in Columbia, a small city in the center of the state. After arriving in St. Louis, he boarded a train north to his boyhood town, now home to over 12,000 people. Having grown substantially during the second half of the nineteenth century, it stood in stark contrast to his overlooked, dying birthplace, Florida, Missouri. He arrived in Hannibal unannounced and visited the graves of his mother, father, and brothers Henry and Orion, while eying the gravestones of some of the other people he had known from days long gone. That evening, he dined with Laura Frazier (now Hawkins), the playmate he had immortalized as Becky Thatcher. He also met some other survivors from his childhood, made new acquaintances, gave a few speeches, and talked with some of the children. Occasionally laughing and close to tears at other times, he said his final goodbyes at the train station on June 1 and then headed off to receive his honorary degree.

Jessie Fowler’s 1904 Piece In 1904, Jessie Fowler wrote a piece for the Phrenological Journal and Science of Health called “How a Man’s Career Shows itself in his Face.”41 She drew attention to Benjamin Franklin, Theodore Roosevelt, and several other highly accomplished men from politics, science, and literature. As might be expected, she mentioned Mark Twain in this piece. Her depiction of his head and character is reminiscent of what had been in the 1901 publication, but what she now related was condensed into two short paragraphs. In her words, his language expresses itself in an unmistakable way under the eyes, and his general thoughtfulness of character shows itself in his full beard [mustache?] and high forehead; his intuitiveness of mind is particularly noticeable. … 41

J. Fowler, Face, 1904.

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More Head Readings and a Phrenological Farewell He is a man who impresses one with the idea that he has something to say and that he is anxious to say it in a way that will attract your attention and cause you to stop and think of what he has said. Humor is only a means to an end. He is the most serious humorist in the world, and it is because he is also so intensely in earnest that he wishes to drive home his ideas in a common-sense way, that he adapts his language to the humorous side of life.42

Final Years Samuel Clemens made a final trip to England three years later, where he received an honorary doctorate in letters from Oxford University on June 26, 1907. Before being honored, he visited London, where he took in some sights and gave a speech at the Savoy Hotel. The Society of the Pilgrims hosted the event. Those assembled listened as their American guest mentioned how Archdeacon Wilberforce of the “Westminster battery” had accidentally taken his hat at a luncheon seven years earlier. He then described how he retaliated by “stealing” the famous cleric’s hat: “My head was not the customary size just at that time. I had been receiving a good many very nice and complimentary attentions, and my head was a couple of sizes larger than usual, and his hat just suited me. The bumps and corners were all right intellectually. The results were pleasing to me – possibly so to him.”43 The idea of his head growing larger from overly generous praising was the reason Twain had given earlier for modest Bishop Twain wanting see the two phrenologists in Eddypus! Clemens had taken what was a real-life mistake and used it to introduce his diatribe about the head readers in the novel he had started writing just a few months later. In 1906, he was dismayed when Jean, suffering from epilepsy, had to be institutionalized. She would drown three years later in a bathtub in Redding, Connecticut, where he had built a two-story Italian villa called “Stormfield.” He had previously lost his young son Langdon and his daughter Susy. Only Clara, born in 1874, would outlive him, dying late in 1962. Samuel Clemens spent most of the last two years of his own life at Stormfield. Although he went on trips to Bermuda in 1909 and 1910 hoping to regain at least some of his physical health, he knew he was on a slippery slope. Sick and frail, and suffering from painful attacks of 42 43

J. Fowler, Face, 1904, 210–211 (italics added). https://irishmanspeaks.com/favorite-mark-twain-speech. Also see Fatout, Twain Speaking, 1976.

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angina pectoris, he was eventually confined to his bed (Figure 7.4). He slipped into a coma and took his final breath on April 21, 1910. Halley’s Comet could again be seen in the night sky just two days before he died. Albert Bigelow Paine, his chosen biographer, wrote that, just months earlier, the writer and humorist had stated prophetically: I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: “Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.”44

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was buried next to the earthly remains of his beloved wife Livy in Elmira’s Woodlawn Cemetery. The woman he never stopped loving had died in Florence on June 5, 1904, and her remains had been transported back to the United States for burial in the northwestern town in New York State, where she had grown up and married the eccentric but immensely talented man, who always loved her. A few years before he died, the man better known as Mark Twain said he planned to give his head to Cornell University for study. At least, that is what the New York’s Mail and Express reported. This newspaper quoted him as saying: “I am getting pretty old and shall probably not need the skull after Christmas. I dunno. But if I should I will pay the rent.”45 Unlike Gall and Spurzheim, whose heads wound up in museum collections, Samuel Clemens’s head remained attached to his body when his remains were laid to rest. His and Livy’s graves continue to attract visitors to Elmira’s Woodlawn Cemetery, though not as many as his boyhood home in Hannibal or house in Hartford, both now museums. The books and related items he had collected were dispersed to libraries and collectors. Catalogs show he had at least two Fowler phrenology books at the time of his death: Orson and Lorenzo’s New Illustrated SelfInstructor and Orson’s Love and Parentage.46 Other phrenology books and pamphlets might have been distributed or lost. His surviving daughter Clara now devoted herself to his estate and legacy. She strove to make sure her father would be presented glowingly, without blemishes. She filtered his letters and photographs, and watched over Albert Bigelow Paine while he was writing her father’s biography, 44 45 46

Paine, Twain, 1912, 3: 1511. Lockwood, Mark Twain sleuth, 2017, 240, quoting a piece in the Jamestown Weekly Alert, North Dakota, February 16, 1903, 12. Gribben, Library, 1: 239.

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Figure 7.4  Mark Twain in old age (photograph courtesy of the US Library of Congress, No. 2005691598).

expressing strong opinions about what the public should and should not be told. As a result, the awaiting public was prevented from knowing everything about Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who was not cast from the George Washington mold (unlike the residents of Hannibal evaluated by the visiting phrenologist while he was growing up!). The Phrenological Journal and Science of Health provided a brief, anonymous obituary of the man from Missouri who, with his colloquialisms, drawling speech, skepticism, and wry sense of humor, had become America’s most cherished humorist and favorite author.47 Clara would have been pleased to read that it presented only his positive features, providing nothing about his personal voyages into hell or, for that matter, the less than Christian-like deception he played on Lorenzo Fowler decades earlier in London. This article bore a short title: “The Late Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens).” It did not provide the author’s name, though the writer could have been Jessie Fowler again. It opened with the sentence: “We shall never forget a privileged interview we had with this veteran writer 47

Anon., Late Mark Twain, 1910.

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in April, 1902.” The piece reiterated what readers had been told in 1901. Nonetheless, this discrepancy over the date raises two possibilities. One is that he returned to the American Phrenological in 1902. The other is that “1902” is just a mistake. Now condensed into three short paragraphs, this obituary reads: He was a wonderful combination of the elements of seriousness and humor, and told us that he considered his serious works his best productions, and that he only wrote in a humorous way to make people sit up and take notice of what he wanted to tell them, and he knew they would not pay the same attention to him if he was always serious. His principal characteristics showed themselves through the organs of Mirthfulness, Comparison, Combativeness, Benevolence, and Human Nature. These gave his mind a marvelous touch of the ridiculous, the logical power to express himself in epigrammatic ways; the ability to understand human life as he found it and afterwards reproduce it in some picturesque story; courage to stay true to things in a drastic, fun-making fashion; and kindliness of disposition which enabled him to get in touch with the whole world and his family. There is a doubt in the minds of many whether America will ever produce another Mark Twain, though there may be other humanists to partially fill his place in the literary world. Be that as it may, he was certainly a veteran in his knowledge of how to make people happy and optimistic, and whoever succeeds in doing this has succeeded in becoming a benefactor to his race and generation.48

Samuel Clemens, memorialized as Mark Twain in the Phrenological Journal and Science of Health, a New York Times obituary, and around the world as “the best-known American man of letters,” “the Dean of American literature,” and in other glowing ways, was different things to different people.49 As put by one of his biographers, he “was a humorist, novelist, short-story-writer, social historian, dramatist, journalist, occasional lecturer and frequent dinner speaker, inventor, entrepreneur, all-night raconteur and billiard player, lavish host, and devoted family man.”50 Like Hank Morgan, Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, he wanted to understand and improve life. He did this in part by exposing the tricks of the “magicians” who had captured the public imagination with what really were unbelievable acts. But unlike Hank Morgan, who failed to change feudal society in England, he took on frauds, fads, and the pseudosciences 48 49 50

Anon., Late Mark Twain, 1910, 190 (italics in original). New York Times, April 22, 1910; see www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/twain-obit.pdf Kaplan, Mr. Clemens, 1966, 175.

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in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century democratic America. And in some of these domains, there are reasons to believe he made a difference. Samuel Clemens’s changing views about phrenology did not occur in a vacuum. Notably, he was not the first person to use humor to poke fun at the doctrine or to “expose” how its purveyors operated in public venues. He was not even the first American to do these things. In the following chapters, we shall meet Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Boston physician whose funny but serious and widely disseminated criticisms of phrenology helped open Clemens’s eyes to the head readers and seemingly also influenced how he chose to lampoon them. These chapters will further show how head readings became a part of everyday American life during the tumultuous nineteenth century, even after most physicians chose to dissociate themselves from phrenology or at least its craniological tenets.

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chapter 8

Young Holmes and Phrenology in Boston

Many of those who had sat in on the autopsy on Spurzheim had also attended his public lectures, among them young Holmes.

Eleanor Tilton, 19471

How Samuel Clemens turned from somewhat positive to decidedly negative about the head readers after undergoing his “little test” in London during the early 1870s accords with how phrenology became less appealing to many people after the start of the Civil War. Some of this decline had to do with the demands of the costly war and its aftermath, which diverted resources and attention away from the pockets of the head readers. Another factor was what clinical and laboratory researchers learned about the brain, and its specialized regions and functions. Additionally, phrenology was no longer a new and exciting way to discern more about oneself, family members, friends, neighbors, and others. In brief, the novelty had worn off. Yet another variable was how some individuals had been doing their best to expose the phrenologists and the flaws in phrenological craniology to the laity – targeting men working on farms, in small shops, and in larger factories, and women trying to maintain households and raise and educate healthy children. And there were undoubtedly other factors, both social and economic, that led to the decline in head readings, not just in America but around the world. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes was influential in phrenology’s decline in America, though his role in exposing the pseudoscience and the head readers preying on the gullible laity is largely forgotten today. Also overlooked is how Holmes helped Samuel Clemens understand what the head readers were doing, serving as his most important guide in this domain and perhaps being the man in the shadows behind Clemens’s little experiment involving Lorenzo Fowler in London. 1

Tilton, Amiable Autocrat, 1947, 74.

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Like Clemens, Holmes’s exposure to phrenology started in his youth. Also like him, his interest in the controversial doctrine, especially in what was being claimed about skull features, continued long after he became famous. The two men also shared a few notable personality traits. Both were skeptics and unusually inquisitive, and both were gifted when it came to writing and addressing audiences from the podium. Two other commonalities are that both men loved humor and knew it could be used as a formidable weapon when fighting ignorance, superstition, and gullibility. Nevertheless, as readers shall now see, Holmes and Clemens, so much alike in these ways, could not have differed more during their formative years.

Holmes and Holmes Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (Figure 8.1) is sometimes confused with his son of the same name, which is why his name is usually preceded by “Dr.” or followed by “Sr.” His son, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., born thirty-two years later, was a Civil War hero who obtained a Harvard law degree.2 This Holmes became one of America’s most famous Supreme Court Justices, a man admired in his day for his understanding of the law and for delivering crystal-clear decisions. He would pass away forty-one years after his father, whose interests, aspirations, and successes differed from his own. As is true of his son, much has been written about the elder Holmes.3 And it is easy to understand why. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., achieved prominence in medicine and as a scientist, and he was highly regarded as a poet, a writer of prose, and a witty speaker. He was always engaging, and he could be funny, deadly serious, or both simultaneously. It did not matter if he were in a classroom teaching a course at Harvard’s Medical School, addressing a club over a meal, or at his desk writing a novel, a piece of poetry, or a monthly serial for a periodical. He had a unique way of attracting people and getting them to listen to what was on his mind. When Henry James, Sr., praised the elder Holmes as “intellectually the most alive man I ever knew,” he had numerous reasons for lavishing this high compliment.4 In his day, Dr. Holmes was a celebrity with a huge following. But unlike Mark Twain, who is still read and admired, he has been largely forgotten outside of academic circles today. 2 3

4

Baker, Holmes, 1991; R. W. Gordon, Holmes, 1991; Alschuler, Law, 2000; Novick, Honorable Justice, 2013. Kennedy, Holmes, 1883; Brown, Holmes, 1884; Morse, Jr., Holmes, 1896, 1939; Tilton, Amiable Autocrat, 1947;Howe, Holmes, 1939; Hoyt, Improper Bostonian, 1979; Gibian, Culture of Conversation, 2001; Dowling, Holmes in Paris, 2006; Podolsky and Bryan, Holmes, 2009. Gibian, Culture of Conversation, 2001, 49.

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Figure 8.1  Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Formative Years Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes was not, like Samuel Clemens, born in the country’s interior, though his birthplace was also along a famous river. In his case, it was the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the year was 1809.5 The family home was located just a few minutes from the Harvard campus, which then included its Medical School, soon to be moved across the Charles River to Boston. His father, Reverend Abdiel Holmes, served as a minister to the First Congregational Church. Stoic and serious, he was not the source of his son’s sense of humor, nonstop talking, or love of life. These traits stemmed from his mother, Sarah Wendell Holmes, whose outlook, caresses, and smiles were more refreshing than Abdiel’s Calvinist orthodoxy, which his son found cold and depressing. Wendell, as he was then called, was small for his age. In adulthood, he was only a little over five feet (1.5 meters) tall, and still possessed his earlier, slim figure. As put by one of his biographers, he was one of those people lucky enough to maintain his youthful appearance, exhibiting “thick brown hair and a pleasant face … yet twinkling eyes that gave youth to 5

Tilton, Amiable Autocrat, 1947; Hoyt, Improper Bostonian, 1979.

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his face, … a small, prim mouth … with heavy laugh lines,” and “long sideburns” that made him appear “youthful in the extreme.”6 Some people would later refer to him as the “little doctor” because of his appearance and diminutive size. Abdiel enrolled his son at the Port School, a private academy in Cambridgeport, where he spent five years. When he was fifteen years old, he was sent to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. He did well enough academically at the Academy, though he was less than comfortable with its religious orthodoxy and stringent rules. In 1825, Holmes transferred to Harvard College, which was better suited to his engaging personality and more earthly interests. He did well at the famous college, especially with languages and chemistry, and was recognized by both his teachers and fellow students as being unusually bright. This witty and loquacious young scholar, who loved to read, smoke, and talk endlessly on myriad subjects, completed his undergraduate studies in 1829. He was now twenty-one years old, and like so many college graduates, he pondered what to do next. He considered two possibilities, having no interest in following in his father’s footsteps and devoting himself to a congregation and religion. One was to become a lawyer, the other was to pursue a career in medicine. He would achieve fame in the latter field, but he first started in law. Holmes enrolled in what was then called the Dane Law School at Harvard. Increasingly recognizing that his heart was not really in becoming a lawyer, he began finding more time to compose poetry in his room. One was a three-stanza piece that he titled Old Ironsides, the nickname of the decommissioned frigate The Constitution, which had served with distinction during the War of Independence. Word was out that the famous ship, a symbol of the land of the free, was about to be destroyed. Though just a student, Holmes felt that the old ship was iconic and did not deserve this fate. With more than a little patriotism, he composed the following short poem to save the ship: Ay, tear her tattered ensign down! Long has it waved on high, And many an eye has danced to see That banner in the sky; Beneath it rung the battle shout, And burst the cannon’s roar;– 6

Hoyt, 1979, Improper Bostonian, 137.

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The meteor of the ocean air Shall sweep the clouds no more! Her deck, once red with heroes’ blood Where knelt the vanquished foe, When winds were hurrying o’er the flood And waves were white below, No more shall feel the victor’s tread, Or know the conquered knee;– The harpies of the shore shall pluck The eagle of the sea! O, better that her shattered hulk Should sink beneath the wave; Her thunders shook the mighty deep, And there should be her grave; Nail to the mast her holy flag, Set every thread-bare sail, And give her to the god of storms,– The lightning and the gale!

Holmes’s stirring poem was published in Boston’s Daily Advertiser in 1830 and afterward was featured in other periodicals. As it spread from one newspaper and magazine to the next, it generated a louder and louder public outcry. And it proved instrumental in saving the historic ship from being scuttled. The name of its anonymous author, who had signed the poem with the first letter of his last name, “H,” soon became known. With Old Ironsides, Oliver Wendell Holmes achieved fame during his law school days – albeit in a field that had nothing to do with his “cold and cheerless” studies or, for that matter, with his alternative career choice, medicine.

Now Medicine Uninspired by his trial year in Harvard’s law school and knowing that writing even stirring poetry would never be associated with a life free from hunger, Holmes turned to the second of the career paths he had been considering. “What decided me to give up Law and apply myself to Medicine,” he reminisced, “I can hardly say, but I had from the first looked upon my law studies as an experiment.” “I made the change,” he continued, “and soon found myself introduced to new scenes and new companionships.”7 7

Holmes, Works, 1892, 9: 424.

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In 1830, he could not have anticipated that he would now be embarking on a career that would lead him to become one of the best known and most admired American doctors of the nineteenth century, “one of the fathers of modern American medicine … at a crucial transitional period in its development.”8 His change in direction called for a knowledge of Latin and physics. Meeting these requirements and opting to remain close to home, he enrolled in a private medical college in 1830. Located in nearby Boston, this college was closely tied to Harvard’s Medical School, also known as the Massachusetts Medical College, which had been founded in Cambridge in 1782 and relocated to Boston in 1810.9 Historian Elinor M. Tilton, when discussing how some private medical schools in the Boston area were related to Harvard’s Medical School, wrote that they were “in effect extensions” of the renowned university, pooling libraries, illustrative material, and other resources.10 Consequently, Holmes was able to attend lectures given by some of the same teachers and train at the same hospitals, including the recently opened Massachusetts General Hospital, as the students who had enrolled at Harvard (Figure 8.2). Holmes did not provide the name of his private medical school in his reminiscences. He stated only that it was started by James Jackson, Walter Channing, Winslow Lewis, Jr., George Otis, and John Ware.11 These physicians, each a specialist in a different field, taught the theory and practice of medicine, anatomy and surgery, obstetrics and medical jurisprudence, chemistry, and materia medica. Holmes considered Winslow Lewis, Jr., who taught anatomy and showed him how to dissect cadavers, his first mentor in medicine. He later reminisced: “Dr. Lewis was a great favorite with students … [he] was our companion as well as our teacher.”12 Nonetheless, he reserved his greatest admiration for James Jackson (Figure 8.3), his future wife’s uncle. He described him as “a man of serene and clear intelligence, well instructed, not over book-fed, truthful to the centre, a candid listener to all opinions;

8 9

10 11 12

Gibian, Culture of Conversation, 2001, 2. The Harvard Medical School began after the Boston Medical Society asked John Warren to lecture on anatomy in 1780. His course proved so popular that he was called upon to come forth with a plan for a medical school that would be associated with Harvard College. The school opened on October 7, 1783, with John Warren teaching anatomy and surgery, Aaron Dexter covering chemistry and materia medica, and Benjamin Waterhouse lecturing on the theory and practice of medicine. Tilton, Amiable Autocrat, 1947, 75. Holmes, Works, 1892, 9: 425. Holmes, Works, 1892, 9: 425.

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Figure 8.2  Massachusetts General Hospital.

Figure 8.3  Dr. James Jackson (1777–1867).

a man who forgot himself in his care for others and his love for his profession; by common consent recognized as a model of the wise and good physician.”13 13

Holmes, Harvard, 1883, 8.

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Holmes’s impressions of what he experienced when starting his medical studies are notable. They reflect his ability to endure the challenges of medical training, including some that even he regarded as shocking and repugnant. These memories never faded, and he provided this colorful description decades later: I can scarcely credit my memory when I recall the first impressions produced upon me by sights afterward to become so familiar that they could no more disturb a pulse-beat than the commonest of every-day experiences. The skeleton hung aloft like a gibbeted criminal, looked grimly at me as I entered the room devoted to the students of the school I had joined. … The white faces in the beds at the Hospital found their reflection in my own cheeks which lost their color as I looked upon them. … I had chosen my profession and must meet all its aspects.14

A Case of “Lead-Poisoning” When not attending lectures at the school, observing patients, or doing autopsies at Massachusetts General Hospital or other institutions, studying in his room, or seeking a breath of fresh air, Holmes accepted speaking engagements at special events. And when not giving dinner and ceremonial speeches, which would be met with rounds of applause, he pushed Wistar’s anatomy book off to the side and relaxed by composing more poetry. Loving puns and wordplay, he would describe his insatiable need to see his hand-written poems converted into printers’ type with a medical term. He classified his obsession as a case of “lead-poisoning,” hyphenating the term. Half a century later, he would state that “there is no form of lead-poisoning which more rapidly and thoroughly pervades the blood and bones and marrow than that which reaches the young author through mental contact with type-metal.” He added: “I have never got rid of it from that day to this.”15 At this time, while afflicted with this sort of lead-poisoning, Holmes began to write his first Breakfast-Table serial. His short prose pieces featured several very different kinds of people domiciled in a Boston boardinghouse, like the one in which he was now residing. His fictitious boarders shared meals and stories, and they offered serious and outrageous opinions about both frivolous and important subjects as they met over breakfast each morning. 14 15

Holmes, Works, 1892, 9: 424. Holmes, 1882; in Holmes, Works, 1892, 9: 425.

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Holmes’s protagonist was a scholar. But he was also a man who could never quite control the group at the breakfast table. Modeled after himself, his alter ego had a strong compulsion to speak out and, if given a chance, monopolize the floor. He was an unstoppable source of witty puns, foreign phrases, ancient and contemporary medical knowledge, and whatever else seemed to enter his mind at the time. He loved to rock the boat with contradictory ideas, though he typically backed them with hard facts, by analogizing, and by bringing forth other kinds of supporting material. Holmes completed two such essays during this time. They were published in the short-lived New England Magazine in 1831 and 1832 as The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. As will be seen in Chapter 11, he would bring his Autocrat back in the Atlantic Monthly in 1858 to entertain this new periodical’s readers. More importantly, a year after resurrecting this Lazarus from the dead, he would give center stage to another protagonist in a second set of essays, one called The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. It would be the man he called the Professor, and not the Autocrat, who would lampoon the head readers in the Atlantic Monthly in memorable ways. Holmes had ample opportunity to learn about phrenology first hand and via secondary sources well before he began to ridicule it in the Atlantic Monthly. He was exposed to it while a medical student in Boston, where seminal events would occur that would shape the reception, course, and nature of phrenology in America. That Boston would figure so prominently in phrenology’s history is understandable, though, as will be seen, some of what happened in the city could never have been predicted. In his book, The Launching of Modern American Science, Robert V. Bruce called New England’s largest city “the natural habitat of the scientist,” and this was true even before the 1840s.16 He pointed out that Massachusetts had less than 5 percent of the nation’s population yet produced more than 20 percent of America’s scientists at midcentury, many choosing to stay in the area. He attributed this statistic to multiple factors, including Boston’s schools and “commitment to learning,” support systems (e.g., libraries), leadership, values, societies, networks, and pride in her scientists. Overlooked is the fact that most of Boston’s medical profession had a serious interest in phrenology as a science while Holmes was studying medicine in the city. In fact, many of the area’s physicians viewed the doctrine favorably or were withholding judgment pending additional evidence.17 16 17

Bruce, American Science, 1987, 31 (see Chapter 4). Walsh, Boston medical community, 1976b, 271.

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John Collins Warren John Collins Warren was one of the Boston physicians open to the new science of phrenology. Specializing in anatomy and surgery, he taught at Harvard’s Medical School. Holmes would remember him as “a cool and skillful operator, a man of unshaken nerves, of stern ambition, equipped with a fine library, but remarkable quite as much for knowledge of the world.”18 Warren, as noted in Chapter 2, had learned about the doctrine in 1801 and 1802, while he was in Paris and while Franz Joseph Gall was still residing in Vienna and was not yet being assisted by Johann Spurzheim.19 He recalled that the new science tended to be called “craniognomy” and that Gall “did not excite great attention in Paris” at this time.20 Upon his return to Boston, Warren did his best to follow what Gall and Spurzheim were saying and doing, particularly their scientific explorations into the functional anatomy of the nervous system. He also paid attention to what others were stating about the discoveries and insights of the two Germans. Intrigued and wanting to see things for himself, he engaged in comparative anatomical research to test some of their novel ideas. Then, in 1821, he returned to Paris, where he attended one of Spurzheim’s lecture demonstrations, which might have inspired him even more than before to pursue his own research agenda. In between his two trips to Paris, Warren began to lecture on the new science at Harvard’s Medical School, now as Professor of Anatomy and Surgery. By 1830, he was giving annual phrenological “dissertations” to the Massachusetts Medical Society, in which he discussed phrenology and presented his findings.21 Holmes was familiar with what Warren was doing and presenting before the Massachusetts Medical Society, although he was not a member of this organization during his student years. When Spurzheim arrived in Boston during the fall of 1832 (see Chapter 2), he bore letters of introduction, as was customary. Some were from French physicians that Warren had befriended. Spurzheim presented these letters to Warren when they met. Warren was excited to see Spurzheim again, and he took the opportunity to show him his growing collection of crania, which his guest examined with great interest. And with Warren making the arrangements, Spurzheim 18 19 20 21

Holmes, Harvard, 1883, 8. E. Warren, Warren, 1860; J. C. Warren, Boston Phrenological Society, 1921. E. Warren, Warren, 1860, 10. Holmes became a member of this society after obtaining his medical degree.

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“gave four or five lectures at the Medical College and afterwards gave a course of lectures on phrenology to a promiscuous assembly of ladies and gentlemen.”22 In Warren’s view, “The medical profession appears to have been courteous and open-minded, but cautious in its endorsement of the new doctrine of phrenology.”23 Holmes felt close to Warren, who helped him professionally and personally. Notably, Warren’s association with Spurzheim provided Holmes with the opportunity to listen to, watch, and perhaps even talk with the highly regarded phrenologist while he was at the “Medical School” (almost certainly a reference to Harvard). Being inquisitive, he might also have attended some of Spurzheim’s general lectures on phrenology at Boston’s Athenaeum Hall and/or those he gave just across the Charles River in Cambridge.24 When Spurzheim succumbed to “a fever” on November 10, 1832, Warren was among the physicians called upon to conduct his autopsy at the Medical College. Holmes was present at the autopsy in what Warren described as a very crowded theater.25 As stated by Holmes biographer Eleanor Tilton: “Many of those who had sat in on the autopsy on Spurzheim had also attended his public lectures, among them young Holmes.”26 “Young Holmes” probably also attended the memorial lecture that Warren delivered before Spurzheim’s elaborate funeral on November 17, an event that drew approximately 3,000 people.27 There is nothing tangible to indicate whether Holmes was endorsing or rejecting phrenology at this moment, or whether he was agnostic about it. Nor is there any evidence to suggest that he attended any meetings of the Boston Phrenological Society, which was formed at the end of 1832. Nonetheless, he remained close to Warren, who continued to promote phrenology at the Medical College and Massachusetts General Hospital, and before several societies. And he was very familiar with the skull collection Warren was using in his lectures. After Spurzheim’s death, Warren combined the revered phrenologist’s collection with his own holdings, which he continued to utilize and show to interested individuals, one being Holmes.

22 23 24 25 26 27

E. Warren, Warren, 1860, 12. J. C. Warren, Phrenological Society, 1921, 3. Tilton, Amiable Autocrat, 1947, 74. E. Warren, Warren, 1860, 12. Tilton, Amiable Autocrat, 1947, 74. Capen, Death, 1833; Capen, Reminiscences, 1881; Walsh, American tour, 1972.

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Other Teachers As important as Warren was, he was not Holmes’s only teacher with a deep knowledge of phrenology. Winslow Lewis, Jr., who taught anatomy and surgery at Harvard’s Medical School and was a co-founder of the private medical school Holmes enrolled in, also was knowledgeable about the new science. Like Warren, Lewis thought highly of Gall and Spurzheim. And, along with Warren, he warmly welcomed Spurzheim to Boston and helped arrange for his lectures and demonstrations at the Medical School. He was also the physician who removed Spurzheim’s head and prepared his skull for study shortly after the visitor’s death (Chapter 2). Further, he, like Warren, was a founding member of the Boston Phrenological Society. In addition to these phrenological credentials, Lewis was tied to phrenology in another important way. He was the scholar who translated Gall’s 1825 volumes from French into English. Thanks to his hard work, Gall’s Sur les Fonctions du Cerveau et sur Celles de Chacune de ses Parties would become available to English readers as On the Functions of the Brain and Each of Its Parts in 1835.28 James Jackson, the father figure Holmes repeatedly turned to for advice, also merits attention here. Jackson was also involved with Spurzheim’s visit, and he was the physician called upon to treat him when he fell ill with “a fever.” He then helped decide what to do with his earthly remains after he died. Additionally, he published a description of Spurzheim’s final illness and his postmortem findings, a document Holmes most certainly read.29 Holmes took private courses with Jackson, in addition to his other courses. Two volumes of his penned notes have been preserved at the Countway Library of the Harvard Medical School, and they include Jackson’s lecture on Spurzheim’s autopsy. These notes appear in Holmes’s notebook labeled “Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Medicine.” The entry was made on November 15, 1832, five days after Spurzheim’s death. Holmes filed them under the heading, “Remarks on the Case of Dr. Spurzheim,” which is the label Jackson might have used for this lecture. As now recorded by Holmes, “Dr. Spurzheim’s case was one of simple Fever.” Turning to “Appearances on examination,” Holmes wrote: Adhesion of the dura mater to cranium. – This circumstance is not very important. Slight opacity of arachnoid. This exists however in three cases 28 29

Gall, Functions, 1835; for the history of Gall’s books, see Finger and Eling, Gall, 2019, 301–316. Jackson, [Final illness], 1832.

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out of four, and in nine out of ten there is slight effusion beneath this membrane. Pia mater red from fullness of small vessels, but no effusion between convolutions. Redness is not necessarily a sign of inflammation. If there was no thickening or effusion, the inflammation cannot account for the disease.

Spurzheim’s thorax revealed healthy organs, and his abdomen showed only old signs of inflammation, leading Jackson to contend, perhaps in these words, that “The case is remarkable from its having proved fatal without severe local infection.” Holmes also wrote: “Dr. Jackson remarked that it was common for young men to begin with the belief that fever is local disease but that he never knew one without prejudice who did not relinquish it when he became older.” There are no other entries related to Spurzheim or phrenology in Holmes’s student notebooks. But that Jackson’s inquisitive student was particularly attentive to what he was saying is evidenced by a letter that the Boston physician wrote to his son soon after Holmes arrived in Paris, where he joined James Jackson, Jr., who was studying medicine there. Dated March 29, 1833, the elder Jackson informed his son: “Holmes knows more about my courses this winter than anyone, … and you will soon find that he is intelligent and well informed.”30 Thus, Holmes knew, met, and interacted with several highly regarded Boston physicians during the early 1830s – individuals with considerable knowledge of Gall, Spurzheim, their doctrine, and their more controversial craniological ideas. Physicians and teachers John Collins Warren, Winslow Lewis, Jr., and James Jackson were among his personal sources and guides into the labyrinth of phrenology and his consultants when he had questions. Unquestionably, there were also other teachers and regional physicians willing to share their knowledge and opinions about phrenology with him. And there were also fellow students ready to discuss the timely topic. For a young man studying science or medicine in America, Boston was an ideal place for being exposed to the new doctrine at this crucial time.

Writings of Influence How phrenology interested Holmes’s teachers, how they involved themselves with Spurzheim’s visit and untimely death, and how he listened to Spurzheim lectures and attended to what followed are not the only sources of Holmes’s early familiarity with phrenology, its founders, supporters, 30

Putnam, Memoir, 1905, 346.

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and critics. At this juncture, it is essential to emphasize that he was an avid reader. He not only delved into the books his teachers assigned or advised, but also seemed to devour everything he could get his hands on when given a chance. Hence, Holmes kept abreast of the latest news in the city’s periodicals, which covered scientific and medical developments, especially those with regional ties. But above and beyond what was in the Boston newspapers and the more widely distributed magazines, he also had a penchant for reading encyclopedia articles. In this context, he might have read a detailed article about phrenology even before enrolling as an undergraduate student at Harvard. Abraham Rees’s The Cyclopaedia; or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature was a popular source for scholars to consult at this time. It was a staple in libraries, but even more conveniently for Holmes, it was also on the shelves in his father’s library, where he had easy access to it. He would describe Rees’s Cyclopaedia as “a treasure-house of my childhood.”31 Like Abdiel Holmes, Rees was a minister. He was also an exceptional scholar, having taken on the arduous task of editing Chambers’ Cyclopaedia before devoting himself to the newer encyclopedia. Rees’s Cyclopaedia was published serially in England from 1802 to 1820, and it had an American edition that was published between 1810 and 1824. Totaling more than forty volumes, the tenth volume of the popular reference book included a nine-page entry titled (in bold letters) “CRANIOLOGY.”32 This detailed but anonymous piece was based on multiple sources. The most important was the book Christian Heinrich Ernst Bischoff had published in German in 1805. Henry Crabb Robinson translated Bischoff’s text into English and also edited and expanded it.33 His English version was titled Some Account of Dr. Gall’s New Theory of Physiognomy Founded upon the Anatomy and Physiology of the Brain and the Form of the Skull with the Critical Strictures of C. W. Hufeland. A scathing letter by Charles de Villers about Gall and his doctrine, which was written in French in 1802 and had been translated into English, was a second important source behind the CRANIOLOGY encyclopedia entry.34 Scottish physician John Gordon’s damning criticisms of phrenology from 181535 was a third, 31 32 33 34 35

Howe, Holmes, 1939, 38. Anon., Craniology, 1808b; Finger and Eling, Gall, 2019, 405–411. Bischoff, Schädel-Lehre, 1805; Bischoff, New Theory, 1807. Villers, Lettre, 1802; for more about its author, history, and impact, see Finger and Eling, Gall, 2019, 246, 275–276, 280–282, 395. Anon. [J. Gordon], Doctrines, 1815.

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and Peter Mark Roget’s biting critique of Gall and Spurzheim’s work as pseudoscientific (see Chapter 2) appears to have been a fourth. The balanced opinions and politeness found in the English edition of the German book that Robinson published are missing from the piece in the Cyclopaedia. Its tone is more reminiscent of Gordon’s invectives, the damning letter Charles de Villers had written to warn the French about Gall and his materialistic doctrine, and what Roget had expressed, which was not favorable. In brief, Gall’s theory was assailed in the Cyclopaedia as nonsense, with readers being told, “He forms his premises readily, but he makes his deductions incorrectly” and “On contemplating the surface of the hemispheres, in the situations pointed out by Gall, we meet with no prominences, where he describes that various organs exist.” Equally damning and probably drawn from what Roget had written, one finds: “The foundations on which the whole doctrine rests, seems to us to be completely false; and the structure which Gall has raised on them, is supported by nothing but fanciful analogies, and the most loose and inapplicable kind of reasoning.”36 In addition to this decidedly negative encyclopedia entry, Holmes had access to primary written sources. Most notably, he was able to consult Gall and Spurzheim’s Anatomie et Physiologie, their costly volumes from 1810–1819. Although the language was a barrier to many readers in America, Holmes was reasonably proficient in French – undoubtedly skilled enough to read and comprehend what the doctrine’s founders had written. In addition, Gall’s less expensive Sur les Fonctions du Cerveau from 1825, which recapitulated what was in the Anatomie et Physiologie without the detailed neuroanatomy, was readily available in Boston. So were some of the books Spurzheim had written, along with a smattering of reviews of their books and lectures, and some other phrenology books.37 Hence, Holmes had extensive exposure to phrenology while in Boston. He learned about it in the classroom, in private conversations and public lectures, from periodicals, encyclopedias, and other scholarly books and articles, and from hearing Spurzheim and probably watching him dissect. He also attended Spurzheim’s autopsy and funeral, listened to the eulogies, and bore witness to the effects his death had on a community wanting to learn more and, in some cases, to preserve and hopefully enhance Spurzheim’s legacy. 36 37

Anon., Craniology, 1808, 750, 754, 756. For English editions and British press coverage, see Finger and Eling, Gall, 2019, 391–417.

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Skeptical? Holmes’s thoughts about phrenology at this stage of his life were never revealed to the public. They cannot even be found in his surviving notes and personal letters. Like some physicians he met and listened to, did he think the doctrine was the long-awaited “new science” that would dramatically change medicine, anatomy, physiology, other life sciences, and perhaps even stodgy institutions? Did he accept some of it, possibly thinking that there might be something to the idea that there are many higher faculties of mind, while joining Warren in wondering if cranial features could really reveal the underlying organs? Or was he, like the anonymous author of the Rees’s Cyclopedia entry on “CRANIOLOGY,” opposed to just about everything phrenological? Further, if Holmes had serious doubts, was he keeping them to himself because he, a student, did not want to be disrespectful to some of the teachers he admired – mentors caring and kind enough to have taken him under their wings? Or did he feel that there were not enough facts to jump into the fray and pass judgment at this time? In contrast to Holmes’s reticence, just about every physician and professor in Boston seemed to be showing his colors before and immediately following Spurzheim’s death, either supporting or opposing the revolutionary doctrine, or calling for more testing of its tenets. Holmes typically was not one for being silent on interesting and timely subjects. Yet he was now somewhat of an exception. The extroverted student, who complained about having “lead-poisoning” and wrote poetry about a warship and newspaper serials to express his thoughts, never left historians even a poem on phrenology or Spurzheim’s ill-fated visit to Boston that has his name or initial(s) on it. Several muses, however, rose to the occasion. Some identified themselves, while others wrote anonymously; some offered opinions, while others refrained. One such poem appeared in New England Magazine in 1832, the year the city seemed to lose its mind over phrenology. This anonymous, eight-stanza poem was called Boston Notions, and the letter “S” is all that appeared after its final line. Since Holmes had been writing poetry at the time and was witnessing how Spurzheim had impacted Boston’s citizens, there are at least two good reasons to think that he might have been the author. A third is had signed Old Ironsides with just an initial, though there he chose an “H,” the first letter of his last name. And a fourth is that the poem is humorous and had a structure like that found in some of Holmes’s known poetry.

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The poem, however, is not listed in The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes.38 Further, none of Holmes’s biographers have suggested he might have written it, though this too is hardly proof of noninvolvement. And although a formal lexical analysis has been not done on the poem, some of its less apparent features, such as the commas with words added to make some parts rhyme, would suggest another would-be poet probably wrote it. Addressed to Dr. Spurzheim, this poem pokes fun at him and his mentor, Gall, and their doctrine and followers. It seems fitting to end this chapter with this piece of poetry written by an unidentified phrenology skeptic, probably but not assuredly another sufferer of “lead-poisoning” from the Boston area. The humorous work, which tells us more about how Spurzheim and phrenological cranioscopy were received in America during the early 1830s, while Holmes was still in medical school, reads as follows: Great man of Skulls! I must let loose My pen against you; – more’s the pity, For surely you have played the deuce Among the noodles of the city I won’t malignantly assail Your fame, and say you mean to joke us; But faith, I can’t make head or tail Of all this mystic hocus pocus. The brains of our wiseacre cits, Thy learned lore so strangely leavens, Good luck! Their wisdom and their wits Lie all at sixes and at sevens. Here’s one all zealous to maintain There’s wisdom true thy wondrous art in; Another cries, with cool disdain, “T is all my eye and Betty Martin.” There’s Billy Dough-head, harmless youth, Who ne’er touched sword, or ever saw gun, Fumbles his sconce, and finds, forsooth, That he’s a huge destructive organ. In doleful dumps his mother quakes, For now, beyond a harmless mockery, He tries his hand at work, and makes Macadam of the glass and crockery. And plodding Tim, so dull and fat, To whom the Fates ne’er granted favor, 38

Holmes, Poetical Works, 1902, 1975.

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Young Holmes and Phrenology in Boston To work his way through sharp and flat, Or tell a crochet from a quaver, Is thrown into harmonious freak, And now, is symphony diurnal, He makes his crazy fiddle squeak, And roars a jargon most infernal. Hen-hearted Bob, whose rising wrath So small a danger smooths and evens, That should a finger cross his path, He’d run away from Major Stevens, Has made a most surprising jump, Doffed in a trice the calf’s skin vile, and Cries out, “I’m brave! Behold the bump! “‘T is just the shape of Noodle’s Island!” There’s Mopus will the world astound; Though deep in silent dullness sunk, he Has felt upon his head and found That he’s mimetic as a monkey. One chapter of thy doctrine sage, His addle pate has popped so pat in, The fool has taken to the stage, And learned a part to tear a cat in. Here’s Joe the truckman, too, it seems, The rhyming bump you’ve found to show him; He’s got him foolscap, forty reams, And set about a ponderous poem. Dick Dusty whilom swept the streets, But since they lectures late have met his Wise ears, he tried mechanic feats, And tinkers mousetraps and dumb-betties. Indeed, can one believe his eyes? ‘T is e’en ‘mong politicians; some skulls Do hold themselves prodigious wise, Albeit most portentous numskulls. Mein Herr, what has your reverence done? A stoic’s jaw must be padlocked, or He’d laugh to see the learned fun Caused by a grave High German Doctor.39

39

S., Boston Notions, 1832.

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chapter 9

An American in Paris

On the site of the ancient cemetery of Clamart, about a mile from my room, there now stands another receptacle for the defunct, where they are consigned to the open hands of science. … We paid fifty sous apiece for our subject, and before evening had cut him into inch pieces. Now all this can hardly be done anywhere in the world but at Paris. Letter from Holmes (in Paris) to his parents May 14, 18351

Encouraged to do so by his mentor James Jackson, Holmes stopped his medical studies in Boston during the spring of 1833 to further his medical education in Paris. This was where Gall and Spurzheim had come in 1807, where both men lived after they stopped collaborating, and where Gall had died five years earlier. Paris now boasted a population of about 800,000, and for those interested in learning advanced medicine, it was the place to be during the 1830s. During the seventeenth century, the Dutch town of Leyden had been the preferred destination for American medical students. During the next century, it was Edinburgh and London. But the practices of medicine and surgery had evolved, and Paris had become the newest “medical Mecca”2 – the site where physicians and surgeons were striving to advance medicine by basing it on hard scientific facts, many stemming from better instrumentation. Supported by the government, Paris now had seven general and five specialized hospitals, which handled approximately 70,000 patients. To put this number in perspective, this was approximately 140 times as many patients as were cared for at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1832.3 1 2 3

Holmes, Works, 1892, 14: 151. This term comes from Shyrock, Medicine and Society, 1960, 127. See Jones, American doctors, 1973; also Jones, Parisian Education, 1978, 12–13.

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What the French were doing had been gaining increased attention in the New World, thanks in part to physicians returning from Paris.4 Dr. Elisha Bartlett studied in Paris during the 1820s before sailing back to New England, where he praised the physicians, hospitals, and the various opportunities for learning more abroad. He even translated a book of biographical sketches of some of France’s leading medical practitioners, researchers, and teachers.5 René la Roche was another important American physician promoting Parisian medicine. He spent 1828–29 in France and published a more balanced “Account of the origin, progress, and present state of the medical school of Paris” in 1832, a work that also showcased what France had to offer in the medical field.6 With the help of these and other returning physicians, American medics and their students were able to envision how Paris, with its call for facts based on hard science, could help them learn more, provide better care, and advance the field. In 1833, when Holmes boarded his ship for the transatlantic crossing, as put by medical historian Colin Jones, “the work of the Parisian clinicians, surgeons, and anatomists and the superior opportunities for medical study there had been widely and favorably reported in the American medical community.”7 The physicians and medical students venturing to Paris during the 1830s had various objectives.8 “Overwhelmingly,” American historian John Harley Warner wrote, “it was experiential knowledge – the promise of gaining practical experience at the bedside and dissecting table – that drew most students to Paris.”9 The hard science underlying highly touted French medicine was a second factor. As Holmes would soon be writing back to his parents: “As to the science in England and France, or rather Paris and London, the Frenchmen have half a century in advance.”10 He had good reasons for saying so.

French Medical Science Some of the landmark discoveries that had made Paris the leading center for rigorous scientific medicine had roots going back to the eighteenth Osler, Alabama Student, 1908; Steiner, Louis, 1940; Hinsdale, Medical argonauts, 1945; Shyrock, American Medical Research, 1947, Medicine and Society, 1960; Jones, American doctors, 1973; Jones, Parisian Education, 1978; Tilton, Amiable Autocrat, 1947; Dowling, Holmes in Paris, 2006. 5 Piesse, Sketches, 1831. 6 Roche, Medical school, 1831–1832. 7 Jones, Parisian Education, 1978, 8. 8 Shyrock, Modern Medicine, 1936; Jones, Parisian Education, 1978; Warner, Spirit of System, 1998. 9 Warner, Spirit of System, 1998, 32. 10 On October 22, 1833; see Holmes, Works, 1892, 14: 117. 4

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century, though not necessarily in Paris. One was the stethoscope. Its history began when Austrian physician Leopold von Auenbrugger discovered that gently thumping or tapping the chest could provide valuable information about the internal organs. The story often told is that his insight came while working at his father’s inn, where he learned to place his ear on a wooden cask and tap it to judge how much wine was left in the barrel.11 While at the Spanish Military Hospital of the Holy Trinity in Vienna, he discovered that he could determine the extent of tubercular lung infiltrations using the same “percussion method,” a breakthrough he confirmed by autopsies on some of his patients. In fact, he could even make a rough outline of the heart by tapping and listening carefully. The discoveries Auenbrugger presented in his 1761 book,12 however, drew little recognition until 1808, when Jean-Nicholas Corvisart published a French translation with commentary.13 Corvisart saw patients at La Charité, the Parisian hospital started by the Brothers of Charity in 1607. Having been Napoleon’s chief physician helped him to draw even more attention to the percussion method in his book, which was larger and more informative than Auenbrugger’s. The next step occurred eight years later in Paris. In 1816, René Théophile Hyacinthe Laennec, one of Corvisart’s students, attended a woman with suspected heart disease. She was so overweight that percussing her chest was useless. But Laennec remembered how schoolchildren used hollow sticks to amplify faint sounds, and he rolled a piece of paper into a cylinder. He placed one end of the tube on the obese woman’s chest and the other by his ear. And it was with his ingenuity that the stethoscope was born. Laennec subsequently designed wood and brass monaural stethoscopes. He described them in a treatise titled De l’Auscultation, published in 1819 and quickly translated into English.14 Although he continued to improve his single cylinders, he never came forth with a binaural stethoscope, the type that physicians now use.15 Holmes would learn a lot more about Laennec’s stethoscopes while in France. He would then play a significant 11

12 13 14 15

O’Neal, Auenbrugger, 1998. This author reminds us that, although there is no hard evidence showing that Auenbrugger derived his insights from tapping wine barrels, he did mention the sounds of full and empty wine barrels in his 1761 book. Auenbrugger, Inventum novum, 1761. John Forbes provided an English translation in 1824 (see Forbes, Original Cases, 1824; also, Forbes and Sigerist, Percussion, 1936). Corvisart, Nouvelle Méthode, 1808. Auenbrugger’s book was ninety-five pages long; Corvisart’s had 440. Laennec, Auscultation, 1819; Laennec, Diseases of the Chest, 1821. Irish-born physician Arthur Leared would introduce this improvement in 1849. George Cammann, who practiced medicine in New York City, modified the stethoscope for commercial production in 1852.

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role in introducing the instrument to American physicians and their students, writing about it and employing it in his lectures and bedside examinations. Paris was also at the vanguard when it came to introducing better ways of classifying diseases, discarding the descriptive formulations that had been handed down through the ages. Previously, diseases were classified on the basis of a single sign (what a physician could detect, such as a rash) or symptom (what the patient would report, such as a headache). Hence, patients were classified as having “fevers” (as in Spurzheim’s case), “inflammations,” and the like. Rejecting these older categorizations, French physicians were now beginning to associate specific disorders with changes in individual organs and to classify them as such. They were helped by stethoscopes and the ability to conduct needed autopsies on large numbers of patients. Marie François Xavier Bichat, a leading figure in anatomy, conducted thousands of autopsies at the Hôtel Dieu. This charity hospital had opened a millennium earlier on the Île de la Cité, just north of the Notre Dame Cathedral.16 Bichat had embarked on his program to study the internal organs and how they were affected by different diseases during the 1790s, and he continued it into the 1800s. His findings and writings were instrumental in creating the field of pathological anatomy.17 Although Bichat (along with Corvisart and Laennec) had died before Holmes arrived in Paris,18 Holmes would feel the anatomist and pathologist’s presence while studying medicine there. He would state that thanks to Bichat’s “extraordinary genius,” “What geology has done for our knowledge of the earth, has been done for the knowledge of the body.”19 “Observe and experience,” along with “test and confirm,” were becoming the catchphrases of the day in progressive Paris. Historian Edwin Ackerknecht drew attention to this decidedly empirical approach, describing it as one “based on physical examination by hand and ear, on pathological anatomy, on statistics, and on the concept of the lesion.”20 This empirical orientation was also being applied to therapeutics. The ancient idea that the Earth was composed of four paired elements, earth, 16 17 18 19 20

The Hôtel Dieu boasted two large buildings while Holmes was in France, a main structure on the island and a nearby annex on the left bank of the Seine. Bichat, Recherches Physiologiques, 1800; Bichat, Anatomie Générale, 1801; Bichat, Anatomie Descriptive, 1801–1803. Corvisart (1755–1821), Laennec (1781–1826), Bichat (1771–1802). Holmes, Works, 1892, 9: 222. Ackerknecht, Paris Hospital, 1967, xi.

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air, fire, and water, was not entirely abandoned through the Renaissance and Early Modern Era. These four elements were coupled with four bodily fluids, or humors (phlegm, blood, black bile, and yellow bile), which in turn were associated with the paired qualities of either wet or dry, or hot or cold. The long-held belief was that bodily disorders were due to humoral imbalances. It logically followed that the imbalances should be treated with opposites to restore the equilibrium. Hence, cold foods were prescribed for patients with fevers and hot ones for those with chills, while patients with flushed skin were subjected to venesection, cupping, or leeching to reduce excessive blood. Although humoral theories lost favor over time, these and other ancient therapeutics managed to endure. But now some Parisian physicians, including the Frenchman Holmes would most admire, were actually testing some of these time-honored therapies, asking whether bloodletting, to cite but one example, really helped make sick people better. Indeed, statistics were already showing that bleeding patients and some other timehonored therapeutics had little medical utility. Some could even be harmful, especially when administered to debilitated patients. New therapeutics that could be shown to be effective were needed, along with greater knowledge of how some diseases might dissipate over time without a physician’s unnecessary meddling. The French government, wanting its physicians to be the envy of the world, was now doing more than its part by providing huge numbers of sick patients for study and, of equal importance, supplying the bodies of those that had died for autopsy – far more than students in the United States or even Britain could hope to dissect. While Holmes was in Paris, approximately 4,000 bodies were made available to physicians, assistants, and aspiring students each year. Most were transported from hospitals to the Amphithéâtre des Hôpital on the Left Bank, close to the Jardin des Plantes. This site had previously been the Cimetière de Clamart, a place for bodies to be buried, not studied. But now its function had changed: it had become a site for teaching and learning. Le Clamart, as it was now informally called, had grown into a campus with four pavilions. It contained offices, lecture halls, a library, a museum, and a morgue. Instructors could rent rooms with up to fifteen dissection tables, and there was sufficient space for 600 students to conduct their morbid studies simultaneously. Holmes would tell his parents how he and a Swiss student “paid fifty sous apiece for our subject, and before evening had cut him into inch pieces.” Since he needed his frugal father’s financial support while abroad,

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he emphasized: “Now all this can hardly be done anywhere in the world but at Paris.”21 In addition to these notable features of Parisian medical training, there were also other developments of importance. One was the change from teaching in the dead language of Latin to teaching in modern French. Another was the concours system, in which advancement through the ranks was based on talent, achievement, and competitive examinations, not wealth, titles, or rank. Further, there was the reorganized hospital system. Patients were now being sent to institutions specializing in specific conditions, such as the Hôpital des Infantes Malades for sick children, the venerable La Charité for chest diseases, and La Pitié, previously an orphan asylum and now a hospital specializing in diseases of the nervous system. Paris really was the hub of the medical universe when Holmes embarked on his transatlantic voyage. Needless to say, he was not alone in making this voyage, though the number of Americans heading to Paris to study medicine was not large. Colin Jones estimated that only 222 Americans did so during the 1830s.22 Other historians, however, think his estimate is probably on the low side, stemming from his strict definition of what constitutes medical training. Costs, language barriers, and demands at home probably held many aspiring individuals back from going to Paris or staying for more than a year if they did go. Many spent just a few weeks or months abroad. Very few pursued a diplôme from the École de Médecine, which took years to achieve with its many requirements.23

Settling In Boston physician Jacob Bigelow was one of the passengers on the ship Holmes boarded in 1833. Bigelow had witnessed how some of his fellow physicians had embraced phrenology early on and how the doctrine had captured the attention of many more physicians when Spurzheim visited Boston. He was also involved with what transpired after Spurzheim’s death, though in one way that separated him from the other physicians. He was the architect of the new Mt. Auburn Cemetery, where the German-born phrenologist had been laid to rest a year earlier. Holmes would write that 21 22 23

Letter of May 14, 1835; in Holmes, Works, 1892, 14: 151. Jones, American doctors, 1973; Jones, Parisian Education, 1978. The French diploma required a bachelor’s degree plus sixteen courses, meaning four years of additional study. It also called for observing patients at the bedside, writing a thesis, and passing five examinations (see Jones, American doctors, 1973, 56).

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Bigelow was “more learned, far more various in gifts and acquirements than any of his colleagues; shrewd, inventive, constructive, questioning, patient in forming opinions, steadfast in maintaining them.”24 But whether the two ocean travelers discussed phrenology as their ship sailed east across the Atlantic is unknown. Holmes secured lodging in a reasonably priced boardinghouse close to the Jardins de Luxembourg, which allowed him to improve his already decent French. He then quickly got to know several other students from New England, who would help him navigate the French system. One was James Jackson, Jr., who had arrived without a medical degree two years earlier. His physician father had been instrumental in guiding Holmes’s career, even telling his son about Holmes’s exceptional capacity to learn and retain what he was taught. He also spent time with Jonathan “Mason” Warren, who had already received his medical degree in the United States, unlike the younger Jackson. Mason’s letters to his father, Dr. John Collins Warren, whom Holmes admired, provide vivid descriptions of the courses offered, the mindsets of the teachers giving them, and Parisian medical culture at this time. Worthy of note is that Mason’s father prevailed upon his son to keep him informed of the latest advances in surgery and medicine, and asked him to buy books, instruments, skulls, and casts for his phrenological cabinet.25 Henry Bowditch, a mathematician’s son, was a third member of the New Englander cabal. Like Mason Warren, Bowditch also obtained his medical degree before heading to France.26 Guided in part by his friends on French soil, Holmes began his Parisian education, which had several distinct components. One was the lectures given by the faculty of the École de Médecine. In a letter to his father, Holmes explained: “The whole walls round the École de Médecine are covered with notices of lectures, the greater part of them gratuitous.”27 A second was the private lectures and demonstrations given by physicians, surgeons, and assistants. A third involved observing physicians while they 24 25

26 27

Holmes, Medical School, 1883, 8. Jones, Parisian Education, 1978. Two years after Mason Warren returned to Boston, his father went to Paris to witness some of the same operations. He met several of the physicians that his son had mentioned. He also visited London and Edinburgh. However, John Collins Warren was not the first of the Warrens to study abroad, his own father having studied medicine in Europe between 1799 and 1801. Bowditch, Bowditch, 1: 1902. Holmes, Works, 1892, 14: 89.

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“walked the wards,” meaning while diagnosing and treating hospitalized patients. Learning surgical techniques was a fourth. And a fifth called for him to perform autopsies under the watchful eyes of a dissector skilled in the morbid art. Like his friends, Holmes recognized early on that the free lectures given at the medical school were not nearly as informative as what he could learn in private clinics. Quoting historian John Harley Warner: “The didactic lectures that made up the official course at the École de Médecine, to begin with, were never foremost in their [the Americans’] attention, despite the fact that these, like most public instruction in medicine, were underwritten by the French government and freely open to them.”28 The more appealing private clinical lessons were usually limited to five students, who paid nominal fees for them. They covered skills such as bandaging and using the stethoscope, observing patients suffering from different diseases, and the proper way to dissect a body. During the mid1830s, approximately fifty tutorials were offered each year, most costing a modest 30 francs per month. Holmes did not deviate significantly from the routines Jackson, Warren, and Bowditch were following. He woke early and went to one of the hospitals to join the students trying to listen to a physician as he went from bed to bed examining patients, a task that was challenging for those positioned toward the back of a crowded ward. He then attended one or more clinical lectures. Afternoons were frequently reserved for doing autopsies. And when possible, he would finish by watching surgeons perform various operations. He would then make his way back to his residence thoroughly exhausted.

Holmes’s Idol, Louis Because of the large crowds that followed physicians and surgeons at the Hôtel Dieu, Holmes’s friends directed him to Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis (Figure 9.1), a physician at the smaller, less crowded Hôpital de la Pitié. Louis spoke little English and was not a consummate lecturer. But these were not turn-offs for Holmes, who focused on what Louis said and recognized his greatness.29 Holmes was particularly impressed with how Louis favored evidencebased medicine and utilized large data sets to debunk medical myths. 28 29

Warner, Spirit of System, 1998, 93. Steiner, Louis, 1940; Hinsdale, Medical argonauts, 1945; Jones, American doctors, 1973; Jones, Parisian Education, 1978; Dowling, Holmes in Paris, 2006.

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Figure 9.1  Dr. Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis (1787–1872), the French physician Holmes most admired.

Among other things, he had shown with a large sample (his “numerical method”) that bloodletting not only failed to hasten recovery from some illnesses, but also weakened many sick patients.30 According to Jones: He [Louis] insisted on and conducted careful, thorough examinations of individual cases starting with complete case histories prior to illnesses, followed by scrupulous observation at the bedside using a stethoscope noting changes in respiration … as the disease progressed. Then he made a complete autopsy, examining all the organs and the mucous membrane for anatomical lesions. The results of his minute investigations of numerous cases he arranged in tables in such a way that significant correlations between symptoms noted in the course of the disease and the lesions detected in autopsies could be easily perceived. By the so-called “numerical method” based on clinical observation Louis … provided accurate details on different thoracic diseases and established the lack of efficacy of certain popular treatments, such as bloodletting, in diseases of the chest.31 30 31

Louis, Saignée, 1828. Jones, Parisian Education, 1978, 45–46. A comparable statement can be found in Dowling, Holmes in Paris, 2006, xiv.

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Louis further taught that the physician’s task was to aid nature, not to block or hinder what nature might be able to do on its own. This was his méthod expectante. Holmes found himself agreeing with Louis about intervening only when necessary. Holmes called Louis the “object of our reverence, I might almost say idolatry … he was a man whom any student might be happy and proud to claim as his teacher and his friend.”32 Similarly, Holmes’s fellow student Henry Bowditch wrote home that “No one has the least conception in Boston of the power that a person can gain by following Louis,” “a careful observer of facts” and “a renovator of the science of medicine.”33 Holmes and other Americans would transport Louis’s ideas back to the United States. They would help make American medicine more scientific and less dependent on worthless or even harmful fads, even ones long thought to be beneficial. Louis and the medical students in his circle recognized Holmes’s potential, dedication, and drive. These traits led them to elect him into the Société Médicale d’Observation, an organization for elite students.34 He was also given free access to two of Louis’s wards, a privilege granted to very few students, including those from France.

Other Teachers Although Louis was Holmes’s favorite teacher, he was also impressed with several other Parisian physicians. He admired Alfred-ArmandLouis-Marie Velpeau, a surgeon who carefully diagnosed his cases prior to operating, showed common sense, “industry, determination, intelligence, [and] character,” and went out of his way to help and be kind to American students.35 He also wrote favorably about Auguste François Chomel, who favored Louis’s empirical and numerical methods and offered clinical lectures. There were, however, also instructors he disliked enough to lecture and write about their faults later on. One was Baron Guillaume Dupuytren, one of Napoleon’s battlefield surgeons. Dupuytren was now in his final years, 32 33 34

35

Morse, Holmes, 1896, 1: 91. Bowditch, Bowditch, 1902, 1: 38; also, Warren’s letter of April 13, 1833 (Jones, American doctors, 1978, 119). This society was founded in 1832 by some of Louis’s students, one being James Jackson, Jr. Henry Bowditch, also a member, would go on to organize an American version of the society, calling it the Boston Society of Medical Observation. For Holmes on his teachers, see Holmes, Works, 1892, 9: 420–440; Tilton, Amiable Autocrat, 1947, 118–134.

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and Holmes was bothered by his dictatorial nature (“No man disputed his reign”), arrogance, and inhumanity toward his patients.36 He was also highly critical of surgeon Jacques Lisfranc de St. Martin. He felt Lisfranc was bombastic and mistreated patients. Holmes was further bothered by how he was always finding ways to rationalize his failures. Besides, he would recall, Lisfranc was “a great drawer of blood,” the popular therapeutic Louis had debunked.

A Revealing Trip During the spring and summer of 1834, Holmes joined Mason Warren, Henry Bowditch, and a third American, Robert Hooper, on a tour of nearby countries. They visited medical sites and met physicians and surgeons in Strasbourg, Amsterdam, London, Edinburgh, and several other cities. One of the highlights of this excursion was a chance to visit John Hunter’s famous anatomical museum in London. Put together during the previous century, it housed an incredible collection of human and animal organs. Hunter had built his enormous collection to learn more about anatomy in health and disease, knowledge he viewed as critical for advancing surgery scientifically. The group also took the opportunity to meet with Sir Astley Cooper, a surgeon at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London, who had recently been President of the Royal College of Surgeons. Despite seeing some world-class medical collections, meeting many highly regarded physicians, and visiting some venerable institutions, Holmes and his fellow travelers concluded that medical education in Britain was in a rather shoddy state. They found it still too formal and traditional, commenting that it was modernizing only at a snail’s pace. As Bowditch wrote in a letter to his father: “I felt as everybody else does, that England and Scotland have retained the names of schools of medicine, but the schools themselves have fallen from their honorable position which they had some fifty or more years ago.”37 For his part, Holmes was taken by how quackery was running rampant in Britain. In a letter dated June 21, 1834, he told his father how he had “been at different hospitals looking at the different manifestations of the 36

37

Mason repeatedly described Dupuytren’s cruelty in his letters to his father, in one of them using the term “savage disposition.” On March 14, 1833, he wrote: “For brutality to his patients I do not think he is equaled. If his orders are not immediately obeyed he thinks nothing of striking his patient or abusing him most harshly. A very favorite practice of his during his consultation is to make a handle of the noses of his patients” (in Jones, Parisian Education, 1978, 109). Mason also noted, however, that Dupuytren could change quickly and talk in a “soft and harmonious” voice when he so wished. Bowditch, Bowditch, 1902, 1: 63.

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English spirit of quackery.”38 Phrenology had many supporters in Britain at this time, thanks in great measure to Spurzheim’s earlier visits, his acolyte Combe’s proselytizing, and the numerous books and pamphlets coming off its presses praising the utility of the doctrine. Thus, Holmes could, and probably was, alluding at least in part to phrenology when bringing up “the different manifestations of the English spirit of quackery” in a medical context. But although this interpretation is worth considering, he did not use the word phrenology in this letter to his father.

The Société Phrénologique As mentioned in Chapter 1, Gall arrived in Paris in 1807 and was treated as a celebrity in various social circles. Although shunned by Napoleon and Georges Cuvier at the Institut National des Sciences et des Arts, Gall had followers in science and medicine. His anatomical skills were especially admired, even by physicians and anatomists opposing or uncertain about his organologie. His public and private lectures proved to be exceedingly popular, and he appeared to have had little trouble filling auditoriums with paying listeners. Gall became a French citizen, opened a successful medical practice, and wrote his most important books in his adopted city. As for Spurzheim, he too continued to promote phrenology in Paris, where he married, lived, and wrote when not on his lengthy lecture tours in Britain. Even after Gall’s death in 1828 and Spurzheim’s in 1832, many Parisians remained committed to studying and promoting Gall and Spurzheim’s new science of man. Arriving in Paris a year after Spurzheim’s death, Holmes witnessed how some Parisian physicians were actively championing and defending phrenology in various venues, while others looked upon phrenology with, to use poet Alexander Pope’s term, a jaundiced eye. The Société Phrénologique in Paris was the most important and visible of the French societies strongly endorsing phrenology during Holmes’s stay.39 This organization was founded in Gall’s memory in 1831, and would remain a part of Paris’s vibrant and colorful landscape until 1848. It boasted 110 members soon after it was formed, more than half of whom had been trained in medicine. Some of these physicians already had or would soon acquire international reputations. This more exalted group included Jean-Baptiste 38 39

Holmes, Works, 1892, 14: 134. Ackerknecht, Dumoutier, 1956; Renneville, Cabinet phrénologique, 1998.

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Bouillaud, Professor of Internal Medicine at the Charité, François-JosephVictor Broussais, Professor of Pathology at the University of Paris, Gabriel Andral, Professor of Hygiene at the University of Paris, and Jean-Pierre Falret and Léon Louis Rostan, physicians at the large Salpêtrière hospital, where Jean Martin Charcot would soon be achieving worldwide fame in neurology and psychiatry.40 Giovanni Fosatti, one of Gall’s most devoted disciples and his first biographer, was another important member of this organization. The Société Phrénologique, as mentioned, did not just attract physicians. It also attracted famous artists, philosophers, and writers. One of its most celebrated artists was the Neoclassical painter François Gérard, famous for his portraits of prominent people.41 French philosopher Auguste Comte, the first “modern” philosopher of science, who is best remembered for his doctrine of positivism, was also a member. Jean-Baptiste Ballière, in turn, represented the group of distinguished writers and publishers joining the organization. He not only published phrenology books but oversaw the organization’s periodical, the Journal de la Société Phrénologique de Paris. Additionally, there were lawyers and politicians from both chambers of the French legislature, and people from still other fields, making for quite a mix. The Société Phrénologique, like other such societies then and now, held annual meetings. It met on August 22, chosen because this was the day Gall died. In the report of the Société’s fourth meeting, which took place in 1834 while Holmes was still in Paris, we find that the French government and even King Louis Philippe I, the country’s last monarch, were interested in phrenology. M. Andral, the most distinguished pathologist of the age, is president of the Paris Phrenological Society. He has given the subject of phrenology a patient examination, and declares that the relation which exists between the configuration of the cranium and the different propensities of man is the result of the evidences which amount almost to certainty. It is also gratifying to learn that the French government takes an interest in the science. The king has recently expressed his opinion that the application of its principles to criminal legislation would render a great service to mankind.42

The society’s members did more than just lecture to the assembled – they collected skulls and casts and offered courses to the public. The Musée 40 41 42

Seven other notable physicians are Félix Voison, A. Pierre Bérard, Jules Cloquet, Imbert Fleury, Achille-Louis Foville, Louis Francisque Lélut, and Alexandre Thierry. Laguée describes the special attraction this society held for artists in Morbid pantheon, 2014. Green, Phrenological Society, 1834, 897.

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de Phrenologie, which opened in a fashionable part of the city shortly after Holmes’s departure, attracted even more attention to the organization and the science it was endorsing.43 With free admission and a large range of exhibits, it became a popular destination for scholars, curious French citizens, and foreign visitors. Later in the century, this collection would be transferred to the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, where it would reside with Gall’s collection of skulls, casts, and other pieces – items that helped him construct and defend his new doctrine of mind and brain.44 As noted in Chapter 2, Gall’s own skull was added to what he had collected and utilized for his research, lectures, and books. Phrenology was also present in other ways in and around Paris. As Holmes and his friends found at first hand, there were stores in the city that sold phrenology books, skulls, and casts. There was also an “orthophrenological” institute at Issy-les-Moulinaux. Further reflecting phrenology’s continuing appeal, Broussais delivered a course of lectures on phrenology at the Université de Paris in 1836 that supposedly attracted approximately 2,000 listeners! Nonetheless, phrenology’s appeal in Paris and throughout France was not quite as strong as it had been while Gall and Spurzheim were still residing there. Further, despite the excitement coming from the Société Phrénologique, few new experiments were being conducted to give the doctrine more substantial scientific support.45 With these facts in mind, it is important to ask what, if anything, Holmes’s teachers had to say about this popular subject.

Holmes’s French Teachers on Phrenology Holmes gave a lecture in 1882 at Harvard’s Medical School in which he reminisced about his teachers. Going beyond just his teachers in Boston, he brought up some of the physicians and surgeons he listened to and met in Paris. What he remembered or at least chose to say about them and phrenology is fascinating. Equally so is what he opted to omit, for reasons that might never be known. François-Joseph-Victor Broussais, mentioned earlier, was one of the physicians who thought highly of Gall, Spurzheim, and phrénologie. He 43

44 45

See Ackerknecht, Alexandre Dumoutier’s, 1956; Renneville, Cabinet phrénologique, 1998. Dumoutier’s Discours on the opening of the museum on January 14, 1836, appears in English in Renneville, Cabinet phrénologique, 1998. Ackerknecht (Gall, 1956) lists the items in the two collections. Lanteri-Laura, Histoire, 1970.

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had studied anatomy under Bichat and became Chief Physician at the Val de Grâce, an important Parisian military hospital, after serving in Napoleon’s Army. In 1831, he was awarded the Professorship of General Pathology at the École de Médecine, where he promoted “physiological medicine.” By all accounts, he was an impressive and dynamic public speaker. Holmes attended some of Broussais’s lectures and wrote home that he, for one, was more than willing to give all of them up! It was not that Broussais did not speak well. But following his mentor Jackson in Boston, Holmes could not accept Broussais’s belief that all diseases begin as local inflammations that became general inflammations affecting the gastrointestinal tract. He also recoiled at how Broussais was still promoting copious bloodletting and at how he tended to be verbally abusive to perceived adversaries, most notably Louis. Holmes likened Broussais to “an old volcano” still spewing obsolete physiological theories while denying the reality of organ-specific diseases.46 To Holmes, he was a physician whose time had passed. What Holmes did not tell his listeners in Harvard’s auditorium and with the subsequent publication of this lecture readers around the world, was how Broussais had been a strong supporter of Gall’s so-called new science. He had, in fact, given the eulogy at Gall’s funeral in Paris, and he then became even more engaged with the doctrine after Gall’s body was laid to rest. He was a founding member of the Société Phrénologique and was elected its vice-president. And in 1833, while Holmes was in Paris, Broussais lectured before this organization on human and animal heads, verbally blasting the “enemies of phrenology.”47 Broussais, in fact, never stopped promoting phrenology, even writing on the subject during the final years of his life. His popular Cours de Phrénologie came off the press in 1836, the year he gave the course on phrenology at the Université de Paris that supposedly attracted 2,000 students.48 The year 1836, in which Broussais published his Cours de Phrénologie, was in many ways a banner year for French advocates of phrenology. It was marked by a torrent of new books on the subject, including: Introduction à l’Étude Philosophique de la Phrénologie, by Georges Louis Bessière; Essai sur les Passions, by P. Paul Mignot; Aperçu Critique des Théories sur les Idées et les Facultés Humaines, by Joanny André Napoléon Perier; and Qu’est-ce que 46 47 48

Holmes, Works, 1892, 9: 429–430. See Andral, Phrenological society, 1834, 896. Broussais, Cours de Phrénologie, 1836.

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la Phrénologie?, by Louis Francisque Lélut. Broussais’s last book, his Leçons de Phrénologie, was published in 1839, a year after his death.49 Gabriel Andral also found Gall’s doctrines intriguing and, like Broussais, was elected an honorary (foreign) member of Boston’s phrenological society. Andral lectured at the École de Médecine right after Broussais left the hall. He received thunderous welcomes from students waiting to hear him talk about pathological anatomy and related subjects. James Jackson, Jr., stated that he and other Americans were even willing to endure Broussais’s flawed lectures to ensure a good seat for the lecturer who followed! One of Holmes’s notebooks covered Andral’s course of fifty-eight lectures on internal diseases. It reveals that Andral discussed the four temperaments, which Spurzheim and Combe had modified in their phrenology books. In Lecture 39, for example, Andral spoke about “the sanguine temperament,” the one Samuel Clemens thought best described him. And in his notes on Lecture 40, Holmes wrote, “Lymphatic temperament more common in women than men.” When giving his 1882 lecture at Harvard, Holmes recalled Andral fondly, saying he was “one of those instructors whose natural eloquence made it a delight to listen to him.” He further remarked that his Clinique Médicale had long remained a valuable collection of cases, and that he appreciated how Andral admitted there were diseases and conditions he did not understand (for example, intermittent fever, now known as malaria).50 Yet, as he had done with Broussais, he chose to say nothing about Andral’s interest and support of phrenology, including his holding the position of President of the Société Phrénologique. Nor did he mention how, during the summer of 1834, Andral had opened the meeting of this society with a discussion of what had already been done in phrenology, before pointing out what still remained to be done, so that “the principles laid down by the science should obtain the authority of facts.”51 Not to be overlooked, Andral had maintained just a year earlier that there was a parallelism between the cranium and the brain, at least in the great majority of people – and that Gall’s thinking about specialized cortical areas was now “beyond dispute.” When discussing “Insanity Illustrated by Phrenology,” Andral had even remarked how he was “full of admiration for that man” when speaking of Gall.52 49 50 51 52

Broussais, Leçons de Phrénologie, 1839. Holmes, Works, 1892, 9: 432. Andral, Phrenological Society, 1834, 896. Andral, Lectures, 1833, 652.

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Holmes also brought up Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud, another member of the Société Phrénologique and the editor of its journal. He did so in the context of “Many other names of men more or less famous in their day, and who were teaching while I was in Paris.” But he then asked rhetorically: “Where now is the fame of Bouillaud?”53 Holmes’s failure to recognize one of Bouillaud’s crowning achievements is hard to comprehend. In 1825, before Holmes arrived in Paris, Bouillaud began publishing reports of clinical cases showing that speech is an anterior cerebral function. Further, he was continuing to collect new cases in support of this structure–function association while Holmes was studying in Paris.54 Bouillaud even used the numerical method popularized by Louis in his endeavors to show that Gall was right about what would later be called “cortical localization of function” – a fact widely accepted in 1882, when Holmes seemed to brush off Bouillaud, even though the latter’s clinical cases were instrumental in setting the stage for Paul Broca’s more detailed case studies of aphasia.55 Importantly, Bouillaud’s clinical case studies had nothing to do with cranial bumps, and this helped undermine phrenology, as will be made clearer at the end of this book. Holmes portrayed Baron Dominique Jean Larrey differently in the same published lecture. He viewed him as a piece of living history. “To go round the Hôtel des Invalides with Larrey was to live over the campaigns of Napoleon,” he told his audiences.56 Larrey had, in fact, treated the wounded of Napoleon’s Grande Armée in twenty-six campaigns between 1803 and 1815 and was highly adept at amputating limbs quickly to preclude the onset of gangrene. Holmes recalled the surgeon’s squat appearance, how he “was still strong and sturdy,” and how he liked to wear a white apron. He remarked how “few portraits remain printed in livelier colors on the tablet of my memory,” when reminiscing about one of the most highly regarded surgeons of the Napoleonic Era.57 But here, too, what he chose to leave unmentioned stands out like the dog that did not bark in the Sherlock Holmes mystery, The Hound of the Baskervilles. Whereas Arthur Conan Doyle based Sherlock primarily on his teacher Joseph Bell, he named his fictional detective after Holmes, once 53 54 55

56 57

Holmes, Works, 1892, 9: 436–437. Bouillaud, Recherches cliniques, 1825; Bouillaud, Traité Clinique, 1825; Bouillaud, Recherches expérimentales, 1830; Bouillaud, Exposition, 1839; Bouillaud, Recherches Cliniques, 1848. Broca, Langage articulé, 1861; Broca, Localisation des fonctions, 1863; Broca, Faculté du langage, 1865; Schiller, Broca, 1979; Finger, Minds, 2000, 137–154. Bouillaud, who died in 1882, witnessed how some of Gall’s fundamental ideas – but not his faulty craniometry – were substantiated by others (see Luzzatti and Whitaker, Bouillaud, 2001; Leblanc, Fearful Asymmetry, 2017). Holmes, Works, 1892, 9: 427. Holmes, Works, 1892, 9: 427.

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stating: “Never have I so known and loved a man whom I had never seen.”58 But as with the uncharacteristically silent hound, which was expected to have barked ferociously and repeatedly in Doyle’s 1902 thriller, Holmes remained silent on Larrey’s close ties to Gall and how he had endorsed phrenological theorizing. Larrey had even lectured on the doctrine in 1808, while in Toulouse. In his own words: “I received an invitation from the professors and students of the medical school to undertake the demonstration of the system of Dr. Gall, … and in four hours completed an anatomical and physiological demonstration of the enkephalon [brain], according to the principles of the German doctor, but with some variations.”59 Even better known, because Gall mentioned it prominently in his two sets of books, Larrey had provided the doctrine’s founder with numerous clinical cases strongly supporting his idea that there are distinct cortical organs of mind, each with a separate locus. At least a dozen of Larrey’s cases were injured soldiers with word-finding problems.60 One of these was Edouard de Rampan, whose “memory of names has been wholly extinguished, and reproduced now with great difficulty; while the memory of images, and of all which is susceptible of demonstration, is perfectly sound.” 61 Edouard de Rampan became Gall’s most famous example of how one higher function could be lost while others remained intact. Over time, he would be cited as Gall’s textbook case. Holmes also knew other phrenologically-oriented physicians and surgeons in Paris, men whose names were not mentioned in his 1882 lecture on his teachers, perhaps because they were not as memorable or influential in defining his career path. One was Joseph Vimont of the Faculté de Médecine. Vimont began giving a course of lectures on phrenology in 1829 and published his Traité de Phrénologie Humaine et Comparée with 120 illustrations between 1831 and 1835. Jean-Baptiste Mège was another such physician. Mège endorsed phrenology and in 1835 published the Société Phrénologique’s manifesto. 58

59 60 61

See Miller, Doyle, 2008, 54, 110. Podolsky and Bryan also mentioned the Holmes–Doyle connection (Holmes, 2009, 125). These authors cite the following “Sherlockian” lines from The Professor at the Breakfast-Table (1859/1892, 260), written by Holmes decades before Doyle came forth with his sleuth: “One can tell a man’s business, if it is a handicraft, very often by just taking a look at his open hand. – Ah! Four calluses at the end of the fingers of the right hand. None on those of the left. Ah, ha! What do those mean?” Larrey, Memoirs, 1814, 188–189. Roux and Reddy, Larrey’s Experience, 2013; Feinsod and Aharon-Peretz, Larrey’s description, 1994; Finger and Eling, Gall, 2019, 146–148. Gall, Functions, 5: 1835, 17.

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But what about French physicians and surgeons on the opposite side of the fence, individuals opposing the doctrine? François Magendie, the revered French physiologist affiliated with the Collège de France, stands out as one of the most famous French physicians who rejected phrenology. Holmes recalled that he could attend only a single lecture by Magendie, and he provided no more information about him. Yet he could have done so, because his associate Henry Bowditch was introduced to the French luminary at a dinner party. Bowditch subsequently watched him working at the Hôtel Dieu, where he “found him very pleasant … pointing out to me cases that were interesting.”62 Given how close Holmes was to Bowditch, they must have talked about Magendie, who, as noted in Chapter 5, was the first physician to call phrenology a “pseudo-science,” doing so in a popular medical book that was published while Holmes was in France.63 The term had been initially used at the end of the previous century by the English historian James Pettit Andrews, who described alchemy as “fantastical pseudo-science.”64 Magendie, however, found reasons for also applying the term to phrenology, which he did in his physiology textbook. This work was in such high demand that it underwent multiple editions, including some in English. Magendie’s application of the term to phrenology must have registered on Holmes. He would use it repeatedly when debunking the head readers and attacking phrenological craniology in the Atlantic Monthly, a Harvard lecture, and his “medicated novels.” Marie-Jean-Pierre Flourens, then in his early forties, was also openly critical of phrenology, although he admired Gall’s dissections and anatomy. Flourens’s experiments involving the ablation of parts of the cerebrum and cerebellum in birds and small mammals date from the 1820s. They were first made public by Baron Georges Cuvier, his mentor, who viewed Flourens’s findings as strong evidence against Gall’s theory that there are many specialized organs with different anatomical sites.65 Flourens had found that the cerebellar lesions he made in his animals (primarily birds) seemed to cause motor difficulties. In contrast, Gall’s (and Spurzheim’s) position was that the cerebellum houses an organ for a higher-level reproductive instinct, one involving consciousness and choice. Moreover, Flourens concluded that it did not seem to matter what part of the cerebrum was damaged – the deficits correlated more highly with the amount 62 63 64 65

Bowditch, Bowditch, 1: 1902, 20. Magendie, Élémentaire de Physiologie, 1834, 89; Finger and Eling, Gall, 2019, 480–481. Andrews, Great Britain, 1796, 87. Cuvier, Rapport, 1824; also see Flourens, Recherches Expérimentales, 1824.

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of tissue destroyed than with the specific site of damage. Often overlooked is that Flourens did not conduct his initial brain lesion experiments to bury Gall and that Gall did not think birds or frogs with little in the way of forebrains were proper subjects for testing his ideas.66 But urged on by Georges Cuvier, who had been Napoleon’s policeman for the sciences, Flourens went on to assail phrenology in books published in French, English, and other languages that circulated widely.67

Letters from Abroad Holmes had two skeletons and some skulls with him when he headed across the Atlantic Ocean back to the United States in 1835. One skeleton was for himself. The other, along with some of the skulls in his possession, might have been for John Collins Warren. Mason Warren, Henry Bowditch, and Holmes knew precisely where to acquire these specimens, casts, and books on phrenology. Mason wrote a letter home shortly before Holmes arrived in Paris describing how he and Bowditch had visited one of Paris’s phrenology shops and how its owner reacted when they told him about Spurzheim’s unexpected death. In your last letter you mentioned the death of the much lamented Spurzheim. I was in the shop of the Phrenologist the same day purchasing you a finely marked caucasian head, Phrenologically mapped out, and mentioning Spurzheim’s death to this man. He would not believe me at first, but when I told him the particulars he could scarcely keep from crying: “c’est une grande perte” [it is a great loss] says he our chief prop[rietor]. He came up to Bowditch the next day with the secretary of the Phrenological Society in order to learn the particulars which B had received from his brother.68

Mason did more than just send his father a phrenologically marked skull from this shop. On January 27, 1833, he informed him: “I send you by a ship sailing direct to Boston two boxes – a large one containing 50 or 60 specimens of morbid bones, some skulls, [and] a skeleton.”69 66 67

68 69

Eling and Finger, Cerebellum, 2019. Flourens, Examen de la Phrénologie, 1842; Flourens, Phrenology Examined, 1846; Flourens, De la Phrénologie, 1863; Flourens, Psychologie Comparée, 1864. For reviews of the controversy: Finger and Eling, Gall, 2019, 454–463; Eling and Finger, Cerebellum, 2019. Gall and Spurzheim viewed Flourens’s experiments as flawed, arguing rightly that his subjects lacked cerebral hemispheres even remotely resembling those of humans, and that even small lesions would have widespread effects on the remaining brain. Jones, American doctors, 1978, 93. Jones, American doctors, 1978, 107.

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Other informative letters home followed. On April 28, 1834, he wrote: “I purchased yesterday a collection of pathological bones, 2 skeletons, heads, etc.”70 And on November 22, 1834: I have been looking about this last week for some Chinese and other heads which you would employ as illustrations in a lecture. The only one[s] I can find are in a magnificent work published by the Phrenological Society here consisting of fine lithographic prints in folio of all the skulls-masks both human and comparative of the different nations of the world and animals. I wrote you the title of the work: Treatise on Human and Comparative Phrenology by Thomas [actually Joseph] Vimont, M.D. of the Faculty of Paris, etc. two vols in 4 accompanied by a splendid atlas in folio consisting of 120 plates.71

In a still later communication, one dated February 26, 1835, Mason mentioned William-Frederic Edwards, who had published a book in 1829 on differences between the human races, a subject of considerable interest to phrenologists.72 Mason told his father that Edwards was now working on a phrenology book and “has the best collection of heads in France.”73 A few months later, on April 5, just before he returned home, Mason further informed his father he had obtained a copy of Vimont’s book “from the author” and had already “made a careful survey” of the plates. He penned that “about 8 or 10 are of different nations for the formation of phrenological comparison.”74 Through letters like these, and by talking among themselves, Holmes and the other Americans studying medicine in Paris conveyed information about the status of phrenology in France to the medical community and non-specialists back home. Similarly, and as noted, their contacts in America sometimes included the latest news about phrenology and its purveyors in the letters they sent to France. Letters were just one means of transatlantic communication. Another was newspapers and magazines that were being transported across the ocean. Additionally, there were cuttings or copies of passages from American periodicals that were translated and presented in French periodicals. To cite an example of the latter, there was a piece in the French periodical Constitutionnel on December 17, 1832, that covered Spurzheim’s funeral. It started with “J’arrive de l’enterrement du docteur Spurzheim et jamais il n’y avait autant de monde sure une occasion semblable [I come from 70 71 72 73 74

Jones, American doctors, 1978, 201. Jones, American doctors, 1978, 222–223. For phrenology and race, see Stanton, Leopard’s Spots, 1960, and Poskett, Materials of Mind, 2019. Jones, American doctors, 1978, 250–251. Jones, American doctors, 1978, 255.

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the funeral of Dr. Spurzheim and never were there so many people on a similar occasion].” Bowditch even quoted the extract in a letter to his sister Mary in Massachusetts.75 After reading about Spurzheim’s death and Harvard Professor Charles Follen’s funeral oration for the fallen phrenologist,76 Bowditch sent a letter to his parents. He told them how he regretted not having listened to “the great phrenologist,” who was also a philanthropist “overflowing with his love of his fellow human beings.” “I hope to make up for this loss,” he penned, “by attending a course of lectures on his favorite subject, given under the direction of the Phrenological Society.”77 After posting this letter, Bowditch might have attended one or more of the Société Phrénologique’s meetings. Had he done so, he almost certainly would have discussed what he saw and heard with Holmes and others in his circle, even if they chose not to accompany him to one of these meetings.

Still Not Taking Sides? So, did Holmes take a stance for or against phrenology before he began his voyage back across the Atlantic Ocean with his books, instruments, and assorted bones during the winter of 1835? He learned more about phrenology while in France, and he certainly encountered diverse opinions on it. But did he believe in phrenology? Did he reject it totally? Did he find merit in some of its features while rejecting others? Just where did he stand? How the people he listened to and met in Paris affected what he thought about phrenology and especially its head readers is not an easily answered question. This is because no information has surfaced revealing precisely what he felt about the science and its practitioners before he went to France. But even more frustrating is that he wrote next to nothing about phrenology, not even to report what his teachers and friends were saying about it, while in Paris. Nor did he elaborate on it when he briefly visited Britain, where phrenology was in full bloom, writing only that he was bothered by the widespread (unidentified) quackery he was witnessing. He did not even address the subject in his 1882 Harvard lecture mentioning some of his teachers in France. 75 76 77

Bowditch, Bowditch, 1: 1902, 33. Follen, Funeral oration, 1832. Bowditch, Bowditch, 1: 1902, 41 (letter of March 13, 1833).

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The sole exception in this void is a single letter to his parents. He had learned that there was a debate in Boston about phrenology. For one reason or another, he welcomed this bit of news. “I am delighted to hear that they had a slight row in the prints about phrenology” was what he wrote in his return letter on January 13, 1834.78 Regrettably, he did not reveal the side he hoped would win this “row” or his reasoning. He did not pen another line on it. Given how he had adopted Louis’s science-based medical philosophy, we might surmise that Holmes left France with a low opinion of phrenology or, at the very least, of its reliance on craniology. Though this should be regarded as a strong possibility, what can be stated more with confidence is considerably broader in scope. Holmes departed France focused on exposing worthless and even harmful medical fads to American physicians, medical students, and the laity. With this mindset, he would go into battle against all sorts of medical quackery in the United States, including popular head readings. In the next chapter, we shall see how Holmes began campaigning for a medicine grounded in verifiable facts and started his crusade against worthless and sometimes harmful medical beliefs and their remedies. We shall also see how he had his head read by Lorenzo Fowler, presumably to gather more information about phrenologists and their head readings, prior to launching a direct attack on the so-called science and those engaged in head readings. 78

Morse, Jr., Holmes, 1896, 1: 125–126.

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chapter 10

Quackery and Holmes’s Head Reading

You are constitutionally ambitious; few men are more so. The desire to distinguish yourself, and to be all that education & circumstances can possibly make you, is a very prominent trait. You are quite mindful of those circumstances which have to do with your position. Holmes’s head reading, 18591

“I am more and more attached every day to the study of my profession, and more and more determined to do what I can to give my own country one citizen among others who has profited somewhat by the advantages offered him in Europe.”2 Holmes penned this sentence while in France on November 14, 1833. Three months earlier, he had written home that he was determined to improve medicine in the United States by following three of Louis’s principles: “not to take authority when I can have facts; not to guess when I can know; not to think a man must take physic [medicines] because he is sick.”3 He would adhere to these principles for the rest of his professional life, which would keep him active until 1894, the year he quietly passed away in Boston. This chapter will focus on how Holmes strove to improve American medicine in various ways; how other American authors were then utilizing phrenology and having their heads read; and how Holmes had his own head read by Lorenzo Fowler, the New York phrenologist who co-founded the phrenological empire.

The New Physician Holmes disembarked in New York in mid-December 1835. He then hurried north to Massachusetts to be home in time for Christmas. Once 1 2 3

In Worth, Autocrat, 1939, 53. Morse, Jr., Holmes, 1896, 1: 109. Morse, Jr., Holmes, 1896, 1: 89.

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settled back in his home state, he began working feverishly. His first objective was to write a dissertation and complete the other requirements for his medical degree from Harvard. His dissertation was on acute pericarditis. Upon receiving his degree, he quickly became active in several societies, including the Massachusetts Medical Society and the Boston Society for Medical Improvement. He also opened a medical practice at his previous boardinghouse. And he began serving as a visiting physician at the Boston Dispensary, where he saw charity cases.4 Somehow finding the time to write, he completed a paper on the stethoscope and received a Boylston Prize for it.5 In 1837, he won two more Boylston Prizes, one for a history of malaria in New England and the other for a work on neuralgia. The following year, Holmes joined Jacob Bigelow and two other physicians to start the Tremont Street Medical School. Located above a Boston apothecary shop, his tasks included teaching pathology and physiology, introducing students to stethoscopes and microscopes, and supervising dissections. Courses were offered when Harvard was not in session, allowing students to enroll in both schools. Tremont would be merged into Harvard’s medical school a decade later. His first professorship also began in 1838. It was in anatomy at Dartmouth College and required traveling to New Hampshire to teach for fourteen weeks during fall semesters. He did this from 1838 to 1840. His long-standing position at Harvard as Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology started in 1847 after he helped found the American Medical Association. The precipitating event was the retirement of John Collins Warren, one of his mentors, who had been interested in phrenology for many years.6 The physician Walter Channing was the school’s dean and, following his retirement, Holmes was also awarded this position, which he held from 1847 to 1853. Being Holmes, a man chronically afflicted with “lead-poisoning,” he never stopped writing poetry. And, as a teacher, he felt compelled to compose a mnemonic couplet in iambic tetrameter to help his students 4 5

6

Holmes abandoned his practice in 1849. In 1848, Holmes would publish The Stethoscope Song; a Professional Ballad (see Willius and Keys, Cardiac Classics, 1941, 831–833). Showcasing his wit while promoting the instrument, he joked about insects getting into a stethoscope, leading to incorrect diagnoses. The last stanza advises: “Now use your ears, all that you can / But don’t forget to mind your eyes / Or you may be cheated, like this young man / By a couple of silly, abnormal flies.” He did not receive a fixed salary, but professors charged for courses and private lessons. George Parkman had donated the land for the new medical school building in Boston, where Holmes taught. It was completed in 1846.

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memorize the twelve cranial nerves in their proper order.7 His midcentury mnemonic, “On Old Monadnock’s Tarry Top A Fat Ass German Picked A Hop,” has since had more than forty variants, and over time the names of several of the cranial nerves have changed.8 One of the less vulgar and more popular variants, which the present author memorized as a graduate student at Indiana University during the 1960s, is “On Old Olympus’s Tower Tops A Finn and Greek Viewed Some Hops.” Holmes lectured five afternoons a week at Harvard, employing some of his own anatomical drawings, further promoting stethoscopes and microscopes, and doing his best to convince his students that medicine must be based on observable and verifiable facts, not loose theorizing or wishful thinking. His unconventional style involved what one assistant described as “a charming hour of description, analysis, anecdote, harmless pun, which clothes the dry bones with poetic imagery, enlivens a hard and fatiguing day with humor, and brightens to the tired listener the details for difficult though interesting study.”9 Fellow physician Elisha Bartlett, who knew Holmes well, said of his intellect and ability to connect with audiences: “His mind is quick as lightning and sharp as a razor” and “His conversational powers are absolutely wonderful.”10 Small wonder his students adored him and showered him with applause. One of his most important contributions to medicine occurred in 1843. This was when he first reported that the deadly disease variously known as puerperal fever, puerperal sepsis, or childbed fever was being transmitted from one new mother to another by unknowing physicians and caretakers going from bed to bed (Figure 10.1).11 A few perceptive European physicians had begun to suspect an infectious agent.12 Still, most of the medical community seemed oblivious to the deadly fever’s vectors at this moment in time or the importance of cleanliness. Twelve years later, Holmes published a more detailed treatise on the disease with some eye-opening statistics. He showed that the probability of one physician For this history and Holmes’s role in the mnemonic, see Lanska, Old Olympus, 2021. The mnemonic, followed by the names of the cranial nerves, can be found in Holmes, Poetical Works, 1975, 433. Mount Monadnock, seen by Holmes as he went back and forth to lecture at Dartmouth, is in southwestern New Hampshire. 8 The corresponding twelve nerves listed by Holmes were (in order) olfactory, optic, motoroculi [sic], trochlear, trigeminal, abducent [sic], facial, acoustic, glossopharyngeal, pneumogastric, accessory, and hypoglossal (Lanska, Old Olympus, 2021). 9 Sullivan, Men of Letters, 1972, 235. 10 Osler, 1908, Alabama Student, 119. 11 Holmes, Puerperal fever, 1843. For context, see Kass, Holmes and puerperal fever, 2009; Dowling, Holmes in Paris, 2006, 91–100. For more on the disease, see Loudon, Childbed Fever, 2000. 12 Alexander Gordon, a Scot, was one such physician (see Gordon, Epidemic Puerperal Fever, 1795). 7

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Figure 10.1  Holmes lecturing on puerperal fever in 1843 (from Wikimedia Commons and based on a painting by Dean Cornwell in the Countway Library, Harvard University).

having a large number of fatal puerperal cases by chance could be as high as a billion to one.13 Between Holmes’s first article and his second on puerperal fever, Viennese physician Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis demonstrated that handwashing in a chlorinated lime solution could markedly decrease the frightening death rate among new mothers. This was in 1847. Nonetheless, as medical historian Sir William Osler recognized, “there was certainly not an article in which the subject was presented in so logical and so convincing manner” before Holmes appeared on the scene.14 However, nothing was known about the causal agent of the fever until 1879, when Louis Pasteur identified the underlying killing agent as a streptococcus. During this same period, Holmes suggested using the word “anesthesia” to dentist William Morton, who had just made history by removing a neck tumor from an etherized patient. The operation was performed at the Massachusetts General Hospital on October 16, 1846. This first surgical use of ether in a medical setting would revolutionize the field, and Holmes would get the credit for coining the new word. But what no one seemed to realize, not even Holmes, was that this seemingly new word had first been used more than a century earlier and had then been forgotten.15 He was now maintaining a growing family, which demanded some of his time, making what he was already able to achieve even more 13 14 15

Holmes, Private Pestilence, 1855. Osler, Alabama Student, 1908, 61. Howe, Breakfast-Table, 1939, 64.

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astonishing. He had married Amelia Lee Jackson, the well-placed daughter of a Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice, in 1840. He then fathered three children over the next six years: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Amelia Jackson Holmes, and Edward Jackson Holmes.16

Medical Science and Quackery Holmes expressed his strong belief that medicine should be based on science in a notable Introductory Lecture given at the Harvard Medical School on November 6, 1861. The school’s Introductory Lecture was second only to the graduation address in importance, and the entire medical faculty, the school’s president, and students came to hear it. Later the same year, he published this lecture, calling it “Border Lines of Knowledge in Some Provinces of Medical Science.”17 One of his messages was that, even with the advent of science-based medicine, there still might not be clear answers to some pertinent questions. Employing analogies, he informed his listeners and readers: Science is the topography of ignorance. From a few elevated points we triangulate vast spaces, inclosing infinite unknown details. We cast the lead, and draw up a little sand from abysses we may never reach with our dredges. The best part of our knowledge is that which teaches us where knowledge leaves off and ignorance begins. Nothing more clearly separates a vulgar from a superior mind, than the confusion in the first between the little that it truly knows, on the one hand, and what it half knows and what it thinks it knows on the other. That which is true of every subject is especially true of the branch of knowledge which deals with living beings.18

In this lecture, Holmes called for doing away with the so-called heroic therapies still being utilized in many practices. As noted in Chapter 9, his idol Louis had shown that bleeding patients was ineffective for treating inflammatory and infectious diseases. Excessive purging (e.g., with emetics and laxatives) and blistering were two other “heroic interventions” originally used to balance the body’s humors. They too were still being prescribed for reasons that made little scientific or medical sense. He also cautioned against over-medicating patients. “We learned that a very large proportion of diseases get well of themselves, without any special 16 17 18

Their children were Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841–1935), Amelia Jackson Holmes (1843–1889), and Edward Jackson Holmes (1846–1884). Holmes, Border Lines, 1861; in Works, 1892, 9: 209–272. Holmes, Works, 1892, 9: 211.

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medication,” he stated, once again following in Louis’s footsteps.19 He had delivered his most memorable line in this same context a year earlier. With few exceptions, one being “the vapors which produce the miracle of anesthesia,” he had opined in 1860, “if the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind – and all the worse for the fishes.”20 Holmes was attacked in some quarters for being too extreme in his cautious approach to therapeutics. Samuel Gross, immortalized in 1875 in Thomas Eakins’s painting “The Gross Clinic,” was one of his most outspoken critics. He felt that Holmes preached therapeutic nihilism, contending that there are many “cases where prompt & decisive measures are absolutely necessary to save life.”21 Holmes would later conclude that Gross was right. In his words: But in those days I, like most of my fellow students, was thinking much more of “science” than of practical medicine, and I believe if we had not clung so closely to the skirts of Louis, and had followed some of the courses of men like Rousseau – therapists, who gave special attention to curative methods, and not chiefly to diagnosis – it would have been better for me and the others.22

Homeopathy was entirely another matter. He assailed the fad and never found a good reason to reverse his view that it was worthless for patients, though beneficial for its founder and others involved in the business. Based on the principle that “like cures like,” German physician Samuel Hahnemann started promoting homeopathy as a scientific panacea at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He prescribed minuscule doses of various drugs that were prepared, diluted, and further diluted as treatments for almost every disorder.23 Hahnemann’s belief that “like cures like” was not absurd. Inoculation with a scab from a smallpox patient or a vaccine did protect people from this dreaded disease. But, as Holmes maintained, what Hahnemann was 19 20

21 22 23

Holmes, Works, 1892, 9: 434–435. In Boston, some of Holmes’s mentors, including Jacob Bigelow and James Jackson, also cautioned against excessive dosing and spoke out about ineffective drugs. Holmes, Works, 1892, 9: 203. Some helpful drugs, however, had been introduced during the early 1800s, including morphine (1804), iodine (1811), caffeine (1821), and codeine (1832). Several had even been tested by François Magendie before Holmes arrived in Paris (Magendie, Nouveaux Médicamens, 1821). Benjamin Parham Aydelott Papers, Cincinnati Museum; cited in Warner, Spirit of System, 1996, 287, 424, n. 169. Holmes, Works, 1892, 9: 434. Hahnemann was born in 1755 and died in 1843. His earliest book promoting homeopathy came out in 1810 (Hahnemann, Organon, 1810).

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doing was different. The drugs in the prescriptions he was touting were so diluted that it was hard to imagine how they could help anyone. Holmes’s attacks on Hahnemann’s homeopathy were not new. They had begun in 1840 when he gave four lectures on medical “delusions” and “humbugs” (a popular word during the mid-nineteenth century). These published lectures were titled “The Natural Diet of Man,” “Astrology and Alchemy,” “Medical Delusions of the Past,” and “Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions.” Why he did not bring phrenology into his 1840 lectures on medical delusions is hard to understand and invites speculation. More to the point, it prompts us to ask: Did he even discuss phrenology in the classroom before openly proclaiming it a pseudoscience in 1859?

Holmes’s 1850 Lecture on Phrenology Extant documents show that Holmes gave at least one lecture on phrenology at the Harvard Medical School before 1859. This lecture took place on March 1, 1850. It seems to have been triggered by a collection of skulls and plaster busts that had just been given to the school. They had belonged to the Boston Phrenological Society, which had disbanded in 1842. Dr. John Collins Warren had purchased the collection in 1847 and took possession of its 550 items (predominantly casts) two years later. Now, holding the title Professor Emeritus and wanting to donate the collection to Harvard, Warren moved it to a new location on North Grove Street, depositing it in the same room where Holmes was teaching anatomy.24 Thanks to Warren, Holmes was now sharing his lecture hall with executed Edinburgh “resurrectionists” and the murderers Burke and Hare, various other criminals, and some remarkable personalities and talents, including Cicero and Napoleon, whose heads, even as plaster casts, were coveted by phrenologists everywhere. A day before delivering this lecture on phrenology, Holmes sent a letter to Warren inviting him to hear it at his “usual [lecture] hour,” meaning 1 p.m. He informed the man he considered a mentor and a friend that, having so many other commitments, he might not do justice to this topic “in the presence of one who, however lenient in his judgment, could hardly avoid seeing the imperfections which must attend my brief glance at the subject.”25 24 25

J. C. Warren, Collection, 1921; Collins, Blood and Ivy, 2018, 104–105. This letter is housed in Harvard’s Center for the History of Medicine (Countway Library of Medicine). See www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth-oai:fq978h254.

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As noted in previous chapters, although Warren had long been fascinated by phrenology, he had mixed feelings about its craniological assumptions. His failure to find support for its cranioscopy in his comparative anatomical research program bothered him. By midcentury, he was even more disturbed by how phrenology had transitioned from being a scientific discipline into what he viewed as a source of entertainment or a business for snake oil salesmen. Warren had, in fact, been taken out of his comfort zone by the late 1830s, when George Combe visited Boston. He would later write: These gentlemen dined at my house and Mr. Combe afterward lectured on the subject of phrenology in various parts of the country. I never attended his lectures for I found that in all the phrenological courses that I attended the principal object of phrenological lectures was not to expose the ground and basis of phrenology but to interweave it with popular and interesting topics.26

Regrettably, what Holmes said about phrenology in his 1850 lecture has not been preserved or even summarized in notes by him or a student that have since been found. But given his way of approaching things and Warren’s influence, presence, and negative feelings about the social fad and the head readers, one would think that he provided a thoughtful and balanced account. On the one hand, he would have been in good company when questioning cranioscopy, as did Warren, and noting how the doctrine’s founders presented only supportive cases, as did Roget and many other perceptive critics. But on the other, and as he would do in the future, he could well have praised Gall and Spurzheim for stimulating more research on the mind and brain, and for drawing needed attention to inborn individual differences and our place in nature. Whether Holmes gave other lectures on phrenology during the 1850s is unknown. Almost assuredly, he would have talked about it in his courses on anatomy and medicine, even if he did not devote a second full lecture to the subject. We know that Holmes had access to phrenology books to consult when he wanted to say more on the subject in his lectures. There were many in Harvard’s libraries and at least a few in his own collection. A list of the approximately 1,000 books he later donated to the Boston Medical Library shows that he owned Gall and Spurzheim’s Anatomie et Physiologie du Système Nerveux en Général, et du Cerveau en Particulier, which came out between 1810 and 1819. He also owned Spurzheim’s Phrenology, In 26

E. Warren, Warren, 1860, 13.

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Connexion with the Study of Physiognomy, from 1828.27 At a later date, and in conjunction with his head reading (to be discussed later in this chapter), he would acquire Orson and Lorenzo Fowler’s Illustrated Self-Instructor in Phrenology.28 And he almost assuredly read other books on the subject at one time or another, in addition to articles appearing in medical journals and more popular periodicals.

Literary Heads Before turning to Holmes’s head reading and phrenological profile, it is important to recognize that he was not the first great literary figure in America to have his head read by a leading phrenologist. Others did so before him. Some iconic American authors had even done a fair amount of “homework” to familiarize themselves with the doctrine, its practitioners, and the phrenological examination. For example, Edgar Allan Poe’s interest in phrenology can be traced back to 1836, when he first reviewed Mile’s Phrenology, and the Moral Influence of Phrenology for the Southern Literary Messenger (Figure 10.2).29 He also wrote reviews of several other phrenology books for this periodical, opining: “Phrenology is no longer to be laughed at,” and “It has assumed the majesty of a science, and as a science ranks among the most important which can engage the attention of human beings.”30 Poe carefully followed what George Combe had been claiming. He might even have attended some of Combe’s lectures when the Scot was in Philadelphia in 1839. Historians have noted that he used Combe’s Lectures on Phrenology when portraying characters in his favorite tale, Ligeia, and in his more famous The Fall of the House of Usher. In the former, the woman named Ligeia has both exceptional language skills and huge eyes, reminiscent of Gall’s verbally talented schoolmates. She also displays a strong Love of Life. In the latter, Roderick Usher has an enormous region above the temples and a nervous temperament, giving his mental actions great vivacity. Elsewhere, when describing the lawyer, politician, and orator William Cullen Bryant, Poe mentioned his broad forehead and prominent organ for Ideality.31 This organ, also alluded to in the fictional character of 27 28 29 30 31

Spurzheim, Phrenology, 1826. His copy is now in the Oliver Wendell Holmes Library of the Phillips Academy. Fowler and Fowler, Self-Instructor, 1859. Hungerford, Poe, 1930;Stern, Poe, 1968; Stern, Phrenological Fowlers, 1971, 70–85. Poe, Works, 1902, 8: 252–255. Poe, Works, 1902, 13: 140.

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Figure 10.2  The poet Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), ca. 1849 (from Wikimedia Commons). Poe wrote reviews of phrenology books and include phrenology in several of his works.

Roderick Usher, was special to Poe for a good reason: phrenologists were associating this faculty with inspirational prose and poetry. Poe might have had his head read by Orson Fowler at his Chestnut Street office in Philadelphia. There is more evidence suggesting that Lorenzo Fowler read Poe’s head at Clinton Hall in New York, but whether his head was read in person or from a photograph in the latter case is unclear. The obituary for Lorenzo Fowler that appeared in the New York Times on September 4, 1896, states only that he had read Poe’s head. We also know that Lorenzo published phrenological profiles of the poet, including one in the 1851 edition of the Illustrated Phrenological Almanac. Fowler gave Poe high grades for Ideality, Sublimity, Spirituality, and Language, while commenting on his exceptional intellect and eccentricities. In later reviews, he focused more on his propensity to drink, noting he was particularly weak in Firmness, Self-Esteem, Veneration, and Continuity.32 Poe, with his slight frame, huge upper forehead, and broad temples, was the perfect exemplar of the “nervous” (or “mental”) 32

Stern, Poe, 1968, 159.

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temperament, the one most closely associated with poets and novelists, a group known for unimpressive bodies yet highly developed minds. Walt Whitman (Figure 10.3) was also deeply interested in phrenology, and we know with certainty that he was “phrenologized” by Lorenzo Fowler on July 16, 1849.33 This was not the first time Whitman had gone from Brooklyn to Manhattan to visit what was then being called a phrenological “Golgotha” (Aramaic for “skull” and the hill outside of Jerusalem, also known as Calvary, calva being Latin for “skull”).34 “One of the choice places of New York to me was the ‘Phrenological Cabinet’ of Fowler & Wells,” Whitman wrote in Good-Bye My Fancy, the last of his poems. As an editor for The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Whitman, like Poe, had already written some favorable reviews about phrenology before his head reading. The first was on November 16, 1846. In it, he praised Spurzheim’s Phrenology, or the Doctrine of the Mental Phenomena and the pioneers behind the science. Whitman harbored few doubts about the future of phrenology when he informed readers that Phrenology, it must now be confessed by all men who have open eyes, has at last gained a position, and a firm one, among the sciences …. Perhaps no philosophic revolutionizers ever were attacked with more virulence – struck by more sinewy arms, or greater perseverance – than Gall, Spurzheim, and the other early Phrenologists …. But the Phrenologists withstood the storm, and have gained the victory.35

Whitman left New York City’s Golgotha in 1849 with a glowing report stressing his humanity. Fowler gave him very high marks for Friendship, Sympathy, Sublimity, and Self-Esteem, stating he was also strong on Voluptuousness and Alimentativeness, which Whitman did not view as faults. He was particularly pleased that Fowler described his “large and rounded” head as a perfect one for a poet, so much so that he published his head reading in Brooklyn’s Daily Times and multiple editions of his most famous work, Leaves of Grass, some sold by Fowler & Wells.36 33 34 35

36

Hungerford, Whitman, 1931. Arvin, Whitman, 1938;Allen, Solitary Singer, 1955; Stern, Phrenological Fowlers, 1971, 99–123; Mackey, Phrenological Whitman, 1997. This piece appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on November 16, 1849 (p. 2). He also published a notice in the same newspaper on March 10, 1847, stating that “there can be no harm, but probably much good in pursuing the study of phrenology,” and that “Among the most persevering workers in this country, must certainly be reckoned the two Fowlers and Wells”; this was followed with information about two of their publications. Whitman published his chart on at least five occasions, including in the first three and fifth editions of his Leaves of Grass.

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Figure 10.3  The poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892), who found inspiration in phrenology and had his head read in 1849.

Whitman’s cheerful Poem of Joys also deserves mention in this context. It dates from 1860 and would be renamed A Song of Joys. Here, he listed various pleasures, each associated with a different phrenological faculty. His guide was Orson and Lorenzo’s The New Illustrated Self-Instructor in Phrenology and Physiology, published a year earlier. Not all famous American writers from this era followed suit, although every revered author seemed to have some knowledge of the subject. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, read George Combe’s The Constitution of Man and made repeated entries about phrenology in his notebooks. Nonetheless, most of his entries were negative, and he remained suspicious of the head readers, claiming that phrenology and what the phrenologists were up to were “for the vulgar.” His standoffishness did not stop the phrenologists at Fowler and Wells from “phrenologizing” his head. But they did this on their own initiative from a relatively poor photograph.37 37

Stern, Emerson, 1984. The head reading (included in Stern’s article) first appeared in an 1854 issue of the Phrenological Journal and described Emerson as having a motive-mental temperament with

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And then there was Hermann Melville. He used phrenology when describing the white whale and Queequeg (a Polynesia harpooner) in Moby Dick.38 But like fellow New Englander Ralph Waldo Emerson, he did not go to New York to have his head read by the best in the business. Nor did he follow Poe or Whitman in openly endorsing phrenology as a science, or Emerson in rejecting it. For Melville, using phrenological descriptions to make his characters more vivid and lifelike appeared sufficient.

Holmes’s Head Reading Holmes’s head reading took place three years after Whitman included his head reading in the 1856 edition of his Leaves of Grass. What we know about it comes from two primary sources. One was Holmes’s copy of Fowler and Fowler’s The Illustrated SelfInstructor in Phrenology and Physiology, which contains his chart. This book is now in the Berkshire Atheneum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, close to where Holmes spent “seven blessed summers” at “Canoe Place,” his country home from 1849 to 1856.39 The other is the Oliver Wendell Holmes Memorabilia Scrapbook, now archived at Phillips Academy, the school he had attended before matriculating as an undergraduate at Harvard.40 He received his copy of Spurzheim’s Self-Instructor with the “Chart and Character of O. W. Holmes” on June 22, 1859. It is unknown whether he paid extra for it or even had to open his wallet to have it and his famous head read. Lorenzo Fowler was unquestionably his examiner, with the famed phrenologist penciling in “O. W. Holmes” and signing “L. N. Fowler” on the book’s cover plate (Figure 10.4). Holmes’s chart covered “organic quality and health,” his temperaments, his skull dimensions (signifying brain size), and assessments of his thirtyseven faculties and propensities, which were split into Domestic (e.g., Amativeness, Friendship), Selfish (e.g., Destructiveness, Secretiveness), Moral (e.g., Hope, Veneration), Self-Protecting (e.g., Ideality, Imitation),

38 39

40

large organs for Compassion, Order, Benevolence, Veneration, Firmness, Combativeness, and Destructiveness. Vincent, Moby Dick, 1949; Aspiz, Whale, 1968. Melville included some phrenology in Mardi and White Jacket before writing his masterpiece, Moby Dick. Holmes’s great grandfather owned 24,000 acres in what is now Pittsfield, and it was on a parcel of this Massachusetts land that Oliver Wendell Holmes built his summer home. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville resided nearby. For more on these sources: Worth, Autocrat, 1939, 46–50; Lokensgard, Phrenological character, 1940, 714–715; Stern, Phrenological Fowlers, 1971, 130–131, 299.

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Figure 10.4  (a) The cover page of Holmes’s Self-Instructor (note Lorenzo Fowler’s signature) and (b) the first page of his phrenological assessment (reproduced with permission of the Berkshire Athenaeum).

and Intellectual groups. The latter were further divided into twelve Perceptive (e.g., Calculation, Tune) and two Reasoning Faculties (Causality, Comparison). A row for “Human Nature” and another for “Agreeableness” completed the chart. Holmes received 5s (out of 7) for Organic Quality, Health, and Size of Brain. He had a high 7/6 for Mental Temperament, a 6/5 for Motive Temperament, and a pedestrian 5 for his Vital Temperament. Turning to his mental faculties, he was graced with full 7s for Approbativeness and Benevolence, and slightly lower 7/6 scores for Cautiousness, Consciousness, Mirthfulness, Locality, and Language. Respectful 6s included Conjugality,

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Combativeness, Firmness, Hope, Sublimity, Imitation, Individuality, Form, Order, Eventuality, and Comparison. His remaining faculties included some lowly 4s (Continuity, Veneration, Color, Calculation, Time), with Self-Esteem being his least developed faculty, on which he received a score of 4/3. He did, however, score more impressively when it came to Human Nature (7/6) and Agreeableness (6). Phonographer-reporter Edwin R. Gardner penned the thirteen-page verbal description of Holmes’s phrenological character found in the Holmes Memorabilia Scrapbook (Figure 10.5). This document described the same head reading. It is generally believed that Holmes started this scrapbook, though his son, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Harlan H. Ballard contributed to it.41 The beautiful cover piece for the Phrenological Character of M Oliver Wendall Holmes in the scrapbook has a portrait of Gall at the top. Spurzheim (spelled “Spurzhiem”) and George Combe appear on the bottom left and right. What might be overlooked is that Holmes’s name was also misspelled. “Wendell” appears as “Wendall.” The printed and penned writing on the cover page show that the reading was done by “L N Fowler, Professor of Phrenology of Fowler and Wells’ Phrenological Cabinet, No. 308 Broadway, New York.” It is dated “Boston, July 1st, 1859,” not June 22, 1859. The difference of a little more than a week probably reflects when this reporter completed his version of the report, which used words rather than numbers. The document ends with “Reported by E. R. Gardiner, Providence, RI.” In 1939, William Worth published a piece on a document that had been “neatly bound with a white and green ribbon at the top, and a regulation cover and black wrapper [from Fowler and Wells] affixed.”42 Its cover plate shows “June 1859,” and it has the same misspelling of Holmes’s middle name. Now typed out, the text matches the slightly later-dated copy found in the Holmes Memorabilia Scrapbook. The full text of Holmes’s head reading in words, rather than with his faculties just being assigned numbers from 1 to 7, begins as follows: You have a high degree of the nervous temperament & your whole organization is very dense, compact & susceptible of the highest degree of action. Your vital powers are barely sufficient to sustain you in the labors of the day. Your muscular system is flexible & you are more capable of sustaining continuous labor of both body & mind – provided the labor is not severe & does not require an extraordinary outlay of strength – than most men. 41 42

Harlan Ballard, Jr., gifted the scrapbook to the Phillips Academy in 1935. Worth, Autocrat, 1939, 2.

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Figure 10.5  The cover plate of Holmes’s 1859 head reading in the Holmes Memorabilia Scrapbook (reproduced with permission of the Phillips Academy).

The tone of your mind indicates unusual vivacity, activity, intensity and clearness. You have a full sized brain which connected with your exquisite temperament gives you a fair amount of power to sway & mould the minds of others. Your special power, however, lies in the great action of certain faculties rather than in the mind as a whole. You should be known for the following peculiarities. You are constitutionally ambitious; few men are more so. The desire to distinguish yourself, and to be all that education & circumstances can possibly make you, is a very prominent trait. You are quite mindful of those circumstances which have to do with your position. You are also excessively cautious & watchful to avoid everything that would have an unfavorable influence; & you fortify & shield yourself against all interference with your affairs.

The reporter now turned to his individual faculties, writing: You have excessive Conscientiousness & adhere very rigidly to what you think is right; & you are disposed to bear down hard on those who are

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Quackery and Holmes’s Head Reading wrong. This sense of justice leads to general circumspection, prudence & integrity. You are hopeful, buoyant & full of bright anticipations, & disposed to be cheerful and happy. You have a fair sense of the Spiritual & ability to appreciate subjects of a spiritual nature; enough to give full & free scope to your vivid Imagination. You have very large Benevolence strong & active sympathies; & you are easily & deeply interested in subjects which excite your feelings of kindness. You throw your whole soul into that channel, which is in harmony with your sympathies. Hence you are able to read & to understand character as well. You have a great love of Fun & and a quick & ready sense of the ridiculous. Many things appear to you, through your Mirthfulness, in a ridiculous light. You have very distinct powers of observation, tending more to the observance of mind & its workings than of physical phenomena. You also perceive the forms shapes & outlines of things correctly. You have quite an active sense of order & method; are particular to have everything systematically arranged & can present your ideas in good order. You have large Locality & a superior memory of places; can describe with great accuracy all objects that come within the range of your vision; can enjoy natural scenery highly; would be fond of travelling. You have a good memory of facts & readily store your mind with facts and knowledge; & you can use what knowledge you have advantageously. Language is very large; & you are seldom at a loss for words to communicate your ideas; are naturally copious in speech, & the outlet of your mind is most ample. You learn language easily; are apt in teaching. The Perceptive faculties, as a class, are not sufficiently developed to render you a practical business man; but you are inclined rather to thinking and philosophising; & you have an apt talent for comprehending first principles. You are well qualified to analyse, describe, illustrate & see the relations of one subject to another. You are especially intuitive in the discernment of character, & can read the motives of strangers at the first interview. You are naturally polite, pliable & agreeable; can make yourself quite at home among foreigners. Your Imagination is vivid and strong; & you have considerable scope of mind; take large & liberal views of subjects generally. You love the sublime & grand; & are inclined to indulge in the extravagant & the poetic. You have fair Imitation: would have made a good actor; can represent character naturally & suit yourself to circumstances. You have much more Kindness & Justice than faith & Devotion are liberal in your religious opinions & not inclined to favor Sectarianism nor to

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regard forms & ceremonies. You do not look upon religious subjects with that degree of reverence which many blind worshippers do. You are firm and fixed in your purposes & quite tenacious in your will, & seldom change your course when once determined. You are somewhat wanting in Complacency & have not much dignity or pride. Still your love of independence is great; & you manage to secure it; but are not haughty. You have tact management & policy with power to evade & avoid unnecessary exposure. You know how to say & do things without giving offence or committing yourself more than is necessary. Your love of property is fairly developed. You enjoy the pleasures of the table and you have a full degree of Executiveness & force of character. You are combative & fond of debate, love opposition & are quick to resist encroachments.

Lastly, the document covered what all of the above signified: You are adapted to variety of thought & to some scientific or literary occupation. Your mind passes rapidly from one subject to another. You are more intense and protracted & connected in your thoughts and actions. You have all the elements of conjugal love but the social brain as a whole does not controll [sic]. You see society not so much from friendship as for the sake of social intercourse & intellectual entertainment & culture. In summing up your character, I should say that you have great intensity of feeling & clearness of mental action; are very ambitious, very watchful, & very rigid, & at the same time very liberal; are decidedly well qualified to amplify and manage your theme; have great love of wit; have superior powers to communicate; are quite original in your mode of viewing subjects, of understanding human nature & of adapting yourself to circumstances. You are not well adapted to a mere business life; but would succeed best in some literary pursuit; in teaching some branch or branches of natural science, or as a navigator or explorer.

As put by Madeline B. Stern, “it was the analysis [by Fowler in 1859] that immediately precipitated the literary response” that Holmes would now give.43 As will be seen in Chapter 11, his reaction, humorous in tone but serious in its underlying message, would appear in a public venue just one month later. 43

Stern, Phrenological Fowlers, 1971, 130–131.

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chapter 11

Holmes’s Professor on “Bumpology”

I have often met persons who have been altogether struck up and amazed at the accuracy with which some wandering Professor of Phrenology had read their characters written upon their skulls. Of course, the Professor acquires his information solely through cranial inspections and manipulations, – what are you laughing at? From Holmes’s The Professor at the Breakfast-Table (1859)1

It is hard to know whether Lorenzo Fowler read Holmes’s head before or after the Boston poet-turned-physician had made up his mind about the head readers. If before, was he still open to what Fowler would reveal about him? If afterward, was his primary motivation to gather facts and descriptive material for an article, a book, or a lecture that would ridicule phrenologists and expose features of phrenology as worthless nonsense? Further, might Fowler have first approached him to add his head to his pantheon of famous individuals, since Holmes had already achieved prominence as a poet and a physician? Or, for that matter, did he just take it upon himself to go to Fowler without a formal invitation? One can only speculate about what was going through Holmes’s mind in 1859. But what is clear is that Holmes used his wry sense of humor to expose head readings as pseudoscientific nonsense immediately after his head reading, and he did so in a periodical with a large and broad audience. To put his contribution into context, we must begin with some basic information about his chosen vehicle, a new magazine featuring pieces by some of America’s most revered writers.

The Autocrat’s Return Plans for a new variety magazine that would promote the best of New England’s culture were finalized in 1857. Holmes was among the periodical’s 1

Holmes, Professor, 1859; in Holmes, Works, 1892, 2: 200–201.

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founders. Moreover, it was Holmes who came up with the agreed-upon name for this new periodical, the Atlantic Monthly. New England authors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and critic and editor Professor James Russell Lowell2 were also involved in launching the new periodical. These literary men knew each other personally and spent considerable time together as members of the “Saturday Club,” a dining group founded a few years earlier (Figure 11.1).3 Holmes was not a founding member of the Saturday Club, but he and Nathaniel Hawthorne were invited to join the tightly knit fraternity soon after its formation. Although most of its members were professional writers, there were notable exceptions. One such person was Louis Agassiz, the Swiss-born biologist and geologist on Harvard’s faculty. Agassiz also wrote, but his works were science books and articles on glaciers, reefs, and natural history, not novels or poetry. The Saturday Club had no rules about who could speak, what they could cover, or how long they could preside before giving another person a turn. For Holmes, this sort of informality was perfect. He could dine with extraordinarily bright and talented people, talk incessantly on any topics that might interest him, and get feedback. And this is precisely what he did, displaying his knowledge of many things and his playful sense of humor, stimulating laughter and further discussions. He was, after all, already well on his way toward being regarded as “the most brilliant conversationalist in America’s ‘Age of Conversation.’”4 Lowell agreed to edit the Atlantic Monthly, but only if Holmes would consent to be a regular contributor. Open to the opportunity to reach a wider audience with his prose and poetry, Holmes agreed. But where and how to begin? Recalling the two pieces he had published in New England Magazine in 1831 and 1832, material composed while he was still a medical student, Holmes chose to resurrect his earlier protagonist. This was the Autocrat, who resided with a colorful cast of characters at a Boston boardinghouse. The Autocrat’s return occurred in the periodical’s first issue, which came out in November 1857. It continued serially into 1858 and appeared in book form later that year.5 As told by Holmes twenty-one years later: “Remembering some crude contributions of mine to an old magazine, it occurred to me that their title 2 3 4 5

Scudder, Lowell, 1901. Emerson, Saturday Club, 1918. Gibian, Doctor Holmes, 2009, 76. Holmes, Autocrat, 1858; in Works, 1892, 1.

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Figure 11.1  Holmes (center) with other members of the Saturday Club. Clockwise from top: Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), James Russell Lowell (1819–1891), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882), William Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892), and John Lothrop Motley (1814–1877) (from Holmes, Works, Vol. 14, 1892).

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might serve for some fresh paper, and so I set down and wrote off what came into my head under the title The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table.” He added in the following sentence: “This series of papers was not the result of an expressed premeditation, but was, as I may say, dipped from the running stream of my thoughts.”6 William James, who would study medicine under Holmes at Harvard, would become much better known for the idea of a stream of thought or consciousness. Holmes’s alter ego was very much like him: a short, thin, well-educated man, who had studied medicine in Paris. His creation was now less arrogant than he had been during the early 1830s, but still never at a loss when it came to expressing his opinions. He could and would converse on a wide variety of topics: books, clubs, aging, horse racing, memory, trees, religious dogma, the mind, medicine, and on and on. But since this was democratic Boston, others at the table also had a say, even those with little education and menial jobs. Holmes’s Autocrat would, in fact, face challenging and sometimes hilarious interruptions from his fellow boarders – men and women with minds of their own, who were not about to sit back and quietly accept what they were hearing while he was holding court at their breakfast table (Figure 11.2). Thus, Holmes’s resurrected Autocrat provided his creator with a vehicle to express himself on whatever interested him at the time. His serial was also a place to showcase some of the short poems he had already published, along with some new ones. What seemed of little concern to him was whether the poetry that would appear in each of the monthly segments related to the Autocrat’s topic of the day.7 Most often it did not, and he did not care. The series, which gave voice to the Autocrat, a divinity student, “a young fellow whom they call John,” a schoolmistress, an old gentleman, an angular female, a nervous landlady, and notably the Autocrat’s friend, the Professor, absolutely delighted the Atlantic Monthly’s readership. People loved reading about the protagonist and the cast of secondary characters, whose varied opinions, some unexpected, were presented in a loose, everyday style. They also enjoyed the author’s penchant for punning and wordplay, and his gift for other forms of tongue-in-cheek humor. Bolstered by the popularity of this serial, the Atlantic Monthly’s circulation soared. The presses produced about 400,000 copies of the periodical 6 7

Holmes, [Remarks], 1880, 5. Three of Holmes’s most memorable poems were featured in the series: Old Ironsides, The Chambered Nautilus, and The Deacon’s Masterpiece, Or, The One-Horse Shay.

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Figure 11.2  The Autocrat trying to hold court at his boardinghouse’s breakfast table (from Holmes, Works, Vol. 1, 1892).

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shortly after its inception, and its circulation continued to ascend, more than exceeding the expectations of even its most optimistic founders. In short, both the boardinghouse serial and the magazine were runaway successes. Although all agreed when the periodical was launched that its pieces would be presented anonymously, the author behind the Autocrat series was quickly recognized. “And so,” as one of his biographers would write, “Holmes came to a literary prominence with The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table that he had not before enjoyed.”8

Follow-Ups Pleased with how successful he was in introducing a uniquely American sort of writing to the world, Holmes came forth with a second set of monthly pieces right after the last installment of his first set. This time he gave center stage to the Professor, the man who had been the Autocrat’s friend in the first series. Drawing from his previous title, he chose The Professor at the Breakfast-Table for the title of this series of essays.9 The newer collection provided him with a platform for expressing additional opinions, displaying more of his sense of humor, and committing what he described as “verbicide.” It premiered in January 1859, two years before he published A Visit to the Asylum for Aged and Decayed Punsters, which just months before the Civil War further revealed his playful side. In 1872, at the age of 63, he would publish a third set of “conversations” in the same periodical. He would call it The Poet at the Breakfast-Table.10 This time, his leading figure would be a more modest but still very learned man. His Poet would tell a new group at the breakfast table about Pasteur’s germ theory, Darwin’s theory of evolution based on natural selection, and the like.11 All three of Holmes’s Breakfast-Table serials were also published as books. Together, they are now regarded as classics in the “conversation” genre.12 As W. D. Howells stated at Holmes’s seventieth birthday party, the guest of honor had 8 9 10 11 12

Hoyt, Improper Bostonian, 1979, 169. Holmes, Professor, 1859; in Holmes, Works, 1892, 2. Holmes, Poet, 1872; in Holmes, Works, 1892, 3. Holmes came forth with a fourth collection of conversations late in his life, which are only sometimes mentioned in this context (Holmes, 1892, 4). He called his 1891 series Over the Teacups. Gibian (Conversation, 2001) is a good source for more on the cultural forces shaping talk-based literature and how Holmes’s genre represented the changes taking place in America.

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Holmes’s Professor on “Bumpology” invented a new kind in literature, something so beautiful and rare and fine that while you were trying to determine its character as monologue or colloquy, prose or poetry, philosophy or humor, it was gradually penetrating your consciousness with a sense that the best of all of these had been fused in one – a perfect form, an exquisite wisdom, an unsurpassable prose.13

Praise even came from faraway London. William Makepeace Thackeray, the author of Vanity Fair and a contributor to Punch magazine, asked a man at a dinner party: “Have you read The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Holmes in the new Atlantic magazine?” John Lothrop Motley, who informed Holmes about this, said Thackeray “then went on to observe that no man in England could now write with that charming mixture of wit, pathos and imagination,” and that his [Holmes’s] pieces “were far better than anything in their magazines.”14

Phrenology at the Breakfast-Table Phrenology was one of the many subjects Holmes addressed in his second series of essays, the one in which one of the borders took the liberty to remark: “A man whose opinions are not attacked is beneath contempt.”15 Being Holmes’s alter ego, the Professor was now intent on exposing medical frauds and charlatanism to anyone ready to listen. He was also determined to show people how frequently they might be confusing effects with causes. Holmes was no slouch when it came to medical history, and he used his Professor to resurrect vivid examples from the past to show how false beliefs were passed from one gullible generation to the next. This is most evident in the fifth chapter in the second series, the one titled “The Professor Finds a Fly in his Teacup.” This piece involved three other professors. These learned men had just “emerged from a state of semibarbarism,” but bristled when informed of this fact. Holmes’s protagonist remarked they must be reminded of this “whenever they put on airs.” They are compared to people taking an overdose of laudanum (an opiate drug), who must be lashed now and then to prevent them from falling asleep again. So we must keep the doctors awake by telling them they have not yet shaken off astrology and the doctrine of signatures,16 as shown by the form of their prescriptions, and their use of nitrate of silver, which turns epileptics into 13 14 15 16

Howells, [Remarks], 1880, 6–7. Motley, Correspondence, 1889, 226. Holmes, Works, 1892, 2: 119. Dating from ancient times, the idea was that medicants resembling various parts of the body could be used to treat those parts.

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Ethiopians. If that is not enough, they must be given over to the scourgers, who like their task and get good fees for it.17 A few score years ago, sick people were made to swallow burnt toads and powdered earthworms and the expressed juice of wood-lice. The physician of Charles I. and II. prescribed abominations not to be named. … Traces of this barbarism linger even in the greatly improved medical science of our century. So while the solemn farce of over-drugging is going on, the world over, the harlequin pseudoscience jumps on to the stage, whip in hand, with half-a-dozen somersets, and begins laying [hands] about him.18

Holmes also included some thoughts about how the conservative clergy repeatedly impeded progress in science and medicine. Through his Professor, he reminded his readers how brutally some men of the cloth, convinced they were carrying out God’s will, treated scientists who were challenging Church orthodoxy. He wrote that some individuals with new ideas were slowly burned at the stake “in a state of religious barbarism.” “If a man hangs my ancient female relatives for sorcery, as they did in this neighborhood [most notably in nearby Salem, Massachusetts] a little while ago, or burns my instructor for not believing as he does,” he continued, “I care no more for his religious edicts than I should for those of any barbarian.”19 Two chapters later, and now in the August issue, Holmes returned to misguided beliefs in science and medicine. This time he targeted phrenologists, wanting to show two things. One was that the head readers were engaging in trickery. And the other was that their so-called science was based on faulty methods – hence, it should not be regarded as a true science, like physics or chemistry. He began this essay, his seventh in the series, benignly, with his Professor saying that a person’s looks could have marked effects on observers. A case in point was how he, the Professor, had been smitten with the image of an attractive woman. And it is in the context of external appearances that the Professor saw fit to present another personal experience. He now turned to “Bumpus” and “Crane” (as in “bumps” and “cranium”), two phrenologists. Holmes’s use of a duo rather than a single phrenologist was creative and purposeful. Given the fame of the firm of Fowler & Wells at the time, most of his readers would have recognized Lorenzo Fowler and Samuel Wells as his real targets, though Lorenzo and his brother Orson might also have come to mind. 17 18 19

People paid to flog or whip, most often to punish or torture by inducing pain. Holmes, Works, 1892, 9: 105. Holmes, Works, 1892, 9: 106.

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As told by Holmes’s Professor: Having been photographed, and stereographed, and chromatographed, or done in colors, it only remained to be phrenologized. A polite note from Mssrs. Bumpus and Crane, requesting our attendance at their Physiological Emporium, was too tempting to be resisted. We repaired to that Scientific Golgotha. Mssrs. Bumpus and Crane are arranged on the plan of the man and the woman in the toy called a “weather house,” both on the same wooden arm suspended on a pivot, – so that when one comes to the door, the other retires backwards, and vice versa. The more particular specialty of one is to lubricate your entrance and exit, – that of the other to polish you off phrenologically in the recesses of the establishment. Suppose yourself in a room full of casts and pictures, before a counterful of books with taking titles. I wonder if the picture of the brain is there, “approved” by a noted Phrenologist, which was copied from my, the Professor’s, folio plate, in the work of Gall and Spurzheim. An extra convolution, No. 9, Destructiveness, according to the list beneath, which was not to be seen in the plate, itself a copy of Nature, was very liberally supplied by the artist, to meet the wants of the catalogue of “organs.”

He continued: Professor Bumpus is seated in front of a row of [rich] women, – horncombers and gold-beaders, or somewhere about that range of life, – looking so credulous, that, if any Second Advent Miller or Joe Smith should come along, he could string the whole lot of them on his cheapest lie, as a boy strings a dozen “shiners” [bait fish] on a stripped twig of willow. The Professor (meaning ourselves) is in a hurry, as usual; let the horncombers wait, – he shall be bumped without inspecting the antechamber.

A description of the Professor’s head reading followed: Tape round the head, – 22 inches. (Come on, old 23 inches, if you think you are the better man!) Feels thorax and arm, and muzzles round among muscles as those horrid old women poke their fingers into the salt-meat on the provision-stalls at the Quincy Market. Vitality, No. 5 or 6, or something or other. Victuality, (organ of epigastrium) some other number equally significant. Mild champooing [shampooing] of the head now commences. Extraordinary revelations! Cupidiphilous, 6! Hymeniphilous, 6+! Paediphilous, 5! Deipniphilous, 6! Gelasmiphilous, 6! Musikiphilous, 5! Uraniphilous, 5! Glossiphilous, 8!! and so on. Meant for a linguist.  – Invaluable information. Will invest in grammars and dictionaries immediately. – I have nothing against the grand total of my phrenological endowments.

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And upon leaving the head readers, he remarked: I never set great store by my head, and did not think Mssrs. Bumpus and Crane would give me so good a lot of organs as they did, especially considering that I was a dead-head on that occasion. Much obliged to them for their politeness. They have been useful in their way by calling attention to important physiological facts. (This concession is due to our immense bump of Candor.)20

The Professor’s Follow-Up Lecture Holmes’s Professor was not finished with the head readers or the so-called science of phrenology. “A Short Lecture on Phrenology, Read to the Boarders at our Breakfast-Table” followed the Professor’s experiences with Bumpus and Crane. From start to finish, he wanted everyone to know precisely why phrenology was not a true science. Again quoting the Professor in full: I shall begin, my friends, with the definition of a Pseudo-science. A Pseudo-science consists of nomenclature, with a self-adjusting arrangement, by which all positive evidence, or such as favors its doctrines, is admitted, and all negative evidence, or such as tells against it, is excluded. It is invariably connected with some lucrative practical application, its professors and practitioners are usually shrewd people; they are very serious with the public, but wink and laugh a good deal among themselves. The believing multitude consists of women of both sexes, feeble minded inquirers, poetical optimists, people who always get cheated in buying horses, philanthropists who insist on hurrying up the millennium, and others of this class, with here and there a clergyman, less frequently a lawyer, very rarely a physician, and almost never a horse-jockey or a member of the detective police. – I do not say that Phrenology was one of the Pseudo-sciences. A Pseudo-science does not necessarily consist wholly of lies. It may contain many truths, and even valuable ones. The rottenest bank starts with a little specie. It puts on a thousand promises to pay on the strength of a single dollar, but the dollar is very commonly a good one. The practitioners of the Pseudo-science know that common minds, after they have been baited with a real fact or two, will jump at the merest rag of a lie, or even at the bare hook. When we have one fact found us, we are very apt to supply the next out of our imagination. (How many persons can read Judges xv. 16 correctly the first time?) The Pseudo-sciences take advantage of this, – I did not say that it was so with Phrenology. 20

Holmes, Works, 1892, 2: 195–197 (italics in original).

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Holmes’s Professor on “Bumpology” I have rarely met a sensible man who would not allow that there was something in Phrenology. A broad, high forehead, it is commonly agreed, promises intellect; one that is “villanous low” and has a huge hind-head back of it, is wont to mark an animal nature. I have rarely met an unbiased and sensible man who really believed in the bumps. It is observed, however, that persons with what the Phrenologists call “good heads” are more prone than others toward plenary belief in the doctrine. It is so hard to prove a negative, that, if a man should assert that the moon was in truth a green cheese, formed by the coagulable substance of the Milky Way, and challenge me to prove the contrary, I might be puzzled. But if he offer to sell me a ton of this lunar cheese, I call on him to prove the truth of the Gaseous nature of our satellite, before I purchase. It is not necessary to prove the falsity of the phrenological statement. It is only necessary to show that its truth is not proved, and cannot be, by the common course of argument. The walls of the head are double with a great air-chamber between them, [the frontal sinuses] over the smallest and most closely crowded “organs.” Can you tell me how much money there is in a safe, which also has thick double walls, by kneading its knobs with your fingers? So when a man fumbles about my forehead, and talks about the organs of Individuality, Size, etc., I trust him as much as I should if he felt of the outside of my strong-box and told me that there was a five-dollar or a tendollar-bill under this or that particular rivet. Perhaps there is; only he doesn’t know anything about it. But this is a point that I, the Professor, understand, my friends, or ought to, certainly, better than you do. The next argument you will all appreciate. I proceed, therefore, to explain the self-adjusting mechanism of Phrenology, which is very similar to that of the Pseudo-sciences. An example will show it most conveniently. A. is a notorious thief. Mssrs. Bumpus and Crane examine him and find a good-sized organ of Acquisitiveness. Positive fact for Phrenology. Casts and drawings of A. are multiplied, and the bump does not lose in the act of copying. – I did not say it gained. – What do you look for? (to the boarders.) Presently B. turns up, a bigger thief than A. But B. has no bump at all over Acquisitiveness. Negative fact; goes against Phrenology. – Not a bit of it. Don’t you see how small Conscientiousness is? That’s the reason B. stole. And then comes C., ten times as much a thief as either A. or B., – used to steal before he was weaned, and would pick one of his own pockets and put its contents in another, if he could find no other way of committing petty larceny. Unfortunately, C. has a hollow, instead of a bump, over Acquisitiveness. Ah, but just look and see what a bump of Alimentiveness! Did not C. buy nuts and gingerbread, when a boy, with the money he stole? Of course you see why he is a thief, and how his example confirms our noble science. At last comes along a case which is apparently a settler, for there is a little brain with vast and varied powers, – a case like that of Byron, for instance. Then comes out the grand reserve-reason which covers everything and

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renders it simply impossible ever to corner a phrenologist. “It is not the size alone, but the quality of an organ, which determines its degree of power.” Oh! oh! I see. – The argument may be briefly stated thus by the Phrenologist: “Heads I win, tails you lose.” Well, that’s convenient. It must be confessed that Phrenology has a certain resemblance to the Pseudo-sciences. I did not say it was a Pseudo-science.

How the so-called head readers relied on trickery was also brought up in this lecture, in which Holmes contrasted what a phrenologist might be thinking with what he would say to some client hoping for a glowing report. His Professor continued: I have often met persons who have been altogether struck up and amazed at the accuracy with which some wandering Professor of Phrenology had read their characters written upon their skulls. Of course, the Professor acquires his information solely though cranial inspections and manipulations, – what are you laughing at? (to the boarders,) – But let us just suppose, for a moment, that a tolerably cunning fellow, who did not know or care anything about Phrenology, should open a shop and undertake to read off people’s characters at fifty cents or a dollar apiece. Let us see how well he could get along without the “organs.” I will suppose myself to set up such a shop. I would invest one hundred dollars, more or less, in casts of brains, skulls, charts, and other matters that would make the most show for the money. That would do to begin with. I would then advertise myself as the celebrated Professor Brainey, or whatever name I might choose, and wait for my first customer. My first customer is a middle-aged man. I look at him, – ask him a question or two, so as to hear him talk. When I have got the hang of him, I ask him to sit down, and proceed to fumble his skull, dictating as follows:

SCALE FROM 1 TO 10 LIST OF FACULTIES FOR CUSTOMER Amativeness, 7 Alimentiveness, 8 Acquisitiveness, 8 Approbativeness, 7+ Self-Esteem, 6 Benevolence, 9 Conscientiousness, 8 ½

PRIVATE NOTES FOR MY PUPIL. Each to be accompanied by a wink Most men love the conflicting sex, and all men love to be told they do. Don’t you see that he has burst off his waistcoat-button with feeding, – hey Of course. A middle-aged Yankee. Hat well brushed. Hair ditto. Mark the effect of that plus sign. His face shows that. That’ll please him. That fraction looks first-rate.

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Mirthfulness, 7 Ideality, 9 Form, Size, Weight, Color, Locality, Eventuality, etc., etc., 4 to 6

Has laughed twice since he came in. That sounds well. Average everything that Color, Locality, cannot be guessed. Eventuality, etc. etc. And so the other faculties.

And to conclude: “Of course, you know, that isn’t the way the Phrenologists do. They go only by the bumps. – What do you keep laughing so for? (to the boarders.) I only said that is the way I should practice ‘Phrenology’ for a living.”21

Commentary Holmes expressed what he was thinking about phrenology in the Atlantic Monthly with his signature humor. Why he waited so long to take this stand against the head readers is unknown, but he could not have selected a better vehicle. His chosen magazine had a high subscription rate, perhaps even 500,000 readers by 1859, with many subscribers sharing copies with others. With considerable skill and a desire to connect with the laity, he explained in everyday language what was bothering him about the head readers and the doctrine they were presenting to the public. Importantly, he pointed out that the doctrine was formulated and based on just accepting favorable cases, while ignoring or explaining away all contradictions. When all else failed, the phrenologists also had safety nets. One was: “It is not the size alone, but the quality of an organ, which determines its degree of power.” To Holmes, these were features of a pseudoscience. He could not have been clearer when he wrote: “Pseudo-science consists of nomenclature, with a self-adjusting arrangement, by which all positive evidence, or such as favors its doctrines, is admitted, and all negative evidence, or such as tells against it, is excluded.” Holmes was not, however, the first to recognize these methodological transgressions and abuses. As mentioned in Chapter 2, Peter Mark Roget had done precisely this in his entry called “Cranioscopy” for the Encyclopaedia Britannica and he had republished this piece in several of his books earlier in the century. Roget had written that, with “such convenient logic, it would be easy to prove anything,” but “on that very account, they [the phrenologists] will be rejected as having proved nothing.”22 Roget’s 21 22

Holmes, Works, 1892, 2: 197–202. Roget, Cranioscopy, 1824, 433, 437.

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thoughts were repeated by others using related terms, but Holmes did not divulge whether he was drawing directly from Roget or other sources. Nor did he have to. The Atlantic Monthly was not a scientific or medical journal. It was a literary magazine and he was targeting a general readership that cared little about his sources. Holmes also saw a need to educate the periodical’s readers about how it is “hard to prove a negative.” With this objective, he pointed out how it “is not necessary to prove the falsity of the phrenological statement. It is only necessary to show that its truth is not proved, and cannot be, by the common course of argument.” He further explained why he believed head readers could appear remarkably skilled, even uncannily accurate, in their assessments. Here, he showed how some of their pronouncements could apply to just about any man or woman. He also pointed out how they excelled in attending to how a client dressed, whether he or she seemed well-fed and healthy, and other such factors – none related to crania. He even brought up how unscrupulous practitioners would start conversations or ask questions to harvest personal information from their customers. Attending to client vocabularies, listening precisely to what they were saying, and watching facial expressions and body language while clients spoke provided even more information. What all of this meant was obvious to Holmes. He had his observant Professor tell the other boarders, and really the Atlantic Monthly’s readership, that the so-called head readers were not reading heads at all! These men were frauds and cheats out to bilk unsuspecting and unsophisticated people of their hard-earned money. Also notable is that Holmes’s Professor never said that the doctrine Gall had formulated at the end of the eighteenth century and tweaked during the nineteenth century was utterly worthless. On the contrary, he told his fellow boarders that a pseudoscience “may contain many truths, and even valuable ones.” The Professor’s creator would elaborate on the positives and negatives of phrenology in a Harvard lecture two years later. But before turning to that lecture, the point must be made that Holmes was not the first person to write humorously about phrenology, or even the first man of letters to use humor as a weapon in what might be viewed as the ongoing phrenology wars.

Humor with a Purpose The history of talented people using their literary skills to make fun of phrenologists and those believing in the controversial doctrine has roots

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that extend back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, if not earlier. It is as old as phrenology itself. A case in point is August von Kotzebue, a German intellectual who befriended Gall in Vienna and wrote a comedic play about his system in 1805. Kotzebue called his play Die Organe des Gehirns, and it appeared in English as The Organs of the Brain.23 His main character was Mr. Rückenmark (Mr. Spinal Cord), who collected skulls and (mis)judged people by attending only to their heads. His farce opens with Mr. Rückenmark having to choose a new valet. He selects Conrad, saying, “Ah! bravo! zounds!, that is a magnificent skull,” while brushing off Walter, whom he calls a “scoundrel” with “a thief’s organ as thick as a roll of canister tobacco.” This being a comedy, Conrad, not Walter, turns out to be a conniving thief. We further learn that Mr. Rückenmark’s daughter Emily wants to marry a man named Ferdinand. Her father opposes this union because Ferdinand’s skull shows he has “no sense of melody” and “without music there is no happy marriage.” As for his other son, Edward, Mr. Rückenmark wants to marry him off to a scarecrow of a woman possessing a magnificent “three-cornered head.” More than anything else, Mr. Rückenmark wants highly coveted skulls for his collection, which already includes “man-eaters from New Holland, in regard to the sense of murder; Bohemian musical heads, in regard to the sense of melody; … and Gypsies for sense of place.” What transpires is funny, and the play does have a happy ending, with the lovers coming together and Mr. Rückenmark obtaining the crania he needs for his growing collection. His new skulls actually come from local nobodies, but they are presented to him as “Voltaire’s head, robbed from the Pantheon,” “The Maid of Orleans,” and the like. Kotzebue was only interested in eliciting laughs, and he was on friendly terms with Gall. As one of Gall’s biographers noted, “Gall attended its first representation, and laughed as heartily as any of them.”24 Gall, as noted in the first chapter, was a somber man and hardly noted for laughing freely. Yet he was obviously amused by the play. Thomas Love Peacock’s Headlong Hall, a light-hearted work of fiction published a decade later, is similar in tone, again featuring a phrenologist in a humorous setting.25 This phrenologist is appropriately named Mr. Cranium. He has a daughter blessed with the name Cephalis. Mr. Cranium does not want to let Mr. Escot marry Cephalis. But Squire Headlong steps in to 23 24 25

Kotzebue, Gehirns, 1806; Kotzebue, Organs, 1838; Mur, Kotzebue’s comedy, 2017. Capen, Biography, 1835; in Gall, Functions, 1835, 1: 34. Peacock, Headlong Hall, 1816; also see Boshears and Whitaker, Phrenology, 2013.

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arrange a deal. It calls for Mr. Cranium to give his daughter to her suitor in exchange for what is being passed off as the Scottish hero Cadwallader’s magnificent skull. Again, the play’s tone is frivolous rather than biting, and everyone ends up happy. Humorous pieces like these were not unique to Europe. Some also came out of the United States before the Civil War. A short sketch published in 1856 called “A New System of English Grammar,” by George Derby, writing under the pseudonym John Phoenix, provides an excellent example.26 Phoenix described how he went to have his head read by a drunk swindler known as “Flatbroke B. Dodge, Professor of Phrenology.” Dodge sat him down, rubbed his head (described as a “sham pooh”), and used his calipers to derive the numbers he needed to complete his client’s chart. He gave Phoenix 1/2 for Self-Esteem, a 1 for Credulity and also for Mirth, and maximum scores of 12 for Benevolence and Veneration. Phoenix left the room thinking communicating could become much more precise if people used a similar numbering system when speaking. “For instance, the most ordinary question asked of you is, ‘How do you do?’ To this, instead of replying, ‘Pretty well,’ ‘Very well,’ … you say, with a graceful bow, ‘Thank you, I am 52 to-day; or, feeling poorly, ‘I’m 13’ … as the case may be!”27 A postscript at the end of this piece states that Phoenix showed it to his wife. She thought it merited a 13 as a magazine article. She also awarded her husband a lofty 96 for stupidity! Samuel Clemens enjoyed Phoenix’s piece so much that he included it in Mark Twain’s Library of Humor, an anthology of humorous works that he coedited with W. D. Howells and Charles Hopkins Clark.28 Perhaps following how Phoenix portrayed his phrenologist, he also portrayed his phrenologists as drunks in Eddypus. Oliver Wendell Holmes must also have read the piece. Phoenix’s “after the manner of a sham pooh” reappears as “champooing of the head” in Holmes’s The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. Holmes liked being funny and, as now also shown, his audiences loved his sense of humor. But when it came to employing humor as a weapon against the head readers and phrenology itself, he was also somewhat late to the game. The British had already shown themselves exceptionally adept at using sarcasm in their cartoons,29 poetry, and prose writings involving the head 26 27 28 29

Phoenix, New system, 1865; also in Twain, Library of Humor, 1888. Twain, Library of Humor, 1888, 503. Twain, Library of Humor, 1888, 498–505. Bynum, Old Maid’s Skull, 1968; Russell, Cruikshank, 2020.

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readers. Although some British authors portrayed the phrenologists as simply misguided, others described them as money-hungry frauds and worse. The Craniad: or Spurzheim Illustrated, a poem from 1816, illustrates some of this sarcasm, a contrast with the more playful sort of humor found in the works mentioned earlier.30 In it, a woman is dismayed to discover that her lover’s skull has a large organ for infanticide, forcing her to ask: “Must I put trust in Cupid or Spurzheim?” Ultimately, the heroine burns what Spurzheim had written. An anonymous reviewer who was no fan of phrenology called this satirical poem “very humorous” and “poignant,” but then added, “the subject, however, is really ineffably absurd, as to be below the serious notice even of the satirist.”31 Charles Tennyson, possibly assisted by his more famous brother, Alfred, was also openly critical of phrenology. In a poem titled Phrenology, he compared the skull-based doctrine to Mesmer’s debunked claims about a magnetic fluid.32 This poem was published in 1827, while Gall and Spurzheim were still alive. Some writers presented phrenologists as madmen – in effect being just as crazy as the doctrine they were promoting. Even more chilling, others portrayed them as murderers, intent on using the heads of unwary clients to expand their cabinets of phrenological curiosities! Thomas Hood, for example, called phrenologists “blockheads” and “wags,” and he had them thirsting for ever more heads and skulls in Craniology, also from 1827.33 Thus, neither Holmes nor Twain, who followed his lead, was blazing an entirely new path when employing humor to deride the head readers. Nonetheless, these two Americans were decidedly more original when it came to using comedy to explain to large readerships precisely how the head readers were deceiving their clients, and why their so-called science was not a science at all.

Holmes’s 1861 Harvard Lecture In 1861, two years after presenting his opinions about phrenology in the Atlantic Monthly, Holmes gave a lecture at the Harvard Medical School titled “Border Lines of Knowledge in Some Provinces of Medical Science” (see Chapter 10). This lecture can be found in his collected works.34 30 31 32 33 34

Anon, Craniad, 1816a; also see Anon., Spurzheim Illustrated, 1817. Anon., [Review of] The Craniad, 1816b1 (italics added). Tennyson, Poems, 1827; Harris, Critique, 1997. Hood, Works, 1862, 4: 200–206. Holmes, Works, 1892, 9: 209–272.

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Phrenology played only a small part in what he had to say under this heading, but he believed it was necessary to express himself on the subject. This lecture was devoid of the humor that characterized the lecture his alter ego delivered at the breakfast table of his Boston boardinghouse in 1859. Only a few paragraphs long and directed at medical students, the phrenology section reads as follows: By the manner in which I spoke of the brain, you will see that I am obliged to leave phrenology sub Jove,35 – out in the cold, – as not one of the household of science. I am not one of its haters; on the contrary, I am grateful for the incidental good it has done. I love to amuse myself in its plaster Golgothas, and listen to the glib professor, as he discovers by his manipulations “All that disgraced my betters met in me.” I loved to see square-headed, heavy-jawed Spurzheim make a brain flower out into a corolla of marrowy filaments, as Vieussens36 had done before him, and to hear the dry-fibred but human hearted George Combe teach good sense under the disguise of his equivocal system. But the pseudosciences, phrenology and the rest, seem to me only appeals to weak minds and the weak points of the strong ones. There is a pica or false appetite in many intelligences; they take to odd fancies in place of wholesome truth, as girls gnaw at chalk and charcoal. Phrenology juggles with nature. It is so adjusted as to soak up all the evidence that helps it, and shed all that harms it. It crawls forward in all weathers, like Richard Edgeworth’s hygrometer. It does not stand at the boundary of our ignorance, it seems to me, but is one of the will-o’-the-wisps of its undisputed central domain of bog and quicksand. Yet I should not have devoted so many words to it, did I not recognize the light it has thrown on human actions by its study of congenital organic tendencies. Its maps of the surface of the head are, I feel sure, founded on a delusion, but its studies of individual character are interesting and instructive. The “snapping turtle” strikes after its natural fashion when it first comes out of the egg. Children betray their tendencies in their way of dealing with the breasts that nourish them; nay, I can venture to affirm, that long before they are born they teach their mothers something of their turbulent or quiet tempers. “Castor gaudet equis, ovo prognatus eodem Pugnis.” 37 [Castor delights in horses; he that sprung from the same egg, in boxing.]

35 36 37

The phrase translates as “under Jove” and means out in the open. Holmes’s reference is to Jupiter, the ancient god of thunder and lightning or the “sky god,” the king of the Roman gods. Raymond Vieussens was a revered French physician and anatomist, who was born in (or about) 1635 and died in 1715. Gall knew and cited his writings. From Horace.

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Holmes’s Professor on “Bumpology” Strike out the false pretensions of phrenology; call it anthropology; let it study man the individual in distinction from man the abstraction, the metaphysical or theological lay figure; and it becomes “the proper study of mankind,” one of the noblest and most interesting of pursuits.38

Thus, Holmes continued to emphasize why phrenology should be regarded as a pseudoscience. Again, he could have had what Roget had written on his mind when speaking about how the doctrine was mired in a “bog and quicksand.” He might even have been thinking about what John Gordon published decades earlier when he called phrenological maps of the brain a “delusion.” But with this select audience, as contrasted with the laity rushing out to have their heads read, Holmes also wanted to state that some good things might emerge from this false science. With his knowledge of history, he might have been thinking about how modern chemistry emerged from alchemy and how astrology gave birth to astronomy. Even misguided, pseudoscientific endeavors, he knew, could have viable spawn. Holmes pointed out that phrenology was, in fact, now stimulating more academicians to study differences in anatomy within and across the family of man. This was a part of what he considered “anthropology,” “the proper study of mankind.” Seen through his eyes, anthropology was a broad discipline. It included psychology and the study of different states of mind. The mind and the concept of self were among the subjects that had long fascinated him, and they would continue to do so to his dying day.39 To Holmes, a second positive that seemed to be coming out of phrenology was how it was drawing more attention to inborn tendencies and propensities, or what is sometimes called hereditary determinism.40 And related to this attribute, it was raising pertinent questions about how people with brain defects should be treated by professionals and judged by others. Holmes would have considerably more to say about these and other features of phrenology, as readers will discover in the next chapter. 38 39 40

Holmes, Works, 1892, 9: 244–246. Gibian, Conversation, 2001; Weinstein, Depth psychology, 2009. This subject, which was important to both the phrenologists and Holmes, will be discussed in Chapter 14. For more contextual information on hereditary disorders in America at this time, see Rosenburg, Bitter fruit, 1974.

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chapter 12

Holmes’s “Medicated Novels”

The limitations of human responsibility have never been properly studied, unless it be by the phrenologists.

From Holmes’s Else Venner (1860)1

Before writing about phrenology, Holmes had the opportunity to exchange his opinions about the controversial subject with other learned men in New England. Having been a member of the Saturday Club and a cofounder of the Atlantic Monthly, he probably discussed certain features of phrenology with many of the literati involved with the club and magazine. Ralph Waldo Emerson (Figure 12.1) was one of these learned and well-read individuals. An icon of New England literature, he also had a serious interest in the doctrine. Emerson, briefly mentioned in Chapters 10 and 11, was born in Boston in 1803 and lived in nearby Concord. He was neither trained in medicine nor one for drawing laughs with puns and gentle humor. But, like Holmes, he was intrigued by phrenology and strove to comprehend who we, in all our diversity, really are and why. He was, in fact, particularly fascinated by how traits run in families and how the faculties we are born with can determine how we think and act. In 1860, Emerson published a collection called The Conduct of Life. It included an essay called “Fate” that contains these lines about phrenology and character: The gross lines are legible to the dull: the cabman is phrenologist so far: He looks in your face to see if his shilling is sure. A dome of brow denotes one thing; a pot-belly another; a squint, a pug-nose, mats of hair, the pigment of the epidermis, betray character. People seem sheathed in their tough organization. Ask Spurzheim, ask the doctors, ask Quetelet, if temperaments 1

This chapter in Holmes’s serial was first published in 1860 and in book form in 1861. It can be found in Holmes, Works, 1892, 5: 226.

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Figure 12.1  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), one of several famous American authors incorporating phrenology into mid-nineteenth-century writings.

decide nothing? or if there be anything they do not decide? Read the description in medical books of the four temperaments, and you will think you are reading your own thoughts which you had not yet told.

And concerning inherited traits, he wrote: How shall a man escape from his ancestors, or draw off from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father’s or his mother’s life? It often appears in a family, as if all the qualities of the progenitors were potted in several jars, – some ruling quality in each son or daughter of the house, – and sometimes the unmixed temperament, the rank unmitigated elixir, the family vice, is drawn off in a separate individual, and the others are proportionally relieved. We sometimes see a change of expression in our companion, and say, his father, or his mother, comes to the windows of his eyes, and sometimes a remote relative. In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man’s skin, – seven or eight ancestors at least, – and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is. … When each comes forth from his mother’s womb, the gate of gifts closes behind him. Let him value his hands and feet, he has but one pair. So he has but one future, and that is already predetermined in his lobes, and described in that

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little fatty face, pig-eye, and squat form. All the privilege and all the legislation of the world cannot meddle or help to make a poet or a prince of him.2

Not only might Holmes have influenced Emerson, whom he certainly admired, but Emerson might also have influenced Holmes, who was at the same time beginning to express similar thoughts similar to these in his “medicated novels.”

Three “Medicated Novels” What Holmes jokingly called his “medicated novels” are three serials from the Atlantic Monthly that were then published as books.3 These works draw heavily on his knowledge of medicine, hence the word “medicated.” Of greater importance in the present context is how he used these works to present his opinions about phrenology and the head readers. He will have a learned New England professor bearing more than a slight resemblance to himself to present reasoned opinions on inherited tendences, disordered minds, and the need for physicians and the public to learn more about mental defects. He will also have him stating that these victims of nature should be treated with more compassion. Another interesting feature of these novels, albeit one that bears more generally on the human mind, is how he presents states of consciousness and unconscious acts well before Sigmund Freud put psychiatry on a new course with his psychoanalytic alternatives to somatic medicine.4 Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny was the first of Holmes’s three “medicated novels.” It was initially published as The Professor’s Story in the Atlantic Monthly. The first installment of the serial appeared in December 1859. In 1861, the year of its last segment, it came out in book form under its better-known title.5 Its central figure is a young woman in her mid-teens, a chimera with human and snake-like features. Elsie has diamond-shaped, hypnotizing eyes, cold hands, and a low forehead that seems even flatter when she is excited. She even seems to coil up before suddenly springing at her 2 3 4 5

Emerson, Complete Works, 1903–1904, 6: 3. The three can be found in Holmes, Works, 1892, 5, 6, and 7. Oberndorf, Psychiatric Novels, 1944; Gibian, Conversation, 2001; Weinstein, Depth psychology, 2009. Holmes, Elsie Venner, 1861, in Holmes, Works, 1892, 5.

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unsuspecting victims. Mentally, she is incapable of fear. She is coldblooded and strangely aloof – a young woman incapable of showing anything like love or affection. Elsie’s snake-like traits, readers learn, stem from her mother having been bitten by a rattlesnake. Holmes uses Elsie Venner to pose moral questions. Are people born defective responsible for their harmful behaviors? Should others judge people suffering from mental disabilities differently? And: “Was Elsie Venner, poisoned by the venom of a Crotalus [rattlesnake] before she was born, morally responsible for behaviors and sins punishable as crimes?”6 Holmes wants his readers to be more aware of the fact that some people are not born “right.” He was advocating that such people should be treated with considerably more compassion by the public, and with increased understanding by physicians, teachers, and juries. He was seeing that those doing the judging often lacked the knowledge and the facts they needed. There was a pressing need for more education. The phrenology in the novel is not just restricted to Elsie’s low forehead and reptilian tendencies. Nor is it limited to Holmes’s descriptions of the discriminating “longer-headed guests” at a dinner party, the bright and perceptive girl with a high forehead in Elsie’s class, or the school board members with their “bumpless foreheads.” Phrenology is front and center in a letter sent by Elsie’s teacher, Bernard Langdon, to his mentor, a well-meaning professor at a prominent university. Perplexed by Elsie’s menacing traits, Langdon asks this more knowledgeable professor for his insights. His mentor responds in detail, alluding to phrenology’s absurd features but also mentioning some good ones. This learned man is serving as Holmes’s mouthpiece when he explains: The limitations of human responsibility have never been properly studied, unless it be by the phrenologists. You know from my lectures that I consider phrenology, as taught, a pseudo-science, and not a branch of positive knowledge; but, for all that, we owe it an immense debt. It has melted the world’s conscience in its crucible, and cast it in a new mold, which features less like those of Moloch [a Canaanite god closely associated with child sacrifice] and more like those of humanity. If it has failed to demonstrate its system of special correspondences, it has proved that there are fixed relations between [brain] organization and mind and character. It has brought out a great doctrine of moral insanity, which has done more to make men charitable and soften legal and theological barbarism than any one doctrine that I can think since the message of peace and good-will to men.7 6 7

Second preface to Elsie Venner (1883), in Holmes, Works, 1892, 5: x. Holmes, Works, 1892, 5: 226–227.

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The Guardian Angel The second of Holmes’s “medicated novels,” The Guardian Angel, was published in 1867, shortly after the Civil War.8 It is a love story involving Myrtle Hazzard, a beautiful young woman who inherited some frightening traits from her ancestors and some good ones. In the story, Byles Gridley, an insightful, retired professor, is Myrtle’s badly needed guardian angel. In Chapter 11, readers encounter a local physician, Dr. Fordyce Hurlbut, who visits Byles Gridley’s house to see some of the professor’s old medical books. He is shown some of Gridley’s treasures, including Andreas Vesalius’s celebrated anatomy book from 1843. Gridley then asks Dr. Hurlbut: “What do you say to this copy of Johannes de Ketam [Ketham], Venice, 1522,” which he maintained contains “the first anatomical pictures ever printed.” After showing him a woodcut of a bedridden plague patient, Gridley tells the visiting doctor that the book also “has the first phrenological picture in it ever made.”9 Johannes de Ketham was a German physician living in Italy at the end of the fifteenth century. Historians note that he owned one of two manuscript copies of the Fasciculus Medicinae, a collection of six medieval treatises. He neither wrote nor compiled this work, yet when the Fasciculus Medicinae with its ten woodcuts was published in 1491, it bore his name. And it continued to do so in subsequent editions. As to its anatomical illustrations, they were tied to ancient theories. Upon examination, it is hard to see anything particularly phrenological in them, as might be expected given the date. When bringing up Johannes de Ketham, Holmes might have been trying to convey the impression that some of Gall’s ideas were not only faulty but also unoriginal. Others had tried to do the same thing. For example, an anonymous article in a British periodical, Philosophical Magazine, from 1810 listed five people whose notions supposedly predated Gall’s.10 One was the Italian High Renaissance poet Lodovico Dolce, who, according to the anonymous author, had referred to an illustration of a cranium “which is divided and figured according to M. Gall’s system.” This unknown author also brought up a treatise on Schumacher, the Grand Chancellor of Denmark, who “died in 1699, [and] must have practiced craniotomy with success.” What was stated in this 1810 article is misleading and intended to depreciate Gall, who had probably never read these early books and would not have taken them seriously if he had.11 8 9 10 11

Holmes, Guardian Angel, 1867; also in Works, 1892, 6. Holmes, Works, 1892, 6: 141. Anon., Craniology, 1810, 77. Finger and Eling, Gall, 2019.

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There is more phrenology later in The Guardian Angel. It appears in a playful way after Myrtle Hazzard and her new husband, Clement Lindsay, are invited to see a portrait of Sir Walter Scott in the parlor of one of Scott’s ardent American admirers. The picture, however, does not resemble the famous author at all. “That is the portrait of the great Scott,” Deacon Rumrill remarks, while “pointing to an engraving of a heavy-looking person whose phrenological developments were a somewhat striking contrast to those of the distinguished Sir Walter.”12 Phrenology recurs yet again when Clement, who enjoyed sculpting people, studies guardian angel Gridley’s face. And this time, there are details. Clement “maintained that Master Gridley had a bigger bump of benevolence and as large a one of cautiousness as the two people most famous for the size of these organs on the phrenological chart he showed him, and proved it, or nearly proved it by careful measurements of his head.” Upon hearing this, “Master Gridley laughed, and read him a passage on the pseudo-sciences out of his book.”13 Before these final pages in The Guardian Angel, Myrtle has overcome, or at least has been able to control, “the conflict of mingled lives in her blood,” with Gridley’s help.14 The novel closes with Myrtle treating wounded soldiers during the Civil War, an act of kindness that shows how her good traits have finally gained control over the inherited ones that had plagued her past. A Mortal Antipathy Holmes’s A Mortal Antipathy, the third and last of his “medicated novels,” appeared much later, in 1885.15 In it, Holmes did more to distinguish between the popular head readers with their tricks and Gall and Spurzheim, whom he thought of as serious researchers misled by unscientific methods. His thoughts on how phrenology had degenerated from a would-be science to a state of despicable chicanery appear in Chapter 3. Here, we find an innkeeper’s wife perplexed by a mysterious boarder, a man she describes as “the solitariest human being that I ever came across.”16 This perplexing man, whose name is later revealed as Maurice Kirkwood, stays in his room at the Anchor Tavern all day and has his servant bring 12 13 14 15 16

Holmes, Works, 1892, 6: 376. Holmes, Works, 1892, 6: 425. Holmes, Works, 1892, 6: 417. Holmes, A Mortal Antipathy, 1867; also in Holmes, Works, 1892, 7. Holmes, Works, 1892, 7: 54.

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him his meals. But at night, he goes walking, horseback riding, or canoeing, albeit always alone. His business is equally mysterious. And yet he shows the graces and good manners of a gentleman. Later in the novel, we learn he had been accidentally dropped from a balcony as an infant. He was being cared for by a young lady, a cousin, at the time. The fall, which nearly killed him, led to his antipathy toward women. This antipathy was so intense that it even triggered seizures. It made Maurice Kirkwood want to live his life as a recluse after he was old enough to go off on his own. Holmes writes about the suspicious landlady’s intense need for more information about her reclusive boarder. And it is here that he brings out how phrenologists would sometimes send out accomplices to gather advance information: “The good lady had her own standards for testing humanity, and they were not wholly unworthy of consideration; they were quite as much to be relied on as the judgements of the travelling phrenologist, who sent his accomplice on before him to study out the principal personages in the village, and in the light of these revelations interpreted the bumps, with very little regard to Gall and Spurzheim, or any other authorities.”17 The heroine in this novel is Lurida Vincent (Figure 12.2), a “largeheaded” young woman “far better equipped with brains than muscles,” so much so that she is affectionately known as “the Terror.”18 Lurida is for women’s rights and is even considering studying medicine, a career still restricted to men in America.19 Her friend and mentor, Dr. Butts, is a smalltown physician with a big heart. He provides Lurida with medical books and advice, and while he is doing so Lurida tells him what she thinks about phrenology. Specifically, she brings up how “books told me that women’s brains were smaller than men’s.” She then informs the good doctor, “perhaps they are – most of them,” adding defiantly: “But when they try to settle what women are good for by phrenology, I [would] like to have them put a tape around my head.” She knows it would reveal a large brain, especially in its more intellectual parts. To make her position even more explicit, which was not really needed given phrenological cranioscopy’s diminished status at this time, Lurida remarks: “I don’t believe in their nonsense for all that.”20 17 18 19 20

Holmes, Works, 1892, 7: 55 (italics added). Holmes, Works, 1892, 7: 40. Holmes wanted Harvard to allow talented women to study medicine but lost this battle. Laura, despite her brilliance, abandons her medical studies later in the novel. Holmes, Works, 1892, 7: 125.

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Figure 12.2  The brilliant Lurida Vincent with Dr. Butts, her medical mentor and friend (from Holmes, Works, Vol. 5, 1892).

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Holmes Phrenologically Remembered Holmes received numerous honorary degrees from universities in the United States and Britain, including Yale, Cambridge, Oxford, and Edinburgh. He had been a Harvard Professor, a beloved Boston “Brahmin” capable of laughing at the elite caste and himself, and a polymath recognized for significant, even monumental contributions to several fields, including science, medicine, and literature. He knew his health was failing as he entered the 1890s. He had been getting increasingly frail and unsteady, and his vision was poor by this time (Figure 12.3). On October 7, 1894, his life ended peacefully at his home on Beacon Street, close to Boston’s Statehouse, which he had declared the “hub of the solar system.” His son of the same name, now a Civil War Hero, though not yet a Supreme Court justice, was by his side when he passed away. His two other children and wife Amelia had predeceased him. His funeral was held at King’s Chapel. His remains were buried next to his wife’s in Cambridge’s Mount Auburn Cemetery (Figure 12.4). This was where Johann Spurzheim’s body had been laid to rest with great fanfare

Figure 12.3  Holmes in 1892, two years before his death (from Holmes, Works; Life and Letters, Vol. 2, 1892).

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Figure 12.4  The gravestone of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and his wife, Amelia, in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge.

in 1832, a landmark in the history of phrenology that he had witnessed as an aspiring medical student. That the German doctor, who had done the most to introduce phrenology to Americans, and the American physician and author, who had done so much to discredit phrenological cranioscopy and the head readers, would have their mortal remains buried in the same New England cemetery is ironic but also in some ways fitting. Both men were drawn to the doctrine, and how they presented it did much to define who they were. Further, and as now shown, Holmes thought that at least some of what Spurzheim had been preaching was important and could help advance studies of the mind, brain, and medicine. Edgar C. Beall, writing for the Phrenological Journal and Science of Health, eulogized Holmes, but remained critical of what Holmes had published using his Professor as his mouthpiece in the Atlantic Monthly in 1859.21 Beall, who would read “Mark Twain’s” head (Chapter 7), based his phrenological assessment of Holmes on photographs and what everyone knew about him, which was a lot given his stature as a physician, a scientist, a poet, and a novelist, as well as for being an engaging and witty speaker. 21

Beall, Photographs, 1894.

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He wrote that Holmes was a distinguished poet with a head that was “rather large” for his small body. His personality was “preeminently hopeful, buoyant, cheerful, sprightly, gay and optimistic,” but he “had the relative superior development of Approbativeness over Self-Esteem or dignity.”22 He continued by mentioning his benevolence and sympathy, also writing that his upper forehead showed expansions over the organs of Ideality, Causality, and Mirthfulness. As a leading phrenologist writing a piece for the phrenological journal founded by Orson Fowler, Beall felt compelled to add that Holmes did considerable harm to phrenologists and his own reputation by promoting the “bump delusion.” His point, unelaborated but clear enough to the faithful, was that although bumps had guided Gall and Spurzheim, later generations of phrenologists, starting with George Combe, had taken phrenological examinations to a higher level by focusing on physical distances between organs (really skull markers) and using lines to delineate organ groups. In brief, the phrenological examination had become more measurement-driven, objective, and scientific, with many phrenologists having abandoned the more subjective searching for bumps and depressions that marked its early years.23 Beall specifically singled out how Holmes had written that “to attempt to read character by Phrenology was as absurd as to judge the contents of a money safe by the size of its rivet-knobs.” He found this analogy both misleading and shameful. “It is to be regretted,” he wrote, “that the brilliant professor was the author of this sarcasm [the bump delusion] which has been repeated by thousands and thousands of people to the great detriment of our cause.”24 Beall appeared to be semi-serious when he concluded that, had Holmes been graced with a somewhat different set of cortical organs, he might have made a good phrenologist! But then again, and now recognizing Holmes’s genius: “If his middle face had been longer, and he had more caution and sagacity in matters of human nature, which might have made 22 23

24

Beall, Photographs, 1894, 273. Historian Theodore Porter (Measurement, 2003, 242) associated objectivity in the sciences “with the effort to be impersonal,” “the negation of subjectivity,” and “the reduction of judgment to a calculation.” According to Porter: “It comes close to achieving standardization …” and “The failure to achieve the status of a ‘real science’ was often identified with the subjectivity of the endeavor” (242, 251; also see Porter, Trust in Numbers, 1995). Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison (Objectivity, 2007) point out that scientific objectivity, at least as it is known today, emerged during the mid-nineteenth century, when scientists began to see their personal biases as impediments to revealing truths. For more on phrenology’s quest for objective measurements, see Finger and Eling, Objectivity and measurements, in press. Beall, Photographs, 1894, 274.

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him a phrenologist, of course, he might not then have enriched our literature with the numerous gems which now bear his name.”25 Holmes had been admired during his lifetime, and for some time after his death he continued to be venerated around the world. As noted in Chapter 9, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who began writing his prized detective mysteries in 1887, named Sherlock Holmes after him.26 And in 1908, fourteen years after his death, Sir William Osler, doyen of medical humanities, praised him as “the most successful combination which the world has ever seen of the physician and the man of letters,” a giant who “has sat amid the Aesculapians [gods of medicine] in the seat of honour.”27 But how much did Samuel Clemens, a later writer and humorist, know about Holmes and his writings. Did he know him personally? Could Holmes have influenced what “Mark Twain” wrote about the head readers in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? Indeed, could Holmes have provided Twain with a template for how best to ridicule the head readers in Eddypus and his autobiographical dictations? An attempt will be made to answer these and related questions in Chapter 13. It will show that Clemens met Holmes on several occasions and exchanged revealing letters with him. Importantly, the case will be made that Holmes was a significant source for Clemens’s thoughts and Mark Twain’s writings about phrenology – a source that has been overlooked for too long. 25 26 27

Beall, Photographs, 1894, 274. Miller, Doyle, 2008, 54, 110; Podolsky and Bryan, Holmes, 2009, 125. Sherlock was largely based on Joseph Bell, Doyle’s unusually observant Edinburgh professor. Osler, Alabama Student, 1908, 57.

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chapter 13

Mr. Clemens and Dr. Holmes

Well, of course I wrote Doctor Holmes and told him I hadn’t meant to steal, and he wrote back and said in the kindest way that it was all right and no harm done; and added that he believed we all unconsciously worked over ideas gathered in reading and hearing, imagining they were original with ourselves. Samuel Clemens, 1879 At a dinner speech honoring Holmes1

Both Samuel Clemens and Oliver Wendell Holmes used humor when explaining to the laity why the head readers were frauds and should be avoided. Clemens, presenting himself as Mark Twain, ridiculed what the head readers were up to in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876 and used his humor to communicate an even more forceful message in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, his masterpiece of 1884. Then, after a pause, he continued his sarcastic portrayals of the men he considered charlatans in a hilarious section of Eddypus, written in 1901, and in his autobiographical dictation of December 26, 1906, both published until after he died in 1910. Holmes’s objectives were identical; namely to inform a large readership about what the head readers were really doing. He did this through The Professor at the Breakfast-Table, published in the Atlantic Monthly and in book form in 1859, in an introductory lecture at the Harvard Medical School in 1861, and in his “medicated novels,” most notably in Elsie Venner, his serial from 1859–60, which appeared in book form in 1861, and A Moral Antipathy, which came out a few years later. With Holmes preceding Clemens in exposing the head readers as frauds and revealing that phrenology was not quite the science it was claiming to be, as well as in using humor as a weapon in the fight against the fad, it is fitting to ask several questions: Was Clemens familiar

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Twain, [Remarks], 1880b, 11.

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with Holmes’s writings? Did he meet Holmes? And is there direct or indirect evidence to suggest that Clemens “borrowed” some of Holmes’s ideas and humorous ways of presenting his thoughts about the head readers and the so-called new science for his own portrayals? The answers to these questions reveal more about both authors, their times, and the head reading fad that captured the nation. Hence, it is essential to examine the personal letters, passages in novels, other writings, and associated materials that tie these two icons of nineteenth-­century American literature together. In so doing, I shall be going beyond what Twain’s and Holmes’s biographers have put in print. What follows will provide clear answers to the first two questions and a strong suggestive answer to the third. It will also shed considerably more light on both authors and the movement that had so engrossed ordinary Americans, as well as the unsuspecting people paying for head readings elsewhere in the world.

A First Meeting Samuel Clemens made his first visit to Boston in March 1869. It was just a two-day affair. “Mark Twain” described it in a July 25, 1869 letter published in the Alta California. This was the San Francisco newspaper he had written for many times in his career. In a classical Mark Twainian way, Clemens’s creation first described how he got off the train to Boston and was approached by a boy offering to carry his luggage to his hotel for 30 cents. Writing tongue-in-cheek, he “scrutinized him narrowly, for I was in a strange city, and he might be one of those plausible outlaws who lie in wait near depots and decoy the unsuspecting to obscure dens and murder them, for the sake of their teeth, which they sell to dentists – and their hair, which they sell to the wig-makers – and their finger bones, which they sell to the ivory makers,” showing no “wish to be retailed when I am dead”! Twain presented himself in this humorous letter as the guest of “Petroleum V. Nasby,” a real person whose given name was David Ross Locke. He had met Nasby “on the circuit” when he (Clemens) was hoping to make enough money to pay off his one-third ownership in the Buffalo Express. Nasby was an energetic and gifted journalist, and he worked for Ohio and New York newspapers. He was a political commentator, an abolitionist, and a satirist, and a man who cared little about how slovenly he appeared in public. His attire mattered little to Clemens, who was hardly a fashion statement himself, and who was impressed with Nasby’s conversational skills and writing successes. He knew that his “newspaper has a

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prodigious circulation; his letters take well; his books sell well,” and “his lecture field is the whole country.” During their trip to Boston, the two men enjoyed viewing the “supposed” site of the Boston Massacre, the Old South Church, Faneuil Hall, the Bunker Hill Monument, and other landmarks from the breakaway nation’s Revolutionary War history. Nonetheless, as he wrote, they were “visiting people the greater part of the time.” According to Twain’s first biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, Holmes was one of the people they attempted to see. On March 14, 1869, they “called on Doctor Holmes.”2 Although Clemens might not have met with Holmes previously, he had read his early pieces in the Atlantic Monthly and at least one of his “medicated novels” before they got together in 1869. What they discussed is unknown. But after this meeting they began exchanging letters, some revealing what each man knew about the other’s writings and interests (see below). Clemens (and Nasby) returned to Boston on November 10 of the same year. This time, Mark Twain lectured at the city’s Music Hall. He expected an audience of “4,000 critics” but instead encountered a congenial crowd.3 Whether Holmes attended the performance and whether they met once more at this time are two more unknowns.

Love and The Autocrat Sam and Livy married in 1870, a year after Clemens first met Dr. Holmes. In 1869, as mentioned earlier in this book, the lovestruck author had been doing everything he could to convince Livy to agree to marry him, despite his so-called faults. One of their favorite activities was discussing literature, which they did when spending time together or through letters when Sam was not in Elmira where Livy was living with her parents. According to historian Ron Powers, “Sam, unlike Livy, was not an academically trained reader, but he read all the time, his choices as eclectic and humanistic as his narratives would prove to be.” Powers continued: “What he happened to have with him on the train would often be the topic of their book talk,” and they discussed various authors, “comparing notes on Tennyson, Milton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Shakespeare, Swift, Sterne, Victor Hugo, Matthew Arnold, Oliver Wendell Holmes.”4 2 3 4

Paine, Twain, 1912, 1: 384. See Fatout, Lecture Circuit, 1960, 127–129. Powers, Twain, 2006, 264 (italics added).

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Livy’s determined suitor had, in fact, been reading and rereading Holmes’s The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. Whether he had first read it in the Atlantic Monthly before buying it as a book is unimportant. But his biographers tell us that he liked to scan the better periodicals for good pieces to read, one being the popular magazine that Holmes helped found and used for this and other serials, the Atlantic Monthly.5 Clemens was still searching for a good title for his book describing his travels to Europe and the Middle East when he had his first meeting with Holmes. It was ten days afterward in Elmira, on a copy of Holmes’s Autocrat that he had been marking up for Livy’s edification, that he scribbled what would become its final title, “The Innocents Abroad.” Holmes’s Autocrat was, in fact, more than just one of the couple’s favorite books. As put by Justin Kaplan in his Twain biography: “Livy adored it, they were both delighted by the little doctor’s wit, and for Clemens at this moment in time, Holmes stood at the pinnacle of literary culture.”6 Livy would preserve this annotated copy of The Autocrat in a tin box with their cherished love letters. The special treatment afforded Holmes’s book by Livy is more understandable knowing what her suitor had scribbled on the last page. There one finds, “Livy, Livy, Livy, Livy, Livy, je vous aime. M’aimez vous?,” French for “I love you” and “Do you love me?” This was not an isolated instance of how he used The Autocrat to court his future wife. Where Holmes had written about “the sweet voices among us” in this work, Sam wrote “Livy in the Lord’s Prayer.”7 Further, where Holmes had described “The Young Fellow Called John,” he changed the boarder’s name to “Charlie,” her brother. After all, Charlie had shown him the picture of Livy that had an immediate impact on him while he was visiting Europe and the Middle East on the Quaker City. The majority of Sam’s annotations were not romantic or even emotional. They were cerebral and indicated that he was seriously pondering what Holmes had put into type. Some were one- or two-word approvals of the various thoughts Holmes had been expressing (e.g., “True,” “very fine,” “well done”) and others were brief comments about how he saw himself or others in the context of what Holmes was contending through his various characters, including the Autocrat. For example, where Holmes had written that “education always begins through the senses and then 5 6 7

Gribben, Literary Resources, 2019, 45; Ferguson, Mark Twain, 1943, 106. Kaplan, Mr. Clemens, 1966, 93. Booth, Comments, 1950.

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works up to the idea of absolute right and wrong,” he informed Livy in one of his notes that this was accurate.8 Some of his more interesting comments had to do with Holmes’s suggestions for lecturing successfully, obviously a subject of great importance to Clemens and his less inhibited alter ego, Mark Twain. For instance, where Holmes had written: “A thoroughly popular lecture ought to have nothing in it which five hundred people cannot all take in a flash, just as it is uttered,” Sam wrote in the margin: “He certainly knows all about it.”9 And two pages later, where Holmes advised lecturers to “pick out the best [face] and lecture mainly to that,” he agreed yet again, scribbling, “I always do that.”

Exchanging Letters Once The Innocents Abroad came out, its proud author sent a copy to Holmes. The highly regarded Boston physician was very appreciative of this unexpected gift. On September 26, 1869, he wrote back to “Mr. Clements [sic]”: I don’t see what excuse you had for sending me such a great big book, which would have cost me ever so many dollars, but I assure you it was very welcome in spite of that – more welcome than you could have guessed it would be, for independently of the pleasure I have had from your other writings some parts of your travels had a very special interest for me. I may mention your visits to Palestine and Egypt. You looked at these countries in a different way it is true … but I always like to hear what one of my fellow-countrymen … a good humored traveler with a pair of sharp twinkling Yankee (in the broader sense) eyes in his head, has to say about things that learned travelers often make … ridiculous and absurd. … I was rather surprised and very much pleased to find how well your ship’s company got on together. … Well, I hope your booksellers will sell a hundred thousand copies of your Travels – don’t let them get hold of this letter for the rascals will print everything to puff their books – private or not – which is odious but take my word for it your book is very entertaining and will give a great deal of pleasure.10

Clemens, in turn, thanked Holmes profusely for his “good words.” He did not tell him that he had misspelled his name. He did, however, 8 9 10

Booth, Comments, 1950: 133. Booth, Comments, 1950: 160. Twain, Letters, 1988–2002, 3: 365–366. The Innocents Abroad sold 82,524 copies in its first eighteen months at an average cost of about $4 per copy.

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now inform him that he had read The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table several times and had just finished rereading and annotating it for “a superior young lady.” I had read “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” two or three times already, when a superior young lady requested me a short time ago to read it again & mark and marginal-note it all the way through for her. … I then said in my secret soul, I have got a chance at this gentleman who writes Autocrats of Breakfast Tables & gives me extra work to do, & I will hurl my six hundred & fifty pages [The Innocents Abroad] at him if I “fetch” and miss and hit the State House! But speaking seriously, I so enjoyed reading the Autocrat the third time that I imposed the pleasant task upon myself of reading it again & marking it without a suggestion from anybody. … I hadn’t any real “excuse,” but I sent the book just as a sort of unobtrusive “Thank-you” for having given me so much pleasure often & over again.

He further related that he had “a commission from the same party” to annotate Elsie Venner. Holmes had expressed pertinent thoughts about phrenology in this, his first “medicated novel,” following up on what he had just included in The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. Among other things, as noted in Chapter 12, the erudite university professor in Elsie Venner informed Elsie’s mentor that phrenology appears to have “failed to demonstrate its system of special correspondences,” though “it has proved that there are fixed relations between [brain] organization and mind and character.”11 The fact that Clemens had read The Autocrat multiple times and Elsie Venner at least once, and that he perused the Atlantic Monthly, where Holmes was publishing his serials, is significant in this context. It leaves little doubt that he also read The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. On its pages he would have seen how Holmes ridiculed the head readers and even the founders of phrenology in plain language in a public venue. He also would have learned why Holmes considered the former charlatans and the “science” less than scientific. What Holmes wrote in The Professor at the Breakfast-Table could have led Clemens to reminisce about the mesmerist that he helped by feigning a trance while still in Hannibal, and what he witnessed when an itinerant phrenologist visited his boyhood town. Whether thinking about these two events from his past or not, Holmes’s second Breakfast-Table serial must have made him even more skeptical of the head readers. Indeed, what 11

Holmes, Works, 1892, 5: 226–227.

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Holmes had written might even have led him to consider conducting a revealing test of his own. At this juncture, it is more than a little interesting to find that Livy copied a quotation from the Phrenological Journal and Life Illustrated into her commonplace book in 1869, the year she and her suitor were discussing Holmes’s The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table.12 Whether or not she was one of the thousands of subscribers to the popular journal, the fact that she was reading a phrenology journal is telling of the movement’s immense popularity in America even after the Civil War, when the imperative to have one’s head read was declining. It is also worth noting how many of Holmes’s works made their way into Clemens’s library. In his Mark Twain’s Library, A Reconstruction, Alan Gribben provided a list of the books it had included but which had been scattered after the writer’s death.13 His list included some of Holmes’s most famous poems (e.g., The Chambered Nautilus, The Deacon’s Masterpiece, The Last Leaf) and collections of poetry (Poems of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Songs in Many Keys). And among other prose works and collections, it contained these: The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, Elsie Venner, The Guardian Angel, and Selections from the Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Thus, two of the three questions posed above can now be answered. Yes, Clemens and Holmes did meet. Their first face-to-face meeting took place in Boston in March 1869. And yes, Clemens was familiar with at least some of what Holmes had written about phrenology. He had read how Holmes had denigrated the head readers in Elsie Venner and he certainly would have known what he had included in The Professor at the Breakfast-Table, probably first encountering it in the Atlantic Monthly. These two literary giants would go on to see each other on later occasions, and Clemens would continue to read Holmes’s works. He would scribble in one of his notebooks that “Nobody writes a finer & purer English than Motley, Howells, Hawthorne & Holmes.”14 Similarly, Holmes would follow Clemens’s career, reading his works, praising his achievements, and politely scolding him when he went too far in a festive dinner speech that fell flat with his audience and was embarrassing to everyone, including Clemens. 12 13 14

Gribben, Library, 1980, 1: 545. Gribben, Library, 1980, 1: 317–320. Twain, Notebooks, 1975–1979, 2: 348 (italics added).

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Holmes, Twain, and the Atlantic Monthly William Dean Howells probably knew Clemens better than anyone outside his immediate family.15 Their friendship endured for forty-six years, which might be a record given Clemens’s habit of turning on people at the slightest provocation and blowing things well out of proportion when money was at stake or when he perceived his reputation to be threatened. Howells and “Clemens,” as his friend called him in his correspondences, exchanged approximately 700 letters, totaling approximately 1,500 pages.16 Howells first met Clemens in 1869, while working for Ticknor & Fields, a publisher located near the Boston Commons. Ticknor & Fields was the publishing house for elite authors from the Northeast. Its clients included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry David Thoreau, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Holmes also used it as his publishing house. It did more than just books, publishing the Atlantic Monthly, which Holmes had helped found and then named. Clemens, under the pen name of Mark Twain, had already established himself as a talented writer before meeting Howells for the first time. He was admired coast to coast for his jumping frog story, humorous pieces covering his travels to the West and the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), and pithy impressions and commentaries stemming from his European and Middle Eastern travels on the Quaker City. Howells was serving as James Fields’s assistant editor in the Atlantic Monthly’s offices when Clemens entered the building in 1869. The writer looked very much out of place with his dense crop of red hair and sealskin coat – hardly the image of a proper gentleman, especially in snobbish Boston. He wanted to thank Howells for giving The Innocents Abroad a good review in the Atlantic Monthly, a periodical of immense importance to a writer aspiring to become even better known. In its December 1868 issue, Howells had not only praised the book’s unique features but stated that it provided material about “pure human nature … that rarely gets into literature.” He also wrote glowingly about its unconventional author, whose sense of humor was unlike anything ever exhibited by a New England writer. “We think he is, in an entirely different way from all the others, quite worthy of the company of the best,” were Howells’s words. As pointed out by one of Twain’s biographers, “The book that Howells had praised was, in fact, a daring choice for an Atlantic review, given that 15 16

Howells, Twain, 1910. Gibson and Smith, Twain-Howells Letters, 1960.

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it lampooned much of what the magazine stood for.” Among other things, it was “exuberantly un-Eastern, impious, and unconcerned with moral improvement.”17 Howells and Clemens left their first meeting as friends. A few days later, they dined at Boston’s Parker House18 with James Russell Lowell, the Atlantic Monthly’s first editor. Holmes, the renowned author of the Breakfast-Table serials, joined Clemens, Howells, and Lowell at the dinner table. Holmes was sixty, Clemens almost thirty-four, and Howells just thirty-two at the time. Meeting Mark Twain’s creator marked a turning point for Howells, who would become the magazine’s editor in 1871, and whose “influence over American literature for the remainder of the 19th century would be unrivaled.”19 The meeting was also crucial for Clemens, who had grown tired of being Mark Twain on the lecture circuit. His stop in Boston was, in fact, part of an East Coast itinerary that included lectures in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Washington, Maine, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. He had agreed to give fifty-one lectures within a three-month period, talks that made good money but were in locations that took him away from his beloved Livy. In a letter written to his mother during the spring of 1869, he lamented: I most cordially hate the lecture field. And I shudder to think I may never get out of it. In all conversations with Gough, and Anna Dickinson, Nasby, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the other old stagers, I could not observe that they ever expected or hoped to get out of the business. I don’t want to be wedded to it as they are.20

Although not everyone in New England was ready to follow Howells and embrace “Mark Twain” as America’s newest rising star, in part because he “spoke to them in new and startling tongues,”21 Bostonians Howells, Lowell, and Holmes recognized his talent and viewed him as a genius with a pen and when entertaining audiences from a podium, albeit an offbeat one. Attentive to how the public was embracing his humorous depictions of people and places, they launched a campaign to get him to write some pieces for the Atlantic Monthly – a campaign they would win, but not immediately after they banded together to try to recruit him. 17 18 19 20 21

Powers, Twain, 2006, 3. Clemens liked to stay at the Parker House on his visits to Boston, though he also was fond of staying with Howells at his homes, first in Cambridge and then in Boston. Powers, Twain, 2006, 19. Paine, Twain, 1912, 1: 378 (italics added). Paine, Twain, 1912, 1: 451.

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In 1874, some five years later, a Mark Twain piece finally appeared the Atlantic Monthly. It was a short sketch called “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It.”22 Written in Black dialect, it presented what Auntie Cord (Aunt Rachel in the story) had told Sam and others at Quarry Farm in Elmira. She related how she had been a born a slave and how her plight was made worse after her husband and children were sold at auction. Nonetheless, she tried to remain positive, and she endured. She was ultimately reunited with her youngest son, who had escaped from the South and fought with the Union Army. This short story lacked the humor that Mark Twain’s readers and listeners craved, and that the men overseeing the Atlantic Monthly most wanted. Nonetheless, it was warmly received by the New Englanders running the periodical, all staunch abolitionists, like Livy’s parents in Elmira. What Samuel Clemens chose to submit a year later was more in line with the image he was so successful at creating, and also far more significant. He now published Old Times on the Mississippi, the serialized version of what would become his Life on the Mississippi. Howells agreed to pay him a then-hefty $20 a page for his chapters, which debuted in the January 1875 issue of the Atlantic Monthly and showcased his unique, wry way of depicting himself and other characters. The same issue had a piece by Holmes titled “The Americanized European.”23 This time in print, the two iconic humorists and writers with very different backgrounds had yet another opportunity to be together.

More Meetings Clemens returned to Boston in December 1870, and spent another two weeks in the city in 1871. These trips would have allowed him to see Holmes again, since the doctor never ventured far from home. But whether they met is less than certain. Their paths were less likely to have crossed in 1872 and 1873, since Clemens spent most of this time in Europe. But they did meet several more times, starting with a festive dinner in 1874. Mark Twain lectured in Boston during February and March of 1874, and he returned yet again that year to attend a party at the Parker House, Boston’s famed hotel. The special event was held on December 15, and Holmes was also there. It was organized to celebrate the Atlantic’s first year under its new owners, as well as the staff and authors responsible for its 22 23

Twain, True story, 1894. This issue also included poetry by Longfellow and an excerpt from Henry James.

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glowing reputation and profitability, which was far exceeding expectations. The dinner was covered in the Boston Globe where it was described as an occasion “to be ranked with the most noteworthy gathering of the kind that the Athens of America has seen.” Twenty-eight guests were present that evening. On the dinner table in front of each guest was an advance copy of the January 1875 issue of the Atlantic Monthly containing the previously mentioned pieces by Twain and Holmes. Though neither man used the occasion to say anything to the group about phrenology, both gave speeches. What they discussed informally when not at the podium or standing up at the dinner table with a glass in hand is unknown. But from what we know about both men, they could have covered any of a myriad of topics at this time: scientific, medical, literary, and perhaps how the Civil War had scarred the country and markedly changed its culture. A year later, while Clemens was on a crusade to get Congress to enact better copyright laws, he returned to Holmes’s Boston. He lectured that November and took the occasion to ask Howells to enlist Holmes, Longfellow, Lowell, and Whittier in the fight against the unauthorized publication of books by American authors. Although Clemens’s petition never reached Congress, Holmes was one of the authors who signed it. But he was not in the least optimistic about the outcome, reminding Clemens that “governments were not in the habit of setting themselves up as high moral examples, except for revenue.”24 Boston’s Hotel Brunswick was also the site of another celebratory event bringing Clemens and Holmes together. Again hosted by the Atlantic Monthly, it was for the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, who had just turned seventy in 1877. And once again, the pillars of New England poetry and literature were invited: Emerson, Longfellow, and, of course, Holmes. The guests were called on to deliver speeches honoring Whittier after an extravagant meal of oysters, soups, fish, mutton, fowl, salads, and various desserts with matching wines. These talks went on and on into the early hours. Early the following morning, Howells finally introduced the guest better known to literati as Mark Twain. He told those assembled that the next speaker was an exceptionally talented humorist devoid of meanness. Clemens appreciated the introduction and stood up to deliver what he believed was a good-natured, Mark Twain kind of tale about Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, and himself. He could not have been more mistaken about how his story would be received. 24

Paine, Twain, 1912, 1: 553.

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The setting was a miners’ camp in California during a snowstorm. Halffrozen, he knocked on the cabin door and introduced himself as Mark Twain. The man in the cabin told him he was “the fourth” to bother him, something so annoying that the distraught miner was contemplating leaving for some other location. Twain asked him precisely what he meant by “the fourth,” and was told, “The fourth literary man who has been here in twenty-four hours.” The irritated miner named the three other literary men, all heading to Yosemite, who had invaded his home the previous evening smelling of whiskey. There was Mr. Emerson, “who was a seedy little bit of a chap”; Mr. Longfellow, “built like a prizefighter” with “a nose straight down his face”; and Mr. Holmes, “as fat as a balloon – he weighed as much as three hundred.” The night before Twain arrived, these three men had made themselves at home, drinking, playing cards, and reciting line after line of boring poetry – all of which the exasperated miner found intolerable. Mark Twain told the miner that the three men claiming to be great American poets had to be impostors. They were “not the gracious singers to whom we and the world pay loving reverence and homage.” Upon hearing this, the miner looked at Twain and said, “Ah! Imposters were they? Are you?” The staid audience at the Hotel Brunswick did not laugh. On the contrary, some thought it was a veiled attempt to topple their local heroes from their well-earned, lofty pedestals. Clemens, now believing he had committed unthinkable blasphemies, could not be consoled. He left Whittier’s birthday dinner embarrassed and boarded the first train he could catch back to Hartford. Soon after arriving home, he composed apology notes to the three men he was convinced he had offended. He explained that he merely wanted to be entertaining – that he was hoping to see America’s literary elite smiling and laughing. In his own words, he was “only heedlessly a savage, not premeditatedly” one. Longfellow wrote a polite note back stating the matter was of “slight importance”; some newspapermen covering the event had blown things out of proportion. Emerson’s daughter replied (to Livy) that the speech was rather unfortunate and disappointing, given the speaker’s sterling reputation, but that her father nonetheless enjoyed it. As for Holmes, he wrote: “I have just read your letter and it grieves me to see that you are seriously troubled about what seems to me a trifling matter.” He continued: “It never occurred to me for a moment to take offense, or to feel wounded by your playful use of my name.” He further informed the distraught speaker,

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whom he knew was begging for forgiveness, that his writings were a source of “infinite pleasure and amusement.” But Holmes was being upfront and honest when he added, “your invention has for once led you a little farther than what some would consider the proper limit of its excursions.”25 In his autobiographical dictation of January 11, 1906, Clemens recast the story, wanting it to appear less offensive. This time he described the man calling himself “Emerson” as merely “grave, unsmiling,” “Longfellow” as an elderly man with white hair and “a benignant face,” and “Holmes,” no longer looking like some huge, beached whale, as a gentleman “flashing smiles and affection.” He also mentioned how he gave his speech “always hoping – but with gradually perishing hope – that somebody would laugh … but they never did,” and how this left him “with a heart which has long ceased to beat.”26 Ron Powers, who, like Clemens, was born in Hannibal, and who followed every other Mark Twain biographer in presenting this woeful episode in his subject’s life, tried to cast what happened in a more positive light. “Whatever else one might make of Mark Twain’s Whittier birthday speech,” he wrote, “this much seems irrefutably true: he had inaugurated a venerable institution of American culture: the celebrity roast.”27

The Unknowing Plagiarist On December 3, 1879, the Atlantic Monthly hosted yet another gala. This time it was a “breakfast” to honor Holmes, who had just turned seventy. The invitees included “Mark Twain,” now the acclaimed author of Tom Sawyer, and the three poets he believed he had offended two years earlier. As was ritual for all such celebrations, toasts, tributes, and longer speeches were given.28 This time Clemens, all too aware of his earlier faux pas, was determined to be at his most gracious best. When called upon, he related how he had always felt a special warmth toward Holmes, because he was the first “great man who ever wrote me a letter.” With a pause and a wry smile, he then went on to say that he was also “the first great literary man I ever stole anything from, and that is how I came to write to him and him to me.” He now told a humbling story involving Holmes and The Innocents Abroad. This was the humorous travelogue he had published in 1869 and sent as a gift to the famed Boston physician and author. 25 26 27 28

Howells, Twain, 1910, 61. Twain, Autobiography, 2010–2015, 1: 260–267. Powers, Twain, 2006, 413. Published as a supplement (Atlantic Monthly, Holmes Breakfast, 1880b).

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Mr. Clemens and Dr. Holmes When my first book was new, a friend of mine said, “the dedication is very neat.” “Yes,” I said, “I thought it was.” My friend said, “I always admired it even before I saw it in The Innocents Abroad.” I naturally said, “What do you mean? Where did you ever see it before?” “Well, I saw it some years ago, as Doctor Holmes’ dedication to his Songs in Many Keys.” Of course my first impulse was to prepare this man’s remains for burial, but upon reflection I said I would reprieve him for a moment or two and give him a chance to prove his assertion if he could. We stepped into a bookstore and he did prove it. I had really stolen that dedication almost word for word.

He continued: I could not imagine how this curious thing happened, for I knew one thing for a dead certainty – that a certain amount of pride always goes with a teaspoonful of brains, and that this pride protects a man deliberately stealing other people’s ideas. That is what a teaspoonful of brains will do for a man, and admirers had often told me that I had nearly a basketful, though they were rather reserved as to the size of the basket. I thought the thing out and solved the mystery. Two years before I had been laid up a couple of weeks in the Sandwich Islands, and had read and re-read Dr. Holmes’s poems till my mental reservoir was filled with them to the brim. The dedication lay on top and handy, so by and by I unconsciously stole it. Perhaps I stole the rest of the volume too, for many people have told me that my book was pretty poetical in one way or another.

Clemens had the good sense not to mention that a blue and gold edition of Holmes’s Songs in Many Keys was the only book he could find while he was sick and confined to a hotel room in Honolulu, where he was so ill he felt he would die. Nor did he state that he had almost memorized it by heart. But he did describe how he informed Holmes of his act of plagiarism and how Holmes forgave him for using the dedication, which read: “To My Most Patient Reader and Most Charitable Critic, MY AGED MOTHER, This Volume Is Affectionately Inscribed.” In Clemens’s words: Well, of course I wrote Doctor Holmes and told him I hadn’t meant to steal, and he wrote back and said in the kindest way that it was all right and no harm done; and added that he believed we all unconsciously worked over ideas gathered in reading and hearing, imagining they were original with ourselves. He stated a truth and did it in such a pleasant way, and salved over my sore spot so gently and so healingly that I was rather glad I had committed the crime, for the sake of the letter. I afterward called on him and told him to make perfectly free with any ideas of mine that struck him as being good protoplasm for poetry. He could see that there wasn’t anything mean about me; so we got along right from the start.29 29

Twain, [Remarks], 1880b, 11.

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After welcome laughter and a burst of applause, Clemens mentioned how he had “met Doctor Holmes many times since” and considered him one of “my fellow-teachers of the great public.” He further related how happy he was to see that he “is still in his prime and full of generous life.”30 Decades later, in 1903, Clemens sent a letter to Helen Keller. He told her how he had read Holmes’s poetry while bedridden in 1866 and afterward informed Holmes that he had inadvertently stolen his dedication. He explained that he had only known he had stolen it because somebody told him that he had. He added: “I have never originated anything altogether myself, nor met anyone who had.”31 Although this is an overstatement, he seemed to have pilfered from Holmes on not just one but two occasions. The second instance can be found in the fifth chapter of Tom Sawyer. This chapter described how a hapless dog had wandered into a church, was bitten by a “pinch bug,” and was turned into “a woolly comet moving in its orbit with the gleam and speed of light.”32 As noted by Justin Kaplan, one of Clemens’s many biographers: The simile of the dog’s tail might have been suggested to Clemens by an entirely unobjectionable source, Oliver Wendell Holmes’s novel, Elsie Venner (1861): in Chapter Three the schoolmaster kicks a “yallah dog,” who then goes “bundling out of the open schoolhouse-door with a most pitiful yelp, and his stump of a tale shut down as close as his owner ever shut the short, stubbed blade of his jack-knife.”33

As noted, Clemens read and owned Elsie Venner. And Holmes, of course, read Tom Sawyer. But whether the two men discussed this second instance of seemingly unintended pilfering, and whether Holmes again brushed it off, is unknown. What is more pertinent and overlooked is how Clemens also seemed to borrow rather liberally from Holmes on the topic of phrenology, a subject that will be examined after looking at a poem written in Twain’s honor.

A Poem for Mark Twain Samuel Clemens returned to Boston late in 1884. This time, it was a stop on his “Twins of Genius” lecture tour with George Washington Cable (see Chapter 7). But there is no record of whether he and Holmes met at this time. 30 31 32 33

Twain, [Remarks], 1880b, 11. Paine, Letters, 1917, 2: 730–733. Twain, Tom Sawyer, 1876/2011, 35–36. Kaplan, Mr. Clemens, 1966, 193.

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Clemens celebrated his fiftieth birthday a year later, on November 30, 1885. He did not have a gala dinner or a celebratory breakfast, like those given by the men guiding the Atlantic Monthly for Whittier and Holmes. Still, The Critic: A Literary Weekly, Critical and Eclectic collected tributes to honor the man who had risen from an obscure river town in the middle of a vast country to become America’s favorite author and humorist, a man whose books had been translated into many languages, providing him with a large international following in addition to his American audiences. Holmes, always the gentleman willing to do nice things, submitted a poem titled To Mark Twain (On His Fiftieth Birthday) to celebrate the occasion. It reads as follows: Ah Clemens, when I saw thee last,– We both of us were younger,– How fondly mumbling o’er the past Is Memory’s toothless hunger! So fifty years have fled, they say, Since first you took to drinking,– I mean Nature’s milky way,– Of course, no ill I’m thinking. But while on life’s uneven road Your track you’ve been pursuing, What fountains from your wit have flowed– What drinks you have been brewing! I know whence all your magic came,– Your secret I’ve discovered,– The source that fed your inward flame– The dreams that round you hovered: Before you learned to bite or munch Still kicking in your cradle. The Muses mixed a bowl of punch And Hebe seized the ladle. Dear babe, whose fiftieth year to-day Your ripe half-century rounded, Your books the precious draught betray The laughing Nine34 compounded. So mixed the sweet, the sharp, the strong, Each finds its faults amended, 34

A reference to the Muses of antiquity.

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The virtues that to each belong In happier union blended. And what the flavor can surpass Of sugar, spirit, lemon? So while one health fills every glass Mark Twain for Baby Clemens!35

The Final Meeting “Mark Twain” spoke in Boston on December 20, 1887, where Holmes would have had the opportunity to hear him. Although this is not mentioned in either man’s surviving letters or other published documents, he might even have called on Holmes. What is not in the least speculative is that the two men had a final meeting six years later. Clemens traveled to Boston in 1893, where he dined with Holmes and the writer Sarah Orne Jewett. Holmes was now eighty-four years old, frail, tiring quickly, and dealing with deteriorating vision. The two humorists were pleased to see each other and exchanged warm compliments. Holmes was especially pleased “to be told once again that his Autocrat had been Clemens’ courting book and was kept with the love letters in Livy’s green tin box.”36 Similarly, Clemens was happy to hear that Holmes had been enjoying the installments of Pudd’nhead Wilson in Century magazine, even though they now had to be read to him. Holmes passed away a year later, in 1894.

Holmes as Clemens’s Guide Holmes had lived a long life, being eighty-five when he was laid to rest in 1894. For decades, he had been expressing himself clearly and forcefully on charlatanism, trickery, and gullibility in science and medicine. Although the diminutive Brahmin was no longer alive, Clemens, now about to enter his sixties, was still thinking about how Holmes approached foolery and naïveté in these fields, both in his lectures and popular writings. In fact, Clemens came close to preaching precisely what Holmes had long been saying about most medicines, homeopathy, and other miraculous cures six years after the doctor’s death. This can be witnessed in a letter he composed on January 8, 1900, to Joe Twitchell, a Hartford minister, 35 36

Holmes, To Mark Twain, 1885, 253. Kaplan, Mr. Clemens, 1966, 325.

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and his close friend and confidant. Like Holmes, who had famously written, “if the whole material medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind – and all the worse for the fishes,”37 Clemens informed Twitchell: We know that 9 in 10 of the [human] species are pudd’nheads. We know it by various evidences; and one of them is, that for ages the race has respected (and almost venerated) the physician’s grotesque system – the emptying of miscellaneous and harmful drugs into a person’s stomach to remove ailments which in many cases the drugs could not reach at all; in many cases could reach and help, but only at the cost of damage to some other part of the man; and in the remainder of the cases the drug either retarded the cure, or the disease was cured by nature in spite of the nostrums. … Really, when a man can prove he is not a jackass, I think he is in the way to prove that he is no legitimate member of the race.38

That Holmes was never out of Clemens’s own fertile mind in its conscious or unconscious state was shown by how Mark Twain used Holmes’s words for his book dedication and how he recycled his humorous story about a hapless dog when writing Tom Sawyer. But what is of greater significance here is how “Mark Twain” seemed to use what Holmes had written on phrenology in his own writings and in his 1906 autobiographical dictation (later to appear in print), even though he never cited the witty and insightful Boston physician. As mentioned, Clemens had read Elsie Venner and almost assuredly Holmes’s The Professor at the Breakfast-Table before conducting his “test” in London. He might also have read The Guardian Angel before having his head read by Lorenzo Fowler in London. Indeed, his decision to have Fowler read his head twice could well have been influenced by Holmes, who saw the famed phrenologist shortly before he had his fictional Professor rip into both the head readers and what he regarded as no more than pseudoscience in an 1859 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Since Clemens did not describe what led him to see Fowler in his known letters or elsewhere, how Holmes might have fit into his thinking, plans, and subsequent actions in London can only be regarded as hypothetical. But what is hard to deny is how much of what Mark Twain wrote about the head readers and phrenology in The Secret History of Eddypus followed the structure Holmes had used decades earlier in The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. To some extent, there are also overlaps between Twain and Holmes in The Adventure of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry 37 38

Holmes, Works, 1892, 9: 203. Paine, Letters, 1917, 2: 690–691.

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Finn, and, even more so, in his 1906 dictation. That the similarities have remained unrecognized for so long is surprising. Holmes had opened the phrenological chapter in The Professor at the Breakfast-Table with his erudite Professor receiving an invitation to visit Bumpus and Crane’s “Emporium” – their “scientific Golgotha.” Upon entering, he finds an impressive “room full of casts and pictures, before a counterful of books with taking titles.”39 In Twain’s Eddypus, readers also encounter not one but two phrenologists, though they are now identified as “Briggs and Pollard, American Phrenologists,” just a minor difference. More noteworthy is how Bishop Twain similarly observed an impressive display of “bald-headed busts all around, checkered off like township maps, and printed heads on the walls, marked in the same way” when he entered Briggs and Pollard’s equally impressive London establishment.40 Leaving the antechamber, Holmes’s Professor is taken to another room to have his head read. It is here that Bumpus tries to impress his client with his fancy language, while at the same time measuring his head and “champooing” it with his fingers. Twain has Briggs doing similar things in Eddypus, though he does not use the term “champooing” or another such word.41 Both Holmes and Twain could not resist putting a lot of color and humor in the pictures they were painting to make their messages to the public even more vivid and memorable. Above and beyond his being “champooed,” Holmes’s Professor compares some of what he had to endure to how “horrid old women poke their fingers into the salt-meat on the provision stalls at the Quincy Market.”42 Twain, in a variation on this theme, has Briggs blurting out: “Scott! This ain’t a human head, it’s a prize pumpkin, escaped out of the county fair.”43 Twain also seemed to follow Holmes’s lead when it came to what the evaluating phrenologist conveyed to his client about his individual faculties and, even more notably, how he did so. As a part of the Professor’s lecture, Holmes provided a table with two columns (see Chapter 11). The one on the left showed the scores his fictitious Professor is given for some of his propensities and faculties. The column on its right differs. It is labeled, “Private notes for my pupil: Each to be accompanied by a wink.”

39 40 41 42 43

Holmes, Works, 1892, 2: 196. Twain, Eddypus, 1972, 350. John Phoenix had previously used “after the manner of a sham pooh” in 1856, showing that Holmes could also pilfer (see Chapter 7). Holmes, Works, 1892, 2: 196. Twain, Eddypus, 1972, 351.

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Three examples illustrate what Holmes wrote, with the left column providing the scores given to the client on his specific faculties, and the right column indicating what the phrenologist was really thinking and withholding from the customer he was duping: Amativeness, 7 Alimentiveness, 8 Mirthfulness, 7

Most men love the conflicting sex, and all men love to be told they do. Don’t you see that he has burst off his waistcoat-button with feeding, – hey Has laughed twice since he came in.44

This two-column structure might have originated with Holmes. The present writer did not find earlier critics of the doctrine using it to lampoon the head readers. What is important here is that this rare and comical use of two separate columns to contrast what a head reader is saying with what he is actually thinking reappears in Eddypus. Nonetheless, there is a notable difference between what Holmes presented and what is in this funny part of Mark Twain’s manuscript. Holmes based his two contrasting columns on his client’s only visit. In contrast, Twain’s left-hand column presents what the phrenologist says to the “Obscure Stranger” on the Bishop’s first visit, while the right-hand column presents what the renowned Bishop, now splendidly dressed in clerical garb, hears on his return. Three examples will suffice: Bloody-minded fiend Probably keeps a harem Worships himself

Heart of an angel! Others are dirt in presence of this purity! Here we have divine humility!45

Both Holmes and Twain repeatedly emphasized cranial bumps in their writings, which is also significant. In his Breakfast-Table serial, Holmes described how the phrenologist subjected the Professor’s head to a tactile examination (his “champooing”), whereas in Eddypus, we find: “Briggs stood up behind me and began to squeeze my head between his hands, paw it here and there, and thump it in spots.” Yet, and as noted in Chapters 2 and 5, and elsewhere, the Fowlers, Wells, and their acolytes, including Beall, were more focused on measuring distances between organs (actually, cranial markers) and estimated distances to the medulla than on searching 44 45

Holmes, Works, 1892, 2: 201–202. Twain, Eddypus, 1972, 352–353.

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for bumps and depressions as Gall and Spurzheim had originally recommended.46 Following Combe, they were also more interested in organ groups, some of which Combe delineated by drawing lines. Holmes, in fact, was severely criticized in 1894 by Edgar C. Beall for portraying the head readers as bumpologists and prolonging the “bump delusion” (see Chapter 12)47 When Mark Twain chose to emphasize the importance of bumps in Eddypus, his autobiographical dictation, and his other works, he again seemed to be following what Holmes had previously written about phrenologists and cranial bumps. Physical measurements only come up when Holmes and Twain mention that the examining phrenologist uses a tape to measure the head’s circumference. Here, Holmes writes, “Tape round the head, – 22 inches,” whereas Twain’s Bishop remarks, “Briggs used a tape-measure on me, and Pollard wrote down the figures.” Measuring the head’s circumference with a tape began with Gall and was continued by Spurzheim and everyone else, including the Fowlers, so this might not seem noteworthy. But following in George Combe’s footsteps, later phrenologists also recognized a need to use more advanced tools in their examinations – at the very least, calipers. Holmes, however, did not mention the use of calipers. Nor did Twain, even though they were even more in vogue when he was writing. As for the underlying message, it comes across as the same in Twain as it had been in Holmes. Readers are informed that the head readers are merely charlatans in Holmes’s Professor at the Breakfast-Table and in Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Eddypus, and 1906 autobiographical dictation. In each of these works, the frauds tell their clients what they want to hear. Further, they base many of their statements on what they can guess about the person from how he or she looks and answers questions. Twain states this most memorably at the end of Eddypus, where, tongue-incheek, he defines phrenology as “the ‘science’ which extracts character from clothes.”48 Holmes would have laughed had he lived to read his punchline, even though he had communicated the same thought, though not in such a funny way. Twain, as shown, could have added “and from advance information, when available.” He brought up the importance of having such information when describing the two frauds that boarded Huckleberry Finn’s and Jim’s raft while they were drifting through Arkansas. As for Holmes, his best line about advance information can be found in A Mortal Antipathy. 46 47 48

See, for example, “Rule for Finding the Organs” in Fowler and Fowler, Phrenology, 1969, 189–198. Beall, Photographs, 1894. Twain, Eddypus, 1972, 353.

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The landlady in this novel described how an itinerant phrenologist “sent his accomplice on before him to study out the principal personages in the village, and in the light of these revelations interpreted the bumps, with very little regard to Gall and Spurzheim, or any other authorities.”49 Both novels appeared in 1884, though Huckleberry Finn did not debut until December of that year in Britain and not until 1885 in the United States. That Mark Twain put the word “science” in quotation marks in the closing line of the phrenological passages in Eddypus should not be overlooked. Holmes had provided essential details on why phrenology was not a true science in his 1859 Breakfast-Table serial. He was highly critical of how phrenology’s founders accepted only supportive cases and ignored or explained away contradictions and exceptions. He branded phrenology a “pseudo-science” on this basis alone, saying it “consists of a nomenclature, with a self-adjusting arrangement, by which all positive evidence, or such as favors its doctrines, is admitted, and all negative evidence, or such as tells against it, is excluded.”50 For Clemens, who lacked Holmes’s scientific and medical credentials, just putting the word “science” in quotation marks seemed sufficient. His alter ego must have felt he did not have to embark on a more detailed explanation in 1901, given the even greater demand for objectivity in the sciences at this later time.51 But what about the autobiographical dictation of December 26, 1906, the one in which Clemens reminisced about his two visits to Lorenzo Fowler in London? Clemens, as noted, abandoned the two-column format that he had used in Eddypus in this dictation. What he related about Fowler reading his head, however, is in many ways comparable to what he had included in his futuristic piece five years earlier. Hence, we again encounter the phrenologist “in the midst of the impressive symbols of his trade,” including “marble-white busts … [with] every bump labeled with its imposing name, in black letters.”52 Here too, one can read how the phrenologist “fingered my head,” while commenting on his client’s cranial features and personality traits. And in the dictation, one can again envision Twain as a teacher, moralist, and reformer, much as Holmes was in his day. Without question, Mark Twain was at his artistic best when describing what Fowler discovered about his signature trait, humor, in his 1906 49 50 51 52

Holmes, Works, 1892, 7: 55 (italics added). Holmes, Works, 1892, 2: 197 (emphasis in original). Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 2007. Twain, Autobiography, 2010–2015, 2: 335.

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dictation. In the first part of the before-and-after comparison, Fowler commented on how his unknown client’s cranial features “represented the total absence of the sense of humor!” But once he knew the man in the chair was the famous American humorist, “the cavity was gone, and in its place was a Mount Everest.”53 Needless to say, Samuel Clemens’s fully formed skull could not have changed in such a dramatic fashion in a matter of weeks – even people knowing little about medicine would have known this to be farcical. What did change over a few weeks, however, was that Fowler was now working from the premise that his client was none other than the American author celebrated around the world for his sense of humor. Although what Twain dictated about first having a cavity and then displaying a Mt. Everest in the region associated with the organ for humor is obviously over the top, he could not have chosen a better way to convey the serious message that phrenological “head readings” have little – perhaps nothing – to do with cerebral bumps and depressions. He was telling the world that phrenologists were only pretending to be reading skulls. But, as Holmes had made clear before Clemens joined the fray, the head readers were astute observers. It is just that they were attending to how their clients were speaking, dressing, and behaving, rather than small skull features.

Muddy Waters By examining what Samuel Clemens, writing as Mark Twain, and what Oliver Wendell Holmes, via his various professors, had to say about phrenology, as well as what these two men were reading, the letters they exchanged with each other, their known meetings, and other possible interactions, one can begin to understand and appreciate the previously overlooked influence Holmes seemed to have had on Clemens in the phrenological domain.54 Yet some things remain fuzzy. Just how much about phrenology did Clemens take from Holmes, either deliberately or unknowingly? Did he have other personal experiences with phrenologists? Did he use other sources for some of his information? Did Holmes 53 54

Twain, Autobiography, 2010–2015, 2: 336. The influence Holmes had on Clemens as a writer has received at least some attention, notably from Randall Knoper in an article titled “American Literary Realism and Nervous ‘Reflexion’” (Knoper, Realism, 2002). Knoper’s piece is focused on automatisms, subconsciousness processing, and dream- and trance-like states in fictional representations; he writes about how the science of the day is incorporated into literature but does not discuss phrenology.

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encourage or prompt Clemens to have a head reading? Did Clemens discuss his ploy with Holmes before (or even after) he set off to conduct his clever experiment on Lorenzo Fowler in London? And did Holmes and Clemens ever sit down to discuss the potential good stemming from what both men considered a pseudoscience? Without question, it would have been ideal to cite stronger, more direct evidence in some of these domains. But neither author left much of a paper trail to work with, resulting in significant gaps. What has been presented, however, can be seen as numerous lines of converging, albeit indirect, evidence or what scientists call the power of “converging operations.” Separately, each piece of indirect evidence might only be suggestive, though some are more telling than others. But together, the various findings reinforce each other and provide a clearer picture of Holmes’s strong influence on what Samuel Clemens had Mark Twain convey about phrenologists and phrenology. There are good reasons why the use of “converging operations” has been an important tool in the sciences and medicine. Gall used it, and others did the same before and after he did so. Without question, converging operations will continue to be used to shed light on Nature’s mysteries and tell us more about beliefs, working hypotheses, and what can reasonably be concluded, such as has been done here. Looking back, Holmes provided good reasons for not trusting the head readers or believing in phrenological craniology, using his humor to convince the laity to stop and think about what they were paying for and so blindly accepting as truths. Clemens, in turn, was aware of what Holmes had done, and it registered on him. He shared Holmes’s intense drive to debunk a worthless fad with his own humor, a weapon he knew how to handle far better than real firearms though he often joked about using guns on selected targets. Without question, Clemens owed Holmes a debt of gratitude for opening his eyes to the head readers and paving the way for his disparaging depictions of them. But to what extent did the two men agree on what should be rejected and, on the other side of the coin, about the pseudoscience having some positive features? In the next chapter, the last before the Epilogue, their opinions about specific elements of the controversial doctrine will be examined. What will be shown will reveal the dangers of painting their negative feelings about phrenology, though not about conniving head readers, with too broad a brush.

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chapter 14

Phrenology Assessed

The best part of our knowledge is that which teaches us where knowledge leaves off and ignorance begins …. That which is true of every subject is especially true of the branch of knowledge which deals with living beings.1 Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1861 (Lecture to Harvard medical students)

We must now look more carefully at exactly what Oliver Wendell Holmes and Samuel Clemens, two Americans with enormous followings, were rejecting about phrenology and, conversely, ask whether there were some features of phrenology that they continued to find acceptable or even laudable. As readers will see in this last chapter, how they felt about the head readers and how they felt about phrenology were not identical. True, they assailed the head readers, sometimes without mercy. But their attempts to educate the public about what Gall had promoted as a new science of man, Spurzheim and George Combe had popularized, and the Fowlers and their minions were busy selling to the public, were not all-encompassing efforts to topple the entire edifice with its many tenets and broad ramifications for individuals and society.

A Doctrine to Be Divided In 1832, the year Spurzheim died in Holmes’s Boston, another American, Dr. Samuel Jackson (Figure 14.1), made a sharp distinction between two of phrenology’s basic tenets.2 The first was the claim that there are multiple specialized cerebral organs. Jackson wrote that the evidence for this assertion was already “so conclusive, that few well instructed and observing 1 2

Holmes, Works, 1892, 9: 211. Jackson, Principles of Medicine, 1832, 207–208.

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Figure 14.1  The Philadelphia physician Samuel Jackson (1787–1872).

physicians, accustomed to analyze and reflect on what passes under their observation, have any difficulty in yielding accordance to this position.” In contrast, the revered University of Pennsylvania physician was bothered by phrenology’s other tenet – the doctrine’s reliance on skulls. Cranioscopy, Jackson opined in his popular Principles of Medicine, “is, probably, more curious than useful,” to which he added, “the possibility of recognizing on the exterior of the cranium, the seats of those particular organs … is far from being established.” Jackson was not alone in distinguishing between one of the most intriguing features of phrenology, multiple organs of mind, and its questionable-at-best cranioscopic foundations and conclusions. Robley Dunglison, the Dean of the Faculty at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, and numerous other prominent physicians agreed with Jackson’s split opinion. A closer look at what Oliver Wendell Holmes and Mark Twain had to say well after Jackson divided phrenology into acceptable and questionable parts shows that they too were not rejecting everything that the phrenologists were claiming. Rather, they seemed to divide phrenology’s tenets into acceptable, unacceptable, and questionable categories.

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Without question, Holmes and Clemens were suspicious of cranioscopy, much as Jackson and Dunglison had been, and as were many of these physicians’ later contemporaries in medicine and the sciences. Phrenological cranioscopy seemed to be a flawed method for probing the mysteries of the mind and the organization of the brain. It had led earlier physicians and scientists astray. Further, some of the questioners opined, the people paying to have their heads read were those most likely to believe almost anything without carefully examining or even thinking about the evidence for the practice of head reading. Whether based on bumps that could be seen or felt, or on the sorts of measurements that Combe and the Fowlers found themselves promoting, there was a lack of good science – and an abundance of bad science – behind the use of skull markers as a way of understanding the functional organization of the brain. Holmes was blunt about the misguided faith the founders of phrenology placed in their primary method and what this meant about the head readers. Given their poor sampling techniques and knowing how Gall and Spurzheim routinely rejected contradictory cases and material, he had no faith in what they, the Combes, or the Fowlers were preaching about craniology and character traits. Known failures to confirm craniological claims increasingly reinforced Holmes’s rejection of this facet of phrenology, the claim that gave rise to the popular fad for head readings. Clemens, in turn, also found reasons to come down hard on the head readers, who he (like Holmes) concluded were only pretending to be reading their clients’ character from their skulls. After his little test in London, it seemed apparent that examining crania could not provide these practitioners of the so-called science with the sort of detailed information about individual organs that they wanted to convey to their clients. But was Clemens closing the door and locking out all cranioscopy? Two problems with interpreting Samuel Langhorne Clemens, especially when he was writing or speaking as Mark Twain, are that he is sometimes cryptic and inconsistent. This fuzziness is best exemplified by looking at his 1906 dictation. “I am aware that the prejudice should have been against Fowler, instead of against the art; but I am human and that is not the way prejudices act,”3 were his exact words. Clearly, he was upset with how Fowler must have been attending to non-cranial cues while pretending to be evaluating his skull. But was he thinking that there could still be something to the skull-based doctrine that might be revealed with better methods and a more skilled examiner – in the language of the day, with 3

Twain, Autobiography, 2010–2015, 2: 334.

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improvements in “the art”? And might this have been one of the reasons why the author continued to allude to his noble and more primitive head features in his writings? Given the ambiguities in his autobiographical dictations and some of his other pieces, we can begin to understand why Twain scholar Alan Gribben opined that “it seems likely that his attitude toward the pseudoscience never crystallized into actual disbelief.”4 Tom Quirk, in his essay on Twain and character, was also left scratching his head. “It is unclear how much or little faith Clemens placed in this pseudoscience,” was what he wrote. He added: “It is not easy to know precisely where Twain (much less Samuel Clemens) stands on the variety of subjects he takes up.”5 Quirk did, however, provide some guidance into the labyrinth when he stated how “it is sometimes easier to know what he is getting at when he is being extravagant than when he is not.”6 Indeed, in situations where Twain rolled up his sleeves and pulled out all stops about the head readers, he is crystal clear about them being scoundrels, charlatans, and thieves. Similarly, he exhibited little faith in bumpology. By pointing out how even the world’s leading phrenologist was relying on clothes, conversations, and advance information, as well as by making statements that would apply to anyone, his bottom line appeared to be that cranial features are unable to reveal the fine details that people most want to know about themselves and others. From this perspective, whether heads and skulls might be revealing anything at all would seem to be the more pressing phrenological question he found himself wrestling with at different times in his life. Cranioscopy is just one feature of phrenology, though it is clearly a lightning rod and, without question, its most controversial feature. Yet its importance to Gall cannot be overstated. It was his and Spurzheim’s primary method – and also the method mentioned far more than any other in their books and other books on phrenology. Often overlooked is that the founders of phrenology also based their theorizing on human neuroanatomy, comparative neuroanatomy, research on development and aging, examinations of people with brain damage or congenital disorders, and experiments on living animals. Thus, phrenology involved considerably more than just studying ­crania. And, as Gall repeatedly emphasized, studying crania was no ­more 4 5 6

Gribben, Twain, 1972, 153; Gribben, Literary Resources, 2019, 64. Quirk, Human Nature, 2007, 25, 54. Quirk, Human Nature, 2007, 54.

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than a method of understanding the real object of his studies, the functional organization of the brain. So did Holmes and Clemens, two icons of American literature and humor, agree on some of the other features of the doctrine? Might Holmes have latched onto some features that Clemens glossed over or avoided, either from lack of interest or because he was not trained as a physician? To answer these two questions, a good starting point is the second important tenet of phrenology that Jackson mentioned. This is Gall’s revolutionary concept that there are many discrete, practical faculties of mind.

Many Faculties of Mind Both Holmes and Clemens appeared to accept the idea that there are multiple faculties of mind. But neither man was inclined to list and certify Gall’s, Spurzheim’s, or any other phrenologist’s list of faculties or classify them in new ways. Holmes expressed his unwillingness to engage in these speculations in A Moral Antipathy, using brilliant Laura Vincent as his mouthpiece. While reading about the nervous system, Laura compared herself to a telegraph operator and her brain to a battery. “But I did not know how many centers of energy there are,” she stated, or “how they are played upon by all sorts of influences, external and internal.”7 In brief, what both Holmes and Clemens found particularly intriguing about this facet of phrenology is not just that the mind or self is composed of many distinct faculties, but its corollary – namely that people differ from one another because of differences in the strengths of their faculties. How could anyone doubt that all of us have some faculties that are better developed and more active than others? And could anyone doubt that there is great variation in which faculties are strong and which are weak from one person to the next? The concept of many distinct faculties of mind and what Gall wrote about how the faculties could vary in strength from one person to the next gained considerably more support as the nineteenth century progressed. These were attractive concepts because, as Gall had argued, they could explain individual differences and account for why each of us is more skilled or deficient in some things than in others. As Gall also astutely recognized, multiple faculties and the dependence of each on a different part of the brain for expression could also explain why injuries and diseases could markedly affect some higher functions while leaving others unscathed. 7

Works, 1892, 7: 147.

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Both Holmes and Twain mentioned and even jested about the kinds of practical faculties that interested Gall and later phrenologists – faculties for specific functions that went well beyond perception, cognition, and memory, the three abstract faculties philosophers and physicians had accepted since antiquity. Mark Twain, for example, wrote about his large organ of Hope being impaired by a small one for keeping promises, and a stagecoach driver blessed with a well-developed faculty for Location. Nonetheless, Twain’s creator wrestled with some faculties and faculty clusters accepted by the phrenologists, wondering whether they were real or merely illusions. In The Mysterious Stranger, to cite just one example, Twain questioned the “moral sense” and asked whether we have free will.8 He takes readers back to sixteenth-century Austria in this story, where they encounter Satan explaining to some boys why the notion of a moral faculty is laughable. He tells the impressionable boys that what we do is determined by previous events and is entirely predictable. In effect, the belief that we are guided by some moral faculty or perhaps a group of moral faculties is laughable. It is a fantasy, no more than a fairytale.

Stability of Character In addition to accepting the concept of multiple practical faculties of mind, but not necessarily the specific faculties imagined by the phrenologists, Holmes and Twain sided with the phrenologists about the relative stability of our faculties and propensities. Gall had been very clear about nature’s dominance over nurture throughout life. He argued against the idea that education and experiences could fundamentally change a person’s basic personality. “From his infancy,” he wrote, “man announces the character which will distinguish him in adult age,” and does so “without education having any part in it.”9 Some of Gall’s best examples of nature’s dominance can be found in his writings on the arts. He observed that, while some young children are anxious to engage in schoolyard games, others prefer to draw with charcoal, chalks, or pencils. “Examine the history of great mechanicians, draughtsmen, painters, architects,” he contended, and “you will not find one, who has not manifested the traces of his innate talent, from his earliest age.”10 Because these early affinities and dislikes are so stable, he explained, 8 9 10

Twain, Mysterious Stranger, 1916. This novel has several versions. Gall, Functions, 1835, 1: 141. Gall, Functions, 1835, 6: 103–104.

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“manufacturers” in Mülhausen (Switzerland) “will receive into their shops only those children who from their tenderest age discover a great talent for the arts in drawing and cutting.”11 Gall studied many great artists and discovered that most had “little education.” Yet, he realized, they were the ones who produced the masterpieces, not those who had required extensive formal training in the arts.12 Although practice could improve some skills, he consequently opined, “models and the lessons of a master will never be able to supply what heaven has denied the pupil.”13 What Samuel Clemens thought about the stability of character traits is most apparent in Mark Twain’s later writings. For example, in Pudd’nhead Wilson, his 1894 mystery about babies switched in the cradle, he included the following about the novel’s villain: Tom imagined that his character had undergone a pretty radical change. But that was because he did not know himself. In several ways his opinions were totally changed, and would never go back to what they were before, but the main structure of his character was not changed, and could not be changed.14

He presented the same conclusion in a magazine article about an American general who he felt was morally deficient. In “A Defence of General Funston,” which he published in 1902, he wrote that “the basis or moral skeleton of the man was inborn disposition – a thing which is as permanent as a rock, and never undergoes any actual and genuine change between cradle and grave.”15 Similarly, in What Is Man?, he has his Old Man telling the Young Man how impossible it is to “eradicate your disposition” or even a part of it. More to the point: “beliefs are acquirements, temperaments are born; beliefs are subject to change, nothing whatever can change temperament.”16 Mark Twain did not wholly dismiss the roles that could be played by “outside” influences in What Is Man? After all, as he put it, Shakespeare’s great intellect would have amounted to nothing had he lived on some barren rock in the middle of an ocean. Without the right “atmosphere” to cradle and nurture the talent, he explained in “Saint Joan of Arc,” the world not only would never have had England’s Bard, but it also 11 12 13 14 15 16

Gall, Functions, 6: 103. Gall, Functions, 6: 105. Gall, Functions, 6: 112. Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson, 1894/1999, 48 (italics added). Twain, Funston, 1902a, 613. Twain, What is Man?, 1923, 108 (Italics in original).

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would not have had Italy’s Raphael or America’s Thomas Edison, despite these men having the brains to make them geniuses in their respective fields. Edison, for one, would have lived and died “undiscovered in a land where an inventor could find no comradeship, no sympathy, no ambition-rousing atmosphere of recognition and applause – Dahomey, for instance.”17 Clemens’s final statement about the stability of character traits appeared in his autobiographical article, “The Turning Point in My Life,” published in 1910, the year he died. He pointed out how he had set out for the Amazon to harvest coca leaves some fifty earlier, “without reflecting, and without asking any questions.” This, he maintained, was entirely consistent with the adventurous personality he was born with – what we might now call his DNA. But although “circumstance” or external conditions changed, his basic temperament had never changed, not “even a shade,” since then. In his words: Circumstance is powerful, but it cannot work alone, it has to have a partner. Its partner is man’s temperament – his natural disposition. His temperament is not his invention, it is born in him, and he has no authority over it. He cannot change it, nothing can change it, nothing can modify it – except temporarily. But it won’t stay modified. It is permanent, like the color of the man’s eyes and the shape of his ears. Sometimes a temperament is an ass. When that is the case the owner of it is an ass too, and is going to remain one.18

The Fowlers and the overwhelming majority of American phrenologists did not fully agree with Gall or Clemens about the impossibility of changing one’s character in significant ways. Weaver, whose phrenology book Clemens read in 1855, is notable in this context. Along with others in the Fowler camp, he contended that circumscribed brain areas could somehow enlarge with practice and shrink with disuse, thereby altering the basic fabric of the mind. These authors presented a more optimistic message for those seeking happiness and striving for personal betterment. As for Holmes, he too was more in Gall’s camp. But, as a physician, he usually framed how he felt about the stability of character traits with an even greater emphasis on heredity.

Heredity and Character Gall provided numerous examples of how character traits seemed to run in families and Spurzheim agreed that this was nature’s way. By midcentury, 17 18

Twain, Saint Joan; in Collected Tales, 1992, 592. Twain, Turning point, 1910, 118.

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the idea that “like begets like” was drawing sustained attention from Europeans and Americans in medicine and related fields. Precisely what was being passed from one generation to the next, however, would not be determined for decades to come.19 As a man of medicine, Holmes found himself particularly attentive to how various traits seemed to be transmitted across generations. His gaze was broad and extended beyond just eye color, height, and physique. Further, he focused on family influences prior to just the previous generation. He repeatedly wrote about personality traits being passed from parents to children and then to the children of these children, who display these same traits into adulthood. And he praised the phrenologists for drawing attention to this phenomenon in the same 1861 Harvard lecture in which he blasted phrenology, saying it “does not stand at the boundary of our ignorance,” but rather “is one of the will-o’-the wisps of its central domain of bog and quicksand.” In his very next sentence, perhaps after pausing and taking a deep breath, he told his listeners: “Yet I should not have devoted so many words to it [phrenology], did I not recognize the light it has thrown on human actions by its study of congenital organic tendencies.”20 Three years earlier, in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, Holmes had his talkative alter ego inform his fellow boarders: When we observe how the same features and style of person and character descend from generation to generation, we can believe that some inherited weakness may account for these peculiarities. Little snapping-turtles snap – so the great naturalist tells us – before they are fairly out of the shell. I am satisfied, that, much higher up in the scale of life, character is distinctly shown at the age of –2 or –3 months.21

Holmes returned to his snapping turtles and human children in the Harvard lecture he gave shortly after publishing these lines, seeing these two very different organisms as an excellent way of presenting his thoughts on the subject to medical students: “The ‘snapping-turtle’ strikes after its natural fashion when it first comes out of the egg. Children betray their tendencies in their way of dealing with the breasts that nourish them; nay, I can venture to affirm, that long before they are born they teach their mothers something of their turbulent or quiet tempers.”22 19 20 21 22

See, for example, Rosenburg, Bitter fruit, 1974. Holmes, Works, 1892, 9: 245 (italics added). Holmes, Autocrat, 1858; Holmes, Works, 1892, 1: 195 (italics added). Holmes, Works, 1892, 9: 245.

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Heredity is also a thread running through his “medicated novels.” One need only read The Guardian Angel, which he published in 1867, to appreciate this feature in them. Before even introducing Myrtle Hazzard, Holmes addressed the importance of heredity in his preface, explaining: The successive development of inherited bodily aspects and habitudes is well known to all who have lived long enough to see families grow up under their own eyes. The same thing happens, but less obviously to common observation, in the mental and moral nature. There is something frightful in the way in which not only characteristic qualities, but particular manifestations of them, are repeated from generation to generation.23

Myrtle Hazzard, we learn on the following pages, is more than just a composite of her mother and father – she also displays traits exhibited by her more distant ancestors. Some of the individuals in her bloodline were devilish and dangerous. Others were exemplary, such as the short-lived Ann Holyoake, a devout woman burned at the stake during the sixteenth century for maintaining her Protestant beliefs. Myrtle is a prisoner of her mixed inheritance. Throughout most of the novel, she is ripped apart and even thrown into hysterics (“the strange spasmodic movements, the chokings, the odd sounds, the wild talk, the laughing and crying”) by the good and bad ancestral forces battling for control of her mind. Family members, “who have long been dead,” Holmes explained, “may enjoy a kind of secondary and imperfect, yet self-conscious life, in these bodily tenements which we are in the habit of considering exclusively our own.”24 Holmes used The Guardian Angel to emphasize that “inherited liabilities” are natural conditions. And with this more earthly orientation, he maintained that physicians, not clerics, should treat those who are impaired or limited mentally. Though clerics could be well-meaning and kind, most lack a good understanding of how curious, odd, and even dangerous behaviors might be related to congenital or later brain defects and pathologies. The clergy simply do not understand enough to distinguish between what these individuals can and cannot consciously control – what could and could not be attributed to free will. Holmes was, in fact, recapitulating what Gall and Spurzheim had written when discussing insanity earlier in the century.25 Gall had addressed this subject in his two sets of books: his Anatomie et Physiologie du Système Nerveux en Général, et du Cerveau en Particulier of 1810–1819, and his 23 24 25

Holmes, Works, 1892, 7: viii. Holmes, Works, 1892, 7: 22. See Finger and Eling, Gall, 2019, 363–381.

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Sur les Fonctions du Cerveau of 1825.26 Spurzheim helped with some of his material and published a separate monograph (in French and English) on insanity after splitting from Gall.27 Both men recognized that some types of insanity run in families; both contended that these disorders must involve the brain; and both argued that, and for too long, afflicted individuals had been treated by the clergy and laymen with limited knowledge of the brain or medicine, and not by more knowledgeable physicians. As for Clemens, when he chose to bring up the subject of heredity, it was typically to contrast the advantages of his own country’s merit system with how the British were stagnating under a culture weighted down by unearned titles inherited from family members. Nonetheless, he did touch on heredity and character in some of Mark Twain’s fiction. One such piece was The American Claimant, where Colonel Sellers (the consummate salesman previously introduced in The Gilded Age) stated: “Every man is made up of heredities, long-descended atoms and particles of his ancestors.”28 And in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Twain wrote: All that is original in us, and therefore fairly credible or discreditable to us, can be covered up and hidden by the point of a cambric needle, all the rest being atoms contributed by, and inherited from, a procession of ancestors that stretches back a billion years to the Adams-clan or grasshopper or monkey from whom our race has been so tenaciously and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed.29

Criminality Gall, Spurzheim, and the phrenologists following in their footsteps also voiced strong opinions about criminality.30 Rather than judging people solely on their acts, they emphasized that judges and juries should also consider the status of a person’s brain.Their organs of mind, they argued, must be understood to determine what each individual could comprehend and might or might not be able to control. The founders of phrenology commented on how frequently they saw people with brain pathologies being harshly punished for acts clearly beyond their control, and they found this deplorable. 26 27 28 29 30

Gall, Anatomie et Physiologie, 1810–1819; Gall, Fonctions, 1825. Spurzheim, Insanity, 1817; Spurzheim, Folie, 1818a. Twain, American Claimant, 1892/1996, 28, 193. Twain, Connecticut Yankee, 1889, 143. See Finger and Eling, Gall, 2019, 382–390.

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People who steal or murder after carefully planning dastardly acts, and who understand the consequences if caught, should, they opined, be held accountable for their crimes. But men, women, and children who cannot comprehend right from wrong or understand laws because of brain defects, they argued, should not be judged similarly. This latter should be treated with greater understanding and more compassion. These now-accepted ideas were introduced into American courtrooms in 1834, when a nine-year-old boy was put on trial for maiming a younger boy.31 John Neal, the accused boy’s lawyer, argued that his client had suffered a head injury in infancy. Neal used physicians supportive of phrenology as expert witnesses to plead the boy’s case. The judge, however, was not swayed. Despite being a pre-adolescent, the accused was convicted and sentenced to nine years of hard labor. Other attempts to present phrenology as an acceptable branch of medicine in courts of law followed this tragic case. Isaac Ray’s 1838 Treatise on the Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity was heavily infused with phrenological thinking and terminology.32 It was one of the most influential legal books in Antebellum America, and it helped make judges and juries pay more attention to an accused person’s state of mind and brain. It also led to the adoption of several phrenological terms in the legal system, such as “propensity to murder” and “propensity to steal.”33 Holmes brought up how he felt about the “moral insanities” (now a way of framing criminal insanity) in Elsie Venner. Bernard Langdon, Elsie’s well-meaning teacher, asked his esteemed medical school professor what he might do to help his frightening, snake-like student. The professor’s answer, as presented in Chapter 13, is that phrenology “has proved that there are fixed relations between [brain] organization and mind and character” and “has brought out a great doctrine of moral insanity, which has done more to make men charitable and soften legal and theological barbarism than any one doctrine that I can think since the message of peace and good-will to men.”34 Elsewhere in the same novel, Holmes reminded his readers: “Young people who fall out of line through weakness of the active faculties are often 31 32 33

34

Thompson, Propensity to murder, 2019; Thompson, Organ of Murder, 2021. Ray, Medical Jurisprudence, 1838. Many phrenologists referred to the traits we share with lower animals as “propensities,” reserving the terms “faculty” and “faculties” for higher-level traits and groupings (e.g., the intellectual faculties). This distinction, however, was not followed by everyone and over time the term “faculties” was applied more broadly. Holmes, Works, 1892, 5: 226–227.

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confounded with those who step out of it through strength of the intellectual ones.”35 To him, this was unfortunate. Like Gall and Spurzheim decades earlier, he wanted individuals in the two groups to be treated differently. If by a visitation of God a person receives any injury which impairs the intellect or the moral perceptions, is it not monstrous to judge such a person by our common working standards of right and wrong? Certainly, everybody will answer, in cases where there is a palpable organic change brought about, as when a blow on the head produced insanity. Fools! How long will it be before we shall learn that for every wound which betrays itself to the sight by a scar, there are a thousand unseen mutilations that cripple, each of them, some one or more of our highest faculties?36

Holmes continued to express how he felt about the insane in “Crime and Automatism,” an article he published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1875.37 In it, he again praised the phrenologists for drawing attention to organic tendencies, while expressing dismay at how the legal system continued to remain inattentive to “mental and moral elements,” unless an accused person is severely insane. His thesis was that less severe forms of insanity and “inborn idiosyncrasies” could be just as uncontrollable. They could also make individuals act more primitively, in some instances like wild animals, with little regard for human laws. “Moral insanity,” Holmes stressed, “is the greatest calamity a man can inherit, and the subject of it deserves our deepest pity and greatest care.”38 The temporary insanity plea had become a contentious issue by this time. “I admit,” Gall had written earlier in the century, “that a criminal act, committed in a lucid interval, renders the person responsible; but, in regard to people who are subject to periodical fits of madness, we cannot be too cautious in deciding, whether or not, the act was committed in a state of perfect mental soundness.”39 But where should the line be drawn when dealing with people displaying some form of temporary insanity? Holmes felt that the temporary insanity plea deserved due consideration in the courtroom. He had been directly involved in a case where it had a good chance of being successfully employed. In 1849, John Webster, a fellow professor at Harvard’s Medical School, was accused of murdering George Parkman. The latter, a businessman, had argued with Webster 35 36 37 38 39

Holmes, Works, 1892, 5: 77. Holmes, Works, 1892, 5: 246. Holmes, Crime, 1875. Holmes, Crime and automatism, 1875, 475. Gall, Functions, 1835, 4: 92.

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over a loan he had made to him before disappearing. After an extensive search, Parkman’s partially burned body was found in Webster’s chemistry laboratory at Harvard. Holmes served as an expert witness in Webster’s trial. He helped identify Parkman’s remains and reconstructed how he must have been killed, also providing details on how his body seemed to be disassembled for disposal.40 Webster, who had been regarded as a kind man, subsequently admitted that he had killed Parkman, claiming to have done so during a rage in which he lost all control. He maintained there was never any premeditation; the killing was committed by a temporarily deranged man in a frenzy – a good and honorable citizen and a distinguished man who had temporarily lost his mind. The jury listened attentively but still found Webster guilty. The popular Harvard professor was hanged in 1850, his trial and execution making headline news. Clemens agreed with Holmes about the need for an insanity plea. He felt, for example, that it should have been upheld after anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinated President William McKinley in 1901. As he put it in a letter to his minister friend, Joe Twichell: Under the unsettling effects of powerful emotion the talkers are saying wild things, crazy things – they are out of themselves, and do not know it; they are temporarily insane, yet with one voice they declare the assassin sane – a man who has been entertaining fiery and reason-debauching maggots in his head for weeks and months. No one is sane, straight alone, year in and year out, and we all know it. [Moreover,] an immense upheaval of feeling can at any time topple us distinctly over the sanity-line for a little while; and then if our form happens to be of the murderous kind we must look out – and so must the spectator.41

In The Gilded Age, Mark Twain had Laura Hawkins invoke the temporary insanity plea when she was put on trial for shooting her unfaithful husband.42 She shot him twice at point-blank range after finding out that her dashing southern gentleman was, in fact, a lying scoundrel secretly married to another woman. Unlike how things turned out for Professor Webster, the jury declare the defendant innocent in Twain’s fictional account, concluding that Laura was temporarily deranged when she fired her pistol. Clemens was, however, less than a flaming liberal when it came to the insanity plea. He was outraged at how frequently it was invoked in cases 40 41 42

For more on the trial, see Collins, Blood and Ivy, 2018. Paine, Letters, 1917, 2: 713. Twain and Warner, Gilded Age, 1873.

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where there seemed to be obvious guilt. As noted by Twain historian Tom Quirk, “In 1870, he published three sketches (‘The New Crime,’ ‘Our Precious Lunatic,’ and ‘Unburlesqueable Things’) damning the insanity plea.”43 As for the death penalty, Clemens would write in one of his private notebooks that he was convinced that capital punishment made little sense. “Death/Gallows makes a hero of the villain, & he is envied by some spectators & by and by imitated.” Moreover, he opined, “Hanging is not based on knowledge of human nature.”44 Yet again, he and Holmes agreed. In a book review that would be published five years later, Holmes would write that the death penalty is “unjust as applied to moral idiots, immoral considered as revenge, useless as a means of intimidation, and dangerous to society by cheapening the value of life.”45

The Anterior Brain and Intellect Holmes was unwilling to accept that some small bump above the eye could be a marker for an underlying organ for Tune, or that other bumps could be correlated with construction, color perception, numerical skills, and the like. Clemens, as also shown, felt similarly. To both men, the idea that small bumps or depressions on crania could serve as markers for identifying Gall’s twenty-seven, Spurzheim’s thirty-three, George Combe’s thirty-five, or the Fowlers’s thirty-seven organs of mind seemed like wishful thinking. It was evident that the so-called authorities could not even agree on their lists. Yet both Holmes and Clemens seemed to accept the more general idea that the front of the brain is associated with our highest faculties. In contrast, our more animal-like instincts and propensities derive from the posterior parts of the cerebrum. This anterior–posterior distinction existed before Gall raised Lavater’s physiognomy to a higher level by bringing the idea that specific faculties of mind have distinct locations into the picture.46 Gall and Spurzheim drew their conclusions about the front and the back of the brain by examining the skulls of people gifted in the uniquely human faculties, such as Metaphysical Depth of Thought. They also observed where the cerebral cortex expands as one climbs the phylogenetic 43 44 45 46

Quirk, Human Nature, 2007, 75. Twain, Notebooks, 1975–1979, 3: 346–347. In this same entry from 1888, he wrote favorably about ridicule and public exposure as deterrents. Holmes, Crime, 1875, 475. Finger and Eling, Gall, 2019, 49–70.

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ladder. Further, they examined the brains of children and people in old age, correlating their emerging and declining cognitive abilities with anatomical changes. They were also on solid ground when they studied how people with circumscribed brain injuries were differentially affected by damage involving the front or the back of the brain. In everyday nineteenth-century life, what Gall and Spurzheim were contending about the intellectual front of the brain seemed beyond dispute. Physicians and the laity already had positive opinions about people with large foreheads. Spurzheim was a believer, a promoter, and a prime example of this belief. His exceptionally prominent forehead made him appear unusually intelligent to those observing him, a fact not lost on his biographers, who considered him a noble genius. As Samuel Clemens knew from when he was growing up in Hannibal, the same thing had been believed about the father of his country. George Washington also had a magnificent forehead that everyone seemed to associate with his exemplary character and abilities as a leader. In contrast, men and women with sloping foreheads or unusually large posterior cranial features were perceived in a diametrically opposite way. They were thought to be more primitive or animal-like. These were people to be feared, a “fact” that resonated with novelists and most people. Holmes showed his acceptance of this early tenet of physiognomy and now feature of phrenology using his Professor at the Boston boardinghouse to speak for him in 1859. This well-educated and opinionated man, never reluctant to give his opinion, remarked: I have rarely met a sensible man who would not allow that there was something in Phrenology. A broad, high forehead, it is commonly agreed, promises intellect; one that is “villainous low” and has a huge hind-head back of it, is wont to mark an animal nature. [But] I have rarely met an unbiased and sensible man who really believed in the bumps.47

Holmes continued to express the same thought in his “medicated novels.” In A Moral Antipathy, Holmes described Lurida Vincent as a “largeheaded” woman, “far better equipped with brains than muscles.”48 Elsie Venner, in his preceding novel, was Lurida’s polar opposite, having a “low,” “vacant” forehead.49 Elsie’s sloping forehead seemed to become even flatter and more snake-like when she was provoked and preparing to spring like a serpent at a victim. Her cousin witnessed this strange and 47 48 49

Holmes, Works, 1892, 2: 198. Holmes, Works, 1892, 7: 40. Holmes, Works, 1892, 5: 183, 76.

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frightening transformation. “She threw her head back, her eyes narrowing and her forehead drawing down, so that Dick thought her head actually flattened itself.”50 Mark Twain presented comparable thoughts about the front and back of the brain and head in The Gilded Age. In one section, he described how people from a small town rushed into a church to hear the sweettaking Senator Dilworthy, “a sort of god” in their eyes. Upon the revered man’s arrival, fingers pointed and there was considerable noise, with some of these people shouting: “There! that’s him, with the grand, noble forehead.”51 Reflecting the other side of the dichotomy, he described Tom Ballou in Life on the Mississippi as a mean man, one who “had more selfish organs than any seven men in the world,” such that they “weighed down the back of his head so that it made his nose tilt up in the air.”52

New Words and Phrases Holmes and Twain found the terms and concepts phrenologists were using particularly well suited for the verbal portraits they were painting. Here, too, they were not alone. Walt Whitman, whose interest in phrenology was briefly mentioned in Chapter 10, thought that Americans needed “an immense number of new words” and that phrenology, with its Amativeness, Adhesiveness, and other terms, provided an excellent source for expanding the everyday vocabulary of the citizens of his nation.53 Despite more people recognizing that the science behind phrenology was faulty and turning their backs on the head readers during the decade of the Civil War, many phrenological terms and phrases had become a part of the vernacular by this time. The accepted or recycled terms included names for the propensities and faculties and newfound uses for the four basic personality types. Its vocabulary was communicative whether one accepted or rejected phrenology, or was agnostic about it. Both Holmes and Twain knew how it could make even dull characters spring to life, and they enjoyed using phrenological terms, sometimes playing with them and presenting them in creative ways. Holmes retained the phrenological vocabulary widely accepted at the time when his Professor gave his lecture in the Atlantic Monthly in 1859. His alter ego talked about Acquisitiveness, Conscientiousness, Benevolence, 50 51 52 53

Holmes, Works, 1892, 5: 160. Twain and Warner, Gilded Age, 1873/2017, 214. Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883/2012, 171. See Hungerford, Whitman, 1931, esp. 380–381.

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Ideality, and the like, much as Spurzheim, Combe, and others had done, and as those in the Fowler camp were now doing. He also stayed within conventional phrenological boundaries in his “medicated novels,” as exemplified by his description of Gifted Hopkins, the aspiring poet in A Guardian Angel. He portrayed him as a starry-eyed young man with “a sanguine temperament.”54 Similarly, he wrote that Myrtle’s guardian angel, Byles Gridley, was graced with a huge “bump of benevolence and as large a one of cautiousness.”55 Holmes did, however, take linguistic liberties, most notably in The Professor at the Breakfast-Table, where he poked fun at how phrenologists had a penchant for coming up with long and sometimes baffling words, which the head readers used freely to impress their clients. “Phyloprogenitiveness,” meaning love of offspring, struck him as a prime example of one of their words with more than just three, four, or five syllables. After Bumpus and Crane read the bewildered Professor’s head in this serial, they graded him on a list of faculties. But unlike the faculties on any of the standard phrenological lists, Bumpus and Crane’s were made up. They included “Cupidiphilous,” “Hymeniphilous,” “Paediphilous,” “Deipniphilous,” “Gelasmiphilous,” “Musikiphilous,” “Uraniphilous,” and “Glossiphilous”! After coming up with these tongue-twisting neologisms, Holmes’s professor commented: “Meant for a linguist …. Will invest in grammars and dictionaries immediately.”56 It is easy to visualize Holmes smiling while composing these lines, which would have had a similar effect on readers with a sense of humor. Clemens was decidedly more conservative than Holmes had been in his 1859 piece. In Eddypus, he gave his disguised Bishop the highest grade for Combativeness, Destructiveness, Cautiousness, and Calculation, and the lowest for Firmness. These were more conventional terms. He was also more conventional in his 1906 autobiographical dictation. He did, however, deviate from the Fowlers and their acolytes in his un­published description of “outlaw” Reid, his short-lived enemy with an overabundance of selfish propensities. He did not come forth with a multisyllable neologism, but was planning to introduce a new faculty, namely “Personal Honor,” at the time. This was a trait he felt the newspaper editor he was out to destroy was lacking. The faculty coming closest to Personal Honor on the lists provided by the Fowlers is Self-Esteem, a Selfish Sentiment associated with pride, haughtiness, and self-respect.57 54 55 56 57

Holmes, Works, 1892, 6: 213. Holmes, Works, 1892, 6: 425. Holmes, 1892, Works, 2: 197. For example, O. Fowler, Practical Phrenology, 1850, 45.

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Nevertheless, Clemens was highly creative when using non-phrenological words to convey what the phrenologists discovered about his head. In Eddypus, he had the drunken phrenologist describe the obscure client’s cranium as “a prize pumpkin” and further tell him he had the physical features of a “bloody-minded fiend” and a man “born to be a thief.”58 Moreover, in his 1906 autobiographical dictation, he described in a classic Mark Twain way how his cavity for humor was not just a bump but rather a “Mount Everest … thirty-one thousand feet high.”59 With colorful descriptions such as these, he did not have a need for neologisms like the ones Holmes had dreamed up.

Soulless Science and Medicine In addition to accepting the features of phrenology mentioned earlier, Holmes, as a man of medicine intent on giving his chosen profession a stronger scientific foundation, applauded the way in which Gall and Spurzheim had drawn more attention to the brain, the most poorly understood large organ in the body. One of his teachers, John Collins Warren, like many other anatomists in America around the world, recognized that Gall and Spurzheim were skilled dissectors entering unknown territory when they traced fiber tracts from the periphery through successively higher parts of the brain and when using scraping tools to separate the brain’s gray matter from its fibrous white matter.60 Studies of this sort, Warren recognized, had the potential to shed considerably more light on the brain’s functional organization. Holmes fully agreed. Moreover, his background allowed him to appreciate how Gall was breaking away from earlier naturalists to bring humans back down to earth from some lofty position well above other animals yet below angels. Gall saw no place for religious and metaphysical beliefs about the human soul, angels, and God in his new science of man. Holmes felt this shift was long overdue, and he praised the pioneering phrenologist for overcoming barriers that had long impeded advancements in the life sciences and medicine. He especially appreciated how Gall approached humans like other animals that were following natural laws. Gall was, in fact, instrumental in 58 59 60

Twain, Eddypus, 1972, 352–353. Twain, Autobiography, 2010–2015, 2: 336. For Gall’s reputation as one of the outstanding anatomists of this era and how the French elite (most notably Georges Cuvier) tried to downplay his anatomical accomplishments, see Finger and Eling, Gall, 2019, esp. 290–299.

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showing how brains become more complex as one works up from lowly animals to humans. He was also a pioneer in revealing how brain changes could correlate with behavioral differences as development progresses from infancy to maturity and then into old age. And he was perceptive in recognizing how acute and chronic brain damage could be associated with regressions to more animal-like propensities. Holmes saw all of these initiatives leading to a more modern kind if medicine, one not laced with metaphysics, and he applauded Gall and Spurzheim for their empiricism and observations. Clemens, coming later, saw less of a need to campaign for purging the biological sciences of metaphysics. Still, he denigrated the belief in metaphysical forces in other contexts, and he endorsed the need for observations and experiments in science and medicine to overcome ignorance. In the latter context, Clemens tried and tested various diets and other alternatives to traditional medicines on himself, though this was hardly objective science. He even gave faith healing a chance, observing that the mind therapies seemed to help some people, including his wife and daughters, overcome various ailments.61 Yet when it came to an understanding of why mind therapies occasionally worked, he made no recourse to divine healers, God’s helping hand, the supernatural, or invisible spiritlike forces. Instead, he recognized that these therapies have much to do with believers and their belief systems. Of course, allowing the body more time to heal could also be important. Clemens maintained this healthy skepticism about medical theories involving agents or forces that could not be seen or measured throughout his life. He might even have read some of what Holmes had written on the subject. Further, he probably knew what his famous countryman from the previous century had written in Poor Richard’s Almanack. With his gift for memorable sayings, Benjamin Franklin might have expressed it best in 1734, when he wrote: “As Charms are Nonsense, Nonsense is a Charm.”62 Clemens understood the human mind was far from perfect. This realization, he knew, could help explain why there have been and will always be worthless health fads, some involving forces that could not be perceived or measured. As for Holmes, he had a term to describe some of these faddish and seemingly miraculous cures. Back in 1840, he regarded them as “delusions.” 61 62

Ober, Twain and Medicine, 2003. Finger, Franklin, 2006, 107.

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Anthropology and Psychology Holmes believed the science of anthropology would be recognized as phrenology’s greatest gift to humankind. He told this to his Harvard audience in his 1861 introductory lecture, “Border Lines of Knowledge in Some Provinces of Medical Science.”63 He began this discourse by informing his listeners that there was much that we still did not know, despite rapid advancements in the sciences. The superior mind, he continued, was the one that could differentiate between what we do and do not know. “That which is true of every subject,” he then maintained, “is especially true of the branch of knowledge which deals with living beings.”64 He introduced phrenology into this lecture after first thinking he would leave it out in the cold (“sub Jove”), since it was just another of the pseudosciences being “so adjusted to soak up all evidence that helps it, and shed all that harms it.”65 But then he had a change of heart. “Strike out the false pretensions of phrenology,” he told his audience, “call it anthropology; let it study man the individual in distinction from man the abstraction, the metaphysical or theological lay figure; and it becomes ‘the proper study of mankind,’ one of the noblest and most interesting of pursuits.”66 He repeated this message in 1875, praising phrenologists for making “those observations and discoveries which, divorced from their fancies and theories, lent themselves to the building up of a true science,” while asking his readers to try to “remember that anthropology is still in its infancy.”67 Holmes was thinking broadly when bringing up “anthropology.” He was not restricting the term to the study of ancient cultures, the advent of newer societies, or artifacts brought to the surface after digging holes in the right places. He also meant considerably more than examining the physical features of modern humans and their ancestors. To Holmes, anthropology really was the study of mankind in all its dimensions – a discipline that would even include the vagaries of the human mind. As such, it encompassed both what would be called the behaviorist approach to psychology, which deals with overt behaviors, and its more mysterious partner, the mind, with its conscious and unconscious dimensions. And this being the case, his anthropology called for more scientific research 63 64 65 66 67

Holmes, Works, 1892, 9: 209–272. Holmes, Works, 1892, 9: 211. Holmes, Works, 1892, 9: 245. Holmes, Works, 1892, 9: 245–246. Holmes, Crime, 1875, 469, 480.

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into disordered minds, greater knowledge of our multiple “selves,” and even investigations into the mysteries of sleep and dreaming.68 He believed that no one before Gall had paid adequate scientific attention to individual, group, national, and global differences in physical features and character. Since ancient times, this subject had intrigued physicians and philosophers, but their observations were often limited and prejudiced. They also reasoned by analogy, now considered a weak and unconvincing type of logic. Georges Cuvier, Jean-Baptiste Lamark, and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in France, and Friedrich Blumenbach in Germany, are often regarded as the founders of modern anthropology. But their anthropologies, while notable, did not have the broad coverage or modern features Holmes was visualizing as important additional coverage. Gall, another acknowledged founder of anthropology, might have been misguided when it came to his bumpology. Still, in Holmes’s eyes, he was the thinker and researcher deserving the lion’s share of the credit for drawing sustained attention to how physical features, temperaments, propensities, and beliefs could vary across the family of man. Moreover, Gall did this without recourse to metaphysics – another giant step in the right direction. Holmes pressed for his new science of man in the last of his BreakfastTable serials, The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. He had his “Master” tell those assembled that “we know a good deal about the earth on which we live,” but very little about “the human element.” He further lamented that “the study of man has been so completely subject to our preconceived opinions, that we have to begin all over again.”69 As Holmes saw it, the need was not just to study the human condition in health and disease, physically and mentally, and near and far from home. It was to do this in ways that will allow other researchers with fortitude and the right tools to test and confirm the facts for themselves. Always a realist, Holmes recognized that “The scientific study of man is the most difficult of all branches of knowledge.”70 This is why he stressed that it would require, “in the first place, an entire new terminology to get rid of that enormous load of prejudices with which every term applied to the malformations, the functional disturbances, and the organic diseases of the moral nature is at present burdened.”71 As previously noted, he was particularly critical of the “cherished opinions” of righteous, opinionated 68 69 70 71

Gibian, Culture of Conversation, 2001, esp. 184–212; Knoper, Realism, 2002; Weinstein, Depth psychology, 2009. Holmes, Works, 1892, 3: 183. Holmes, Works, 1892, 3: 307. Holmes, Works, 1892, 3: 307.

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clergymen, who throughout history managed to find ways to hamper scientific progress. Holmes lived to witness some of what he was calling for in his 1861 lecture. Scientific psychology began to come into its own during the final decades of the nineteenth century. Wilhelm Wundt is usually credited with opening the first psychology laboratory in 1879. He did this in Leipzig, Germany, where he studied the senses, reaction times, and the like with students, who subsequently did the same at other universities across Europe and North America. Others, most notably Wundt’s mentor, Hermann Helmholtz, had already started to till fertile soil with revealing experiments in perception and other fields, and would continue to do much more to understand the human condition.72 Closer to home, in fact very close, Holmes’s student and neighbor, William James, offered the first psychology course in America at Harvard in 1875.73 Before Holmes died, James had become world-famous for his writings about dreaming, the unconscious, multiple personalities, perception, and other topics that Holmes had been reflecting on, alluding to, lecturing on, and calling for in his published works. What James had so boldly taken as subject matter for further study were all features of Holmes’s broadly defined “anthropology.”74 Clemens shared Holmes’s interest in the human condition, even though he was not formally trained in medicine or the sciences. Mark Twain’s four widely read travel books, Life on the Mississippi, The Innocents Abroad, A Tramp Abroad, and Following the Equator, are filled with hundreds of observations and thoughts about his fellow human beings and human nature. Some concerned the extremes of society, such as cold-blooded murderers terrorizing the Wild West, the cheats and liars he met while piloting boats up and down the lengthy Mississippi River, and distraught women in India determined to kill themselves by fire (suttee), so they could join their deceased husbands. He also commented on the traits of people widely admired for their achievements, on nationalities, and on racial and regional customs. He even billed his first lectures, given shortly after returning from what is now Hawaii, as “Our Fellow Savages of the 72 73

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Rieber and Robinson, Wundt, 2001. James left an account of how Holmes had once asked him during an examination to provide information about a small nerve in the head and how he gave a correct answer, leading Holmes to remark, “If you know that, you know everything!,” then saying, “Now tell me about your dear old father” (Tilton, Holmes, 1947, 322). James’s most important book was his two-volume textbook Principles of Psychology, published in 1890. A briefer edition, which some students called “Jimmy,” appeared two years later (James, Principles, 1890; James, Psychology, 1892).

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Sandwich Islands.” As his eye-catching title implied, he was fascinated by “universals” – some he regared as admirable but others he loathed. It was with universals in mind that Clemens, appearing on stage as Mark Twain, gave a speech in 1885 that he called “The Character of Man.”75 He was becoming more disgusted with his own species over time, writing, “All creatures kill – there seems to be no exception; but of the whole list, man is the only one that kills for fun; he is the only one that kills in malice; the only one that kills for revenge.”76 He also singled out two myths in his provocative talk. The first is that we are fiercely independent of each other. Here he argued that, no, people are just like sheep that “wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove.”77 His second “lie” concerned human tolerance. He opined that such a thing did not exist. Instead, he maintained that the “mainspring of man’s nature” is selfishness. He would reiterate these two disturbing thoughts in his 1896 essay “Man’s Place in the Animal World.”78 Yet, in a letter written three years later, he seemed to change his mind about the human species. Whether he really did, however, is questionable. This is because he was writing to his beloved Livy, who was not a person for seeing things through jaundiced eyes like his. He told his wife that he was “privileged to infer that there is far more goodness than ungoodness in man,” and goodness has been “the rule” since the advent of humans, even among the savages. Yet, after pandering to her with these remarks, he nonetheless snapped out of his dream state, writing “I detest MAN”!79 By his last decade, Clemens had read a wide assortment of books and articles about the nature of man, always looking for universals and yet awed by individual differences. One was Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man, which came out in 1871. Another was Herbert Spencer’s work on evolutionary theory. His library also included John George Wood’s The Uncivilized Races; or Natural History of Man, and Louis Figuier’s widely disseminated Primitive Man, a work about the origins of human life.80 Further, he bought and consulted Mark Baldwin’s The Story of the Mind. And, going full circle back to Holmes via his most famous student, he had William James’s landmark book, Principles of Psychology.81 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

Twain, Autobiography, 2010–2015, 1: 312–315. Tom Quirk (Human Nature, 2007) has written on Twain’s notable shift from individual personalities to “average” people. Twain, Autobiography, 2010–2015, 1: 312. Twain, Autobiography, 2010–2015, 1: 312. In Twain, Collected Tales, 1992, 207–216. Letter written July 17, 1889; see Twain, Love Letters, 1949, 253. Wood, Uncivilized Races, 1870; Figuier, Primitive Man, 1870. Gribben, Literary Resources, 2019, 44.

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Never being affiliated with a university or even having attended college, Clemens was content to let Holmes make the case for teaching a broad sort of anthropology at colleges and universities. But he must have been pleased in his old age to see students now showing more interest in cultural anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, health, and related subjects that had long interested him. Phrenology had helped to change some things for the better, and even ordinary people were now paying more attention to commonalities and differences across the family of man. Without question, phrenology was a pseudoscience. But, as Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Samuel Clemens recognized, it was also instrumental in revealing some truths. Additionally, it was influential in launching new research into the human condition both in states of health and when hampered by disorders affecting the now less mysterious brain.

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Both Holmes and Clemens saw a need to educate the laity about the head readers, whom they regarded as frauds. The same can be said about casting phrenology as less than a true science – being a doctrine based heavily on faulty craniology and buttressed by presenting only supportive cases. Yet, at the same time, both men recognized that phrenology also had some notable positive features. After all, it was leading to more research on the brain, drawing more attention to individual differences, and tempering judgments about the accountability of those considered insane or criminal. Reaching shopkeepers, farmers, women raising families, and others with their warnings about the head readers was important. This is because ordinary citizens, more than physicians and academics, believed in the fad and paid money, sometimes in short supply, to have their heads read. Some were also opening their purses to purchase the books, journals, and other products the Fowlers and their minions were selling, not knowing that much of what they were promoting as science was little more than nonsense. Holmes and Clemens were exceptionally skilled writers and communicators. Holmes’s poem Old Ironsides, which saved the famous American warship from its destruction, had in its own way made waves across the nation before he even started medical school. He had also published other famous poems and pieces of prose before 1859, when he used the Atlantic Monthly to lay out his case against the head readers, explaining their tricks to the laity and detailing why phrenology is a pseudoscience. As for Clemens, he had achieved his first major success writing as Mark Twain with his Jumping Frog story in 1865. He then published his bestselling travel book, The Innocents Abroad. He followed it with Roughing It, covering his travels through the American West and Sandwich Islands, before lampooning the head readers for the first time in 1873, using The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as his vehicle. He was more explicit about the 306

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their tricks and deceits in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which came out eleven years later. Yet he waited until the new century opened before finally revealing why he had come down so hard on the head readers. He described his ploy in a short but serious letter subsequently published in a London periodical, mentioning how the two head readings he had under different identities during the early 1870s produced contrasting profiles. He also drew upon what he had learned from his first and return visit to Lorenzo Fowler in The Secret History of Eddypus, the World Empire, which was published posthumously, and in a very funny autobiographical dictation from 1906, in which he took obvious artistic liberties, as was his custom. Both Holmes and Clemens used wit and humor to present how they felt about the head readers and phrenology in their works, and both targeted broad public audiences. They used humor because they knew they could be funny, and their audiences expected and even demanded this of them. But above and beyond these reasons, both men knew that humor could draw more attention to what they were stating – that it would make their profound underlying messages even more memorable. Additionally, it would generate more thinking and discussions about the head readers, the fad, and human gullibility. In brief, both writers entered the phrenology wars knowing how to use humor as a tool – a weapon that could stir up the troops and injure the opposition. Could these writers have found a better way of educating a public in need of more education? Although both men used humor, Holmes had the edge over Clemens when critiquing phrenology and exposing the head readers. This was because he was a physician and a scientist, a man with impressive achievements in these respected and rapidly changing fields. Among other things, he had become famous for helping to eradicate dreaded puerperal fever, had played a key role in promoting the stethoscope and microscope in America, had effectively exposed worthless therapeutics, and had done numerous other things as he crusaded to modernize American medicine by basing it on science, especially experiments and numbers. In these ways, and with his exceptional writing and speaking skills, he was the perfect spokesman for providing informed, easily understood insights about the flaws inherent in phrenology and the devious head readers at midcentury. Though from rural Missouri and not the Boston area, which Holmes regarded as the center of the intellectual universe, Samuel Clemens had a few advantages of his own. The greatest was his creation “Mark Twain,” a down-to-earth character with a unique way of seeing the world around him. Twain’s approach was based largely on commonsense wisdom, and

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he expressed himself on stage and in his writings with a folksy drawl and unexpected punchlines that people adored. His alter ego was an overnight sensation and a massive draw, and Clemens knew how to capitalize on his character. Mark Twain’s creator benefited from Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, whom he emulated in notable ways when portraying and exposing the head readers. Holmes helped open Clemens’s eyes to several tricks the head readers were using. He also served him by revealing why phrenology was a faulty, bogus science. In addition, Holmes showed him some crea­ tive ways to use his humor to denigrate the head readers and debunk their ideas. When Twain began deprecating the phrenologists in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, he had a clear path to follow, making what he wanted to say and how best to say it easier when enlightening the gullible public in this novel, its sequel, and his later writings and dictations. One question that might be asked at this juncture is whether some of the head readers might have been deceiving themselves. One historian of ­psychology, Michael Sokal, in a thoughtful essay on phrenology in America, wrote that successful phrenologists “actively used and combined the ­abilities of Sherlock Holmes, Phineas T. Barnum, and Clever Hans.”1 Like the fictional detective (named after the astute Boston physician), practicing phrenologists honed their powers of observation, carefully looking over the physiques of their clients and how they dressed, while attending to body language and how they spoke and answered questions. Like Barnum, they fed their clients want they wanted to hear, stressing the positives, circumventing the negatives, and tailoring their pronouncements to the types of people they were seeing. As for Clever Hans, the German horse that seemed able to do mathematics and solve problems, it was shown that this animal was attentive to the reactions, sometimes unconscious, of his handlers and others watching him, stopping his leg tapping when they signaled in some way that he had reached the correct answer (for example, to 3+2). Sokol maintained that highly successful phrenologists were also tuned in to small, subtle reactions to questions and the statements clients might make. Sokol’s controversial conclusion is that many phrenologists, including the founders and other leading writers on the subject, believed in the doctrine and what they were doing when striving to read heads. That is, they did not consider themselves frauds or charlatans. But at the same 1

Sokol, Practical phrenology, 2001, 37.

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time, they frequently did not realize how much they were relying on other cues. Clemens, as shown, was less kind to the phrenological fraternity. He would have been happy to see at least some head readers driven out of town, like the fraudulent phrenologist and his bogus faith healer friend, who made themselves at home on Huckleberry Finn’s raft. It is important to realize that Mark Twain was preaching to a different, more receptive congregation than the one Holmes faced when he began to assail the head readers. In an essay composed half a century ago on Mark Twain and temperament, Alan Gribben quoted James Cox, the author of a book titled Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor.2 Cox had previously written that “a major part of Mark Twain’s career is a long display of innocent poses against parties and ideas relatively safe to ridicule.”3 Consequently, “he was not with the minority but with the majority; he had not chosen the unpopular but invariably popular cause.” Gribben agreed with Cox with regard to the stance Clemens eventually adopted against phrenology, writing: “By the last quarter of the 19th century phrenology had lost much of its credibility even for unlearned laymen, and an almost unanimous hostility to its ideas prevailed in scientific circles.”4 Unlike Oliver Wendell Holmes, Samuel Clemens really was relatively late to the dance when he first began to ridicule the phrenologists in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, published in 1873. Head readings were not nearly as popular as they had been before the Civil War, though they still had some appeal to the laity. There were several reasons for this perceptible decline, which created a safer environment for Twain than the one Holmes had faced when he began his public campaign against the pseudoscience and the head readers. Although only fourteen years had passed between Holmes’s piece in the Atlantic Monthly and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, many things had changed in science and medicine, and more generally, culturally. One such factor was the slow but steady loss of phrenology’s novelty – the thrill of having one’s head read and then telling others about the experience. The head reading fad was also hurt by a steady stream of editorial cartoons depicting phrenologists as greedy frauds and their clients as unsuspecting fools. The same, of course, could be said for the biting written critiques appearing in daily newspapers and magazines. The onslaught 2 3 4

Gribben, Twain, 1972, 59. Cox, Humor, 1966, 196. Gribben, Twain, 1972, 59.

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of negative cartoons and newspaper editorials had started during Gall’s lifetime, but it gained even more traction over time.5 The onset of the disruption of the Civil War also changed outlooks. With its loss of lives and properties, and its impact on personal and regional economies, this conflict forced people to focus more on survival and everyday demands. Money that might have been used for head readings was now being utilized for more pressing matters or saved, especially in families where men had been called away to fight. As can be imagined, new failures to confirm basic features of the doctrine also circulated. Some were from physicians and academics. But, as put by the historian Carla Bittel, “Many consumers of ‘practical phrenology’, in particular, subjected themselves to examinations to test the phrenologist and his practices against their own knowledge of themselves.”6 Although Bittel’s article was on phrenology in Antebellum America, a time when people seemed especially inclined to judge things for themselves rather than just accept what the authorities were saying,7 lay skeptics continued to test the doctrine during the Civil War years and after the fighting ended. Much of this personal experimenting, which had been encouraged by Gall, Spurzheim, and others, was done by amateurs either on themselves or on others they knew well. But, as also has been shown, some people tested professional phrenologists. As might be expected, many people found their own head readings and what they were hearing from professionals upon showing up disguised to be less than accurate. This also impacted the trajectory of the head reading fad, but as with each of the other variables, not in easily quantifiable ways. There was also an important new scientific addition to where things stood when Clemens entered the fray, one that had a significant impact on what people were thinking about skull-based theories of mind and brain as the last quartile of the century began. It came from two sources: one was examining patients with brain damage, and the other involving brain stimulation and lesion experiments using laboratory animals.8 In these domains, Clemens was very much on the safe side of a great divide, but 5 6 7 8

For some cartoons, see Bynum, Old Maid’s Skull, 1968; Russell, Cruikshank, 2020. Bittel, Testing the truth of phrenology, 2019, 352. This article is based largely on personal “letters, diaries, memoirs and marginalia” from ordinary Americans during the Antebellum Era. For more on this culture of self-testing and dueling with authority, see Pandora, Popular science, 2009. For three reviews, see Young, Gall to Ferrier, 1968; Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation, 1970; Finger, Origins, 1994; Finger, Minds, 2000.

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Figure E.1  Paul Broca (1824–1880), who associated the inability to speak fluently with damage to the third frontal convolution of the left hemisphere.

not so Holmes. Holmes appeared on the scene too early to benefit from a worthy alternative to a doctrine that was based heavily on craniology, suffered from methodological sloppiness, and was promoted at least in part by less-than-honorable salespeople. Not so Clemens. In 1861, Parisian surgeon and anthropologist Paul Broca (Figure E.1), following in Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud’s footsteps,9 examined a hospitalized patient who had lost his ability to speak fluently. When Monsieur Leborgne, better known as “Tan,” died, Broca examined his brain and attributed his loss of speech to damage in one part of his “anterior lobe,” the third frontal convolution.10 Broca soon had several more clinical cases with word-finding problems, confirming his initial correlation. His location of the damaged speech area was somewhat in accord with phrenological theory, which put the organ for word memory in the front of the brain. 9

10

As noted in Chapter 9, Bouillaud had been one of Holmes’s teachers in Paris. Since the mid-1820s, he had maintained that speech is an anterior lobe function. He presented a huge number of cases to support his contention, but his reports lacked the details of Broca’s and, given the earlier zeitgeist, they had less impact than Broca’s. Broca, Langage articulé, 1861.

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But what became known as “Broca’s area” was not behind the eyes, where Gall had placed it, and its discovery was not based on crania. Broca surprised everyone even more just four years after seeing his first case. In 1865, he reported that the left hemisphere is more important than the right for fluent speech. This was a completely unexpected phenomenon, and even he was perplexed. Hemispheric equality, with one side being a duplicate of the other, had been accepted by Gall and Spurzheim, and by Xavier Bichat, the acknowledged authority on pathological anatomy in Paris. Suddenly, this equality was no longer a hard and fast rule. What would later be called “cerebral dominance” for speech, and soon after for some right-hemispheric functions, was now the new reality.11 Researchers working with laboratory animals soon added more facts to what Broca had discovered about the brain’s functional organization. In 1870, Gustav Fritsch and Edvard Hitzig, using electrical stimulation and by making brain lesions, showed that the dog’s cerebral cortex has a distinct motor area with different parts for the face and limbs of the opposite side of the body.12 Stimulated by the work coming out of Berlin, David Ferrier (Figure E.2), a Scot working in England, discovered separate cortical areas for seeing and hearing in rabbits, dogs, and other animals. Ferrier also conducted experiments associating the anterior cerebral cortex with attention, inhibition, and other cognitive functions more highly developed in primates than in other animals, such as dogs and rabbits.13 Ferrier felt so confident about his findings that he even superimposed the cortical maps he had made using animal subjects onto a sketch of the human brain (Figure E.3). Together, the replicable clinical and laboratory findings provided a far better way to understand specialized brain areas and functions, as well as the effects of brain damage. They effectively rendered the fanciful maps of the skull made by phrenologists obsolete. Newspapers and magazines covered the more notable breakthroughs. The press also began showing how these landmark discoveries were now directing surgeons to tumors, abscesses, and objects embedded in the 11

12 13

Broca, Localisation, 1865. Marc Dax recognized cerebral dominance in 1836, but his work remained unknown until 1865, the year Broca published his widely discussed report (M. Dax, Moitié gauche, 1865;G. Dax, Même sujet, 1865). For perspectives and commentary, see Benton, Hemispheric dominance, 1984;Cubelli and Montagna, Dax and Broca 1994; Finger, Origins, 1994; Finger, Minds, 2000, 137–154; Finger and Roe, Gustave Dax, 1996; Leblanc, Asymmetry, 2017. Fritsch and Hitzig, Elektrische Erregbarkeit, 1870. Ferrier, Experimental research, 1873; Ferrier, Localisation, 1874a; Ferrier, Pathological illustrations, 1874b; Ferrier, Monkeys, 1875. Also see Ferrier, Functions of the Brain, 1876.

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Figure E.2  David Ferrier (1843–1928), whose stimulation and ablation experiments confirmed cortical localization in a wide variety of animals, and whose cortical maps helped transform neurosurgery.

brain.14 This was “real science.” It had utility and saved lives. The venerable phrenological maps were now considered distractions, relics of a bygone era that professionals and the laity would be wise to forget. Hence, we can say that Clemens was preaching mainly to the converted, to some extent with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but especially when Adventures of Huckleberry Finn came out in 1884. Holmes, with his erudite Professor lecturing his fellow boarders in Boston, had been from an earlier era – a time in which there was no worthy alternative to counter phrenology with its heavy reliance on crania. Although on different sides of a great scientific and medical divide, Holmes and Twain should be regarded as medical reformers. As shown in Chapter 10, Holmes had branded himself a medical reformer before writing The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. In fact, he had been clear about what he wanted to do on American soil back in 1835, before he returned from his studies in France. He began attacking worthless fads and “cures” 14

Macewen, Tumour, 1879;Macewen, Intra-cranial lesions, 1881; Macmillan, Macewen, 2004a; Macmillan, Macewen, 2004b. Also see Bennett and Godlee, Excision of a tumour, 1884.

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Figure E.3  David Ferrier’s functional cortical areas mapped onto an image of the human brain (from Ferrier, 1876).

almost immediately after returning to Boston and obtaining his medical degree from Harvard. He then began lecturing and publishing articles to educate the medical profession, and for the gullible laity to read and hopefully contemplate. Although he might not be thought of in this way, partly because he had not been trained in medicine and was not a distinguished faculty member at a university, Samuel Clemens was also an educator and reformer. William Dean Howells understood this sometimes overlooked side of his lifelong friend, writing in 1880: His humor springs from an intensity of common sense …. It may be claiming more than a humorist could wish to assert that he is always in earnest; but this strikes us as the paradoxical charm of Mr. Clemens’s best humor. Its wildest extravagance is the break and fling from a deep feeling, a wrath

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which disquiets him more than other men, a personal hatred for some humbug or pretension that embitters him beyond anything beyond laughter. … At the bottom of his heart he has often the grimness of a reformer …15

Howells was not alone in making this point. In 1901, the anonymous author of the Phrenological Journal and Science of Health described Clemens as a man who “does not write to make you laugh, but to make you think.” And, on the same page: “He has a purpose and a philosophy in writing, and humor is his method of conveying that purpose to the public.”16 This periodical’s readership was further informed that Clemens’s head features were consistent with his character, and that “his moral brain” dominated “over the remainder of his faculties.”17 Similarly, in its 1910 obituary for “Mark Twain,” its readers were told how he “only wrote in a humorous way to make people sit up and take notice of what he wanted to tell them.”18 In 1888, Samuel Clemens had, in fact, called his chosen profession both “useful” and “a worthy calling.” He continued by stating that “with all its lightness, and frivolity it has one serious purpose, one aim, one specialty, and it is consistent to it – the deriding of shams, the exposure of pretentious falsities, the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence.” Elsewhere in this same letter, which he had addressed to the President of Yale University, he explained that the humorist is “the natural enemy of royalties, nobilities, privileges, and all kindred swindles.”19 The anonymous author (most likely Jessie Fowler) of Mark Twain’s obituary in a 1910 issue of the Phrenological Journal and Science of Health concluded that there would never be another Mark Twain, a talent uniquely able to convey serious thoughts so humorously. But looking back rather than forward, precisely the same words could have been written about Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes when the diminutive Boston physician passed away in 1894. Holmes had the skepticism and mind of a scientist, a physician’s dedication, the pen and heart of a poet, and a jocularity that set him apart from earlier writers expressing themselves on fads in science and medicine. The lives of these two celebrated men show how pervasive phrenology was in nineteenth-century America and how it still had a pulse going into 15 16 17 18 19

Powers, Twain, 2006, 435. Anon., Greatest Humorist, 1901, 5–6. Anon., Greatest Humorist, 1901, 5. Anon, Late Mark Twain, 1910, 190. Letter to Timothy Dwight, reprinted in the Hartford Courant, June 22, 1888, 5 (italics added).

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the new century, even though it now required life support. The present voyage back in time also reveals how phrenology affected the lives of two of the most celebrated authors of the nineteenth century from their formative years into old age. That Holmes and Clemens, being unusually observant, brilliant, and creative, would form and maintain strong opinions about the men reading heads and phrenology itself is hardly surprising. The real surprise is how little has been written about their notable forays into phrenology. The same can be said about how both men skillfully employed humor as a weapon in the phrenology wars and, as shown in the last chapter, how Twain was indebted to Holmes. Examining the phrenology in Clemens’s and Holmes’s writings provides biographers with intriguing new material about these two influential men. It is also a portal into nineteenth-century culture and one of the most far-reaching and significant medical fads of the last few hundred years. Whether approached by established scholars or students of literature, individuals interested in American history, or historians of science and medicine, there is much to be gleaned and processed here – and the promise of more to be gained with new research endeavors. Both Oliver Wendell Holmes and Samuel Clemens believed craniological phrenology was fraudulent. But they were also perceptive enough to realize that phrenology had tenets capable of withstanding the test of time, some capable of advancing science and medicine, and others helping us to change how we see each other. In not painting with too broad a brush, and by thinking more about individual features of the doctrine rather than rejecting it in its entirety, they were stepping carefully into the future. Minus its craniology, phrenology would provide basic building blocks for the modern neurosciences. It would also help people better understand what makes individuals unique from one another, while providing valuable ideas for improving education, legal systems, and the care of the insane. Today, we take for granted Gall’s basic idea that there are many discrete faculties or functions of mind, as well as his notion of the cortical localization of function, to name just two of his contributions to understanding the mind and brain. These seminal features of phrenology are still very much with us, even if few people know their origins. The same is true for several other tenets of phrenology, as shown in the previous chapter.20

20

For more on how Gall helped shaped today’s sciences, medicine, and more, see Chapter 20 in Finger and Eling, Gall, 2019.

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For too long, articles in popular magazines and what authors included in novels have received inadequate attention from historians delving into the histories of science and medicine.21 Yet these sources, along with music (especially opera) and the fine arts,22 have long been ways of communicating scientific and medical ideas to the public. In closing, it is hoped that the literary material presented in this study will lead to a greater appreciation of the importance of these underexplored routes of communication between physicians and scientists, on the one hand, and the laity, on the other. As shown, these sources go far in helping us to understand the impact of the “bumpy” science that Gall introduced, Spurzheim and Combe popularized, and the Fowlers made into a highly lucrative business in America, where Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and a self-educated skeptic from Missouri writing under the pen name of Mark Twain produced some of the world’s most celebrated and revealing literature. 21 22

For two exceptions, see Stiles, Finger, and Boller, Literature, Neurology, and Neuroscience, 2019, and Finger, Boller, and Stiles, Literature, Neurology, and Neuroscience, 2019. See Altenmueller, Finger, and Boller, Music, Neurology, and Neuroscience, 2015; Finger, et al., The Fine Arts, Neurology, and Neuroscience, 2013.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009301251.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

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Index

Ackerknecht, Edwin, 188 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain) fraudsters, 66 Huckleberry Finn’s character, 132 narrative, 133–135, 137, 139–140 phrenology in, 135–139, 257, 274–275, 277–278 publication, 133 reviews, 140 writing of, 133 Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The (Twain) narrative, 131–132 phrenology in, 132, 257, 274–275, 277–278 plagiarism of Holmes, 271 sales, 133 Twain’s mother as Aunt Polly, 59, 132 writing of, 129–131 American Claimant, The (Twain), 291 American Medical Association (AMA), 209 Andral, Gabriel, 197, 200 anthropology, 244, 301–303 Atlantic Monthly, The The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, 175, 227–232, 260–262, 273, 289 breakfast gala for Holmes, 257, 269–270 Bret Harte’s pieces in, 99 celebratory dinners, 267–269 founding of, 226–227, 245, 264 Holmes pieces in, xv, 1–2, 100, 175 Howells as editor, 265 Old Times on the Mississippi (Twain), 266 phrenology in the Breakfast-Table serial, 232–238, 241 The Poet at the Breakfast-Table, 231, 302 The Professor at the Breakfast-Table, 231–238, 241, 254, 257, 262–263, 274–278, 297–298 Twain’s piece in, 265–266 Auenbrugger, Leopold von, 187 Baldwin, Mark, 304 Ballière, Jean-Baptiste, 197

Bartlett, Elisha, 186, 210 Beall, Edgar Charles, 149–151, 159–160, 254–256, 276, 277 Beecher, Henry Ward, 95 Bell, John, 31–32 Bichat, Marie François Xavier, 188, 199 Biddle, Nicholas, 31 Bigelow, Jacob, 190–191, 209 Bischoff, Christian Heinrich Ernst, 180 Bittel, Carla, 124, 125 Bixby, Horace, 83–85, 88, 140, 144 Blumenbach, Friedrich, 302 Bojanus, Ludwig Heinrich, 13, 29 Bonaparte, Joséphine, 17 Boston Phrenological Society, 47, 178, 214 Bouillaud, Jean-Baptiste, 196–197, 201 Bowditch, Henry, 191, 194, 195, 203, 204, 206 Broca, Paul, 311–312 Broussais, François, 197–199 Cable, George Washington, 146–148, 271–272 Caldwell, Charles, 32 Capen, Nahum, 27, 44–47 Caprell, Madame, 103 Carmichael, Andrew, 37–38 Carmichael, John, 44 Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches, The (Twain), 91–92 Central Phrenological Society, 31–33 Channing Walter, 172, 209 Charcot, Jean Martin, 197 Chomel, Auguste François, 194 Christian Science, 107–109 Clemens, Clara, 130, 155, 162–164 Clemens, Henry, 59, 61–62, 101–102 Clemens, Jane (neé Lampton), 59, 61, 66, 108, 132, 153 Clemens, Jean, 107, 162 Clemens, John Marshall, 59–61 Clemens, Langdon, 99, 104, 162

339

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Clemens, Olivia (née Langdon) children, 99, 104, 133, 155, 162 co-reading of Holmes’s The Autocrat, 260, 263, 273 health issues, 99, 108, 153 literary discussion with Clemens, 98, 259 marriage to Samuel Clemens, 99 move to Hartford, 99 Clemens, Orion, 59, 62, 67, 74, 80, 87 Clemens, Samuel Langhorne see also Twain, Mark ability to read character as a necessary lifeskill, 81–82 the anterior brain and intellect, 297 belief in science-based medicine, 300–301 in California, 98 chart of Whitelaw Reid’s faculties, 142 as “devoid of humor,” 1, 100, 110, 117–120, 122, 136, 278–279 dispute with Whitelaw Reid, 140–143 during the Civil War, 86 early life in Florida, Missouri, 58–60 education, 61 encounter with a visiting head reader in Hannibal, 57, 70–73, 100 in Europe, 94–97, 154 Farmington Avenue House, 130, 153–155 fiftieth birthday, 272 final years, 162–163 financial difficulties, 130, 153–155, 157 friendship with Howells, 78–80, 148, 264–266 friendship with Ulysses S. Grant, 92 in Hannibal, Missouri, 60–61, 161 in Hartford, 99 health issues, 153–154 on heredity and character, 291 Holmes’s works as a source for, 167–168, 256, 263–264 Holmes’s works in the library of, 263, 274 images of, 64, 104, 164 interest in phrenology, 76–82, 97–99, 100–101, 114–115, 146, 163 interest in science, 120 interest in the human condition, 303–305 Jessie Fowler’s reading of, 106, 122, 157–162 journalism for the Journal, 62 knowledge of Weaver’s Lectures on Mental Sciences, 76, 78–81, 87–88, 100, 115 lectures, 261 letter to Whyte, 114–116, 120 letters with Holmes, 257, 259, 261–262 Lorenzo Fowler’s reading of, xiv–xv, 1, 2, 101, 104–106, 115, 125–126, 274, 278–279, 283 marriage to Olivia Langdon, 98–99, 104, 133, 153, 163, 259–260

as a medical reformer and educator, 314–315 meeting with Horace Bixby, 83–84 meetings with Holmes, 259, 263, 265–269, 273 as a mesmerizer’s assistant, 63–69, 73, 101 move to St. Louis, 74–76 on the multiple faculties of the mind, 285–286, 297 in Nevada, 88–91 obituary in the Phrenological Journal, 164–165, 315 the organ of hope, 89 personality traits, 78–80, 89, 168 plagiarism of Holmes, 257, 269–271, 274 positive features of phrenology, xvi, 315–316 on the public’s naïveté over science and medicine, 273–274 reading of The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, 260–262, 273 on the relative stability of the faculties, 286–288 religious beliefs, 83 reservations over cranioscopy, 282–285, 295 as a riverboat pilot, 84–86, 103, 140 skepticism over phrenology, xiv–xv, 71–73, 115 stagecoach to Nevada, 87 on the temporary insanity plea, 294–295 typewriter technology, 131 use of humor, 257–258, 309 use of phrenological language, 297–298 visit to Boston, 258–259, 263 visit to Madame Caprell, 103 visits to mediums, 101–104 work in the print trade, 61–62, 74, 75, 82–83 Clemens, Susy, 108, 130, 155, 162 Clemens, Will M., 149–150 Combe, Andrew, 73 Combe, George defense of phrenology, 35, 40–41, 196 Edinburgh Phrenological Society, 32, 40, 55 Essays on Phrenology, 31 illustration of the temperaments, 78 image of, 39 John Collins Warren on, 215 lecture tour of the United States, 27, 48, 216 Notes on the United States During a Phrenological Visit in 1838–39–40, 142 the organ of concentrativeness, 73 publications on phrenology, 39–40, 219 Spurzheim’s death, 45–46 at Spurzheim’s lectures, 39 use of measurements, 41, 51, 122, 276–277 Comte, Auguste, 197

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Index Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A (Twain), 109, 151–152, 165–166, 291 Coombs, Frederick, 92, 115 Cooper, Astley, 195 Cooter, Roger, 42–43 Corvisart, Jean-Nicholas, 187 Crane, Susan, 99, 130 craniology Clemens’s reservations over cranioscopy, 282–285, 295 Gall’s cranioscopic methods, xiii, 8, 21–22, 25, 284–285, 295 Gall’s dislike of craniology, 9 Holmes’s reservations over cranioscopy, 282–283, 295 Spurzheim’s cranioscopic methods, 284–285, 295 Cuvier, Georges, 17–18, 25, 196, 203, 204, 302 Darwin, Charles, 304 Davies, John, 35, 56–57 Davy, Humphrey, 18 Dean, Henry Clay, 144–145 Derby, George, 241 Dickens, Charles, 98 Dolce, Lodovico, 249 Double Barrelled Detective Story, A (Twain), 156–157 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 102, 156–158, 201–202, 256 Dunglison, Robley, 282 Dupuytren, Guillaume, 194–195 Eddy, Mary Baker, 107–109 Edinburgh Phrenological Society, 31, 32, 40, 46–47, 55 Elsie Venner (Holmes), 245, 247–249, 257, 262, 274, 292–293, 296–297 Emerson, Ralph Waldo at The Atlantic Monthly celebratory dinners, 267–269 The Conduct of Life, 245–247 image of, 246 interest in phrenology, 245 phrenology in the works of, 101, 219–220, 245–247 publishers, 264 Saturday Club membership, 227 Extracts from Adam’s Diary (Twain), 156 faith healing, 107–109, 135–136 Falret, Jean-Pierre, 197 Ferrier, David, 312 Figuier, Louis, 304 finger prints, 156

341

Flourens, Jean Pierre, 203–204 Follen, Charles, 44 Following the Equator (Twain), 155, 303–304 Fosatti, Giovanni, 197 Fowler & Wells Co., 76, 94, 106–107 Fowler, Charlotte, 50 Fowler, Jessie A. as the author of Clemens’s obituary, 164–165, 315 image of, 158 piece for the Phrenological Journal, 161–162 reading of Clemens, 106, 122, 157–162 running the family business, 158 Fowler, Lorenzo in Britain, 104–105 head readings, 50–54 image of, 49 marketization of phrenology, xiv, 49, 69–74 moral sentiments, 138–139 New Illustrated Self-Instructor in Phrenology and Physiology, 106–107, 158–159, 163, 216, 219, 220 Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, 55, 149, 159 phrenology’s fad status and, 27–28, 55–57 publications on phrenology, 52–53, 55 reading of Clemens, 1, 2, 101, 104–106, 115, 125–126, 274, 278–279, 283 reading of Edgar Allan Poe, 217–218 reading of Holmes, xv, 1–2, 104, 207, 208, 220–225, 274 reading of Walt Whitman, 218–220 skull and specimen collections, 54–55 symmetry of the phrenological organs, 122 Twain’s test of, xiv–xv, 2, 100, 104, 115–123, 136 use of measurements and charts, 49, 51–53, 121, 276–277 Fowler, Orson bump evaluation techniques, 121 head readings, 50–54 image of, 49 marketization of phrenology, xiv, 49, 69–74 New Illustrated Self-Instructor in Phrenology and Physiology, 106–107, 158–159, 163, 216, 219, 220 Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, 55, 149, 159 phrenology’s fad status and, 27–28, 55–57 publications on phrenology, 52–53, 55 reading of Edgar Allan Poe, 217 skull and specimen collections, 54–55 use of measurements and charts, 49, 51–53, 276–277 Francis II, 14

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Franklin, Benjamin, 28, 62, 63, 108, 161, 300 Freemon, Frank, 48 Freud, Sigmund, 247 Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia, 123–124 Fritsch, Gustav, 312 Froriep, Ludwig Friedrich, 13

Gordon, John, 33–35, 39, 180 Grant, Ulysses S., 92–93 Gribben, Alan, 88, 97, 120, 121, 160, 263, 284 Gross, Samuel, 213 Guardian Angel, The (Holmes), 249–250, 274, 290, 298

Gall, Franz Joseph see also Spurzheim, Johann Gaspar the anterior brain and intellect, 295–296 association of faculties with cortical organs, 14, 21–23, 25, 29 belief in science-based medicine, 2–4, 8, 21, 23–24, 299–300 in the British press, 27 cranioscopic methods, xiii, 8, 21–22, 25, 284–285, 295 on criminality, 1, 291–293 dislike of craniology, 9 dislike of the term “phrenology”, 8–9 early life and education, 2–4 early reports on his theory, 13–14 early theories, 4–8 European lecture tour, 15–17, 31 Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia’s test of, 123–124 heredity and character, 288–291 identification as a physiognomist, 9 image of, 2 John Collins Warren and, 176 later years, 25–26 lectures in Vienna, 6–7, 14–15 nature vs. nurture debate, 145, 286–287 open letter to Retzer, 7–9, 11 publication of the new theory, 7–8 publications, 18–25, 47, 69, 178, 181, 215, 290–291 reception in Paris, 17, 196 rejection by the French Institut, 17–18, 196 the relative stability of the faculties, 286–287 research on the faculties of the mind, xiii, 2–6, 10, 11, 13–14, 20–23, 285–286, 295–296, 316 skull collections, 6, 8, 15, 25–26, 198 skull of, 198 split from Spurzheim, xiii–xiv, 12–13, 36–37 symmetry of the phrenological organs, 122 theories as unoriginal, 249–250 types of memory, xiii, 5 Galton, Francis, 156 Galvani, Luigi, 10 Gérard, François, 197 Gilded Age, The (Twain and Warner), 127–128, 141, 294

Hahnemann, Samuel, 213–214 Hamilton, William, 41–42 Harrison, John P., 35 Harte, Bret, 92, 94, 99 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 5 Hicks, Urban East, 64–65, 68 Hirst, Robert, 107 Hitzig, Edvard, 312 Holmes, Abdiel, 169, 180 Holmes, Amelai, 253 Holmes, Dr. Oliver Wendell see also Atlantic Monthly, The A Visit to the Asylum for Aged and Decayed Punsters, 231 admiration for Dr. Pierre Louis, 192–194, 208, 212–213 anatomical collection, 204 the anterior brain and intellect, 296–297 Beall’s phrenological eulogy, 254–256 belief in anthropology and psychology, 244, 301–303 Clemens’s plagiarism of, 257, 269–271, 274 as co-founder of The Atlantic Monthly, 226–227, 245, 265 copy of Fowlers’s Self-Instructor, 220 death of, 253–254, 273 desire to improve American medicine, 208, 299–300, 313–314 dismissal of homeopathy, 213–214 early opinions on phrenology, 182–184, 206–207 Elsie Venner, 247–249, 257, 262, 274, 292–293, 296–297 exposés of phrenology, xv–xvi, 226, 238–239, 306–307 first encounters with phrenology, 175, 177–182 formative years, 169–171 The Guardian Angel, 249–250, 274, 290, 298 head reading in the works of, 2, 28 on heredity and character, 289–291 image of, 169 impressions of British medicine, 195–196 James Jackson and, 172–174, 178–179, 185 John Collins Warren’s mentorship of, 176, 177, 209, 214–215 later years, 253

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Index lectures on phrenology, 214–215, 242–244 letters with Clemens, 257, 259, 261–262 Lorenzo Fowler’s reading of, xv, 1–2, 104, 207, 208, 220–226, 274 To Mark Twain (On His Fiftieth Birthday), 272–273 marriage and family, 211–212 medical studies, 171–174, 208–209 medical studies in Paris, 185–186, 190–195 medical teaching career, 209–210 the “medicated novels”, 247 meetings with Clemens, 259, 263, 265–269, 273 A Mortal Antipathy, 250–252, 277–278, 285, 296 on the multiple faculties of the mind, 285–286, 295–297 Old Ironsides (poem), 170–171, 182, 306 personality traits, 168–169 poem about Spurzheim, 182–184 as a poet, 170–171, 174, 182, 209–210, 306 positive features of phrenology, xvi, 239, 244, 315–316 on the relative stability of the faculties, 286, 288 reservations over cranioscopy, 282–283, 295 ridicule of the “king’s touch”, 135 role in the decline in phrenology, 167 the Saturday Club, 227, 245 Song in Many Keys, 270 as a source for Clemens and Twain, 100, 167–168, 256, 263–264 stance on therapeutics, 212–213 teachers on phrenology, 198–203 on the temporary insanity plea, 292–294 Twain’s use of Holmes’s writings on phrenology, 273–280, 308 use of humor, 257–258, 307 use of phrenological language, 297–298 use of the word “anesthesia, ”211 Winslow Lewis, Jr and, 172, 178 work on puerperal fever, 210–211 written sources on phrenology, 179–182, 215–216 Holmes, Oliver Wendell Jr., 168, 212, 222, 253 Holmes, Sarah Wendell, 169 homeopathy, 213–214 Hooper, Robert, 195 Howells, William Dean on Clemens’s literature, 231–232 editorship of The Atlantic Monthly, 265 friendship with Clemens, 78–80, 148, 264–266 review of The Innocents Abroad (Twain), 264–265

343

Humboldt, Alexander von, 19 Hunter, John, 195 Innocents Abroad, The (Twain) copy sent of Holmes, 261 phrenology in, 96–97, 127 plagiarism of Holmes for the dedication, 269–271 reviews, 141, 264–265 source material, 96 the human condition and, 303–304 title, 98, 260 Jackson, Amelia Lee, 211–212, 253, 254 Jackson, Dr. Samuel, 281–282 Jackson, James, 172–174, 178–179, 185, 191 Jackson, James Jr., 191, 200 James, Henry, 168 James, William, 102, 108, 303–305 Jones, Colin, 186, 193–194 Jul’us Caesar (Twain), 93 Keller, Helen, 271 Ketham, Johannes de, 249 Klein, Franz, 12 Kotzebue, August von, 240 Laennec, René Théophile Hyacinthe, 187–188 Lamark, Jean-Baptiste, 302 Langdon, Charles, 98, 260 Larrey, Dominique Jean, 201–202 Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 10 Lewis Jr., Winslow, 172, 178 Life on the Mississippi (Twain) Clemens and Robert Styles, 143–144 Clemens’s reunion with Horace Bixby, 144 meeting with a medium, 102 as Old Times on the Mississippi, 133, 266 phrenology in, 143–145 research for, 140 source material for, 85–86, 140–143 the human condition and, 303–304 typewritten manuscript, 131 Lincoln, Abraham, 87, 145 Lisfranc de St. Martin, Jacques, 195 Longfellow, Henry Wadwsorth, 227, 264, 267–269 Louis, Pierre Charles Alexandre, 192–194, 208, 212–213 Lowell, James Russell, 227, 265 Magendie, François, 203 Mansfield, James Vincent, 101–102 Mark Twain’s Library of Humor, 241

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Massachusetts General Hospital, 172 McKinley, William, 294 medical profession see also Holmes, Dr. Oliver Wendell in Boston, Massachusetts, 175 in Britain, 195–196 cadavers for study, 185, 189–190 defense of phrenology in Paris, 196–198 detractors of phrenology in Paris, 203–204 disease classification and therapeutics, 188–189 early criticism of phrenology in America, 32–36, 48 early interest in phrenology in America, 175–179, 190–191 humoral theories, 188–189 invention of the stethoscope, 186–188 knowledge of the brain, 10–11, 299–300, 310–313 Paris at the vanguard of, 185–186 puerperal fever, 210–211 teachers on phrenology in Paris, 198–203 use of ether, 211 Mège, Jean-Baptiste, 202 Melville, Herman, 101, 146, 220 Mesmer, Franz Anton, 63, 107 mesmerism, 62–69, 73, 101, 107 Mortal Antipathy, A (Holmes), 250–252, 277–278, 285, 296 Musée de Phrenologie, 197–198 Mysterious Stranger, The (Twain), 286 Napoleon, Bonaparte, 14, 15, 17–18, 25, 194, 196, 201, 204 Neider, Charles, 70–71, 116 Oliver Wendell Holmes Memorabilia Scrapbook, 220, 222 Osler, William, 211, 256 Paine, Albert Bigelow, 102–103, 163–164, 259 palmistry, 118–119 Pandora, Katherine, 124 Pasteur, Louis, 211 Peacock, Thomas Love, 240–241 Phoenix, John, 241 Phrenological Journal and Life Illustrated, 149, 263 Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, 55, 149, 159 Phrenological Journal and Science of Health, 159, 161–62, 164–165, 254–256, 315 phrenology see also craniology; Gall, Franz Joseph; Spurzheim, Johann Gaspar in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 135–139, 257, 274–275, 277–278 in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 132, 257, 274–275, 277–278

in America, 27–28, 32–36, 48, 175–179, 190–191, 204–206 in Breakfast-Table serial (Holmes), 232–238, 241 in Britain, 27–29, 195–196 in Clemens’s autobiographical dictation, 58, 70, 116–118, 121, 160–161, 257, 274, 275, 277–279, 283–284 Clemens’s interest in, 76–82, 97, 98, 100–101, 114–115, 146 in Clemens’s notebooks, 76, 94 in Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A, 152 decline in faith in head reading, 28, 309–310 in A Double Barrelled Detective Story, 156–157 in Elsie Venner, 248–249, 257, 262, 292–293, 296–297 in Extracts from Adam’s Diary, 156 in Following the Equator, 155 in The Gilded Age, 128 in The Guardian Angel, 249–250, 290, 298 in The Innocents Abroad, 96–97, 127 the laity’s testing of, 124–125, 310 in Life on the Mississippi, 143–145 materialism and, 14–15, 21, 35, 38, 41 moral sentiments, 137–139, 155, 286 in A Mortal Antipathy, 250–252, 277–278, 285, 296 in The Mysterious Stranger, 286 nineteenth century American literary authors and, 101, 146, 216–220, 245–247 organs of the mind, 281–282 phrenologists’s skill-sets, 308–309 physicians’s early criticism of, 32–36 physicians’s early interest in, 175–176 porcelain busts, 94 in The Professor at the Breakfast-Table, 232–238, 241, 254, 257, 262–263, 274–278, 297–298 in Pudd’nhead Wilson, 156, 287 in Roughing It, 87–88 scholarship on, xv in The Secret History of Eddypus, the World Empire, 106–107, 110–114, 162, 241, 257, 274–278, 298–299 temperaments, 151 term, 8–9, 32, 69 vocabulary of, 297–299 physiognomy, 9–10 Poe, Edgar Allan, 101, 146, 216–218 Pond, James B., 148 Pond, Ozias, 148–149 Powers, Ron, 67–68, 106, 153, 259, 269 Prince and the Pauper, The (Twain), 133 psychology, 303 Pudd’nhead Wilson (Twain), 155–156, 273, 287

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Index Quaker City, 95, 97, 98, 260 Quimby, Phineas Parkhurst, 107 Quirk, Tom, 90, 284 Ramón y Cajal, Santiago, 10 Rees, Abraham, 180 Rees’s Cyclopaedia, 180–181 Reid, Whitelaw, 140–143 Retzer, Freiherr von, 7, 9 Roche, René la, 186 Rogers, Henry Huttleson (“Hell Hound”), 154–155 Roget, Peter Mark, 34–35, 181, 238–239 Rostan, Léon Louis, 197 Roughing It (Twain) phrenological language, 87–88 publication of, 99, 104 sales, 133 stagecoach to Nevada, 75, 87 Rush, Benjamin, 8, 32 Saint-Hilaire, Geoffroy, 302 Schreibers, Karl Franz Anton Ritter von, 12 Secret History of Eddypus, the World Empire, The (Twain) Mary Baker Eddy and, 109 narrative, 109–110 phrenology in, 106–107, 110–114, 162, 241, 257, 274–278, 298–299 writing of, 106, 107, 152–153, 158 Sellers, Isaiah, 90 Semmelweis, Ignaz Philipp, 211 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 96 Sherrington, Charles Scott, 10 Simpson, James, 46–47 Sizer, Nelson, 76, 125 Slote, Dan, 96 Sniadecki, Andrew, 13 Société Phrénologique, 196–197, 199–202, 206 Sokal, Michael, 308 Spencer, Herbert, 158, 304 spiritualism, 101–104 Spurzheim, Johann Gaspar anonymous poem about, New England Magazine, 182–184 the anterior brain and intellect, 295–296 the Atlas, 18–19 cranioscopic methods, 284–285, 295 on criminality, 291–292 death of, 45–47, 69, 177–179, 181–182, 204–206, 253–254 on the faculties of the mind, 38–39 as Gall’s assistant, xiii–xiv, 12–13, 15, 18, 31 heredity and character, 288–291 image of, 12 John Collins Warren and, 43–45, 176–177

345

lecture tours in the UK, xiv, 37–39, 41–43, 196 Phrenology, In Connexion with the Study of Physiognomy, 215–216 Physiognomical System, 38–39 promotion of phrenology in America, xiii–xiv, 26, 27, 36, 43–45, 176–177 reworking of Gall’s doctrine, 38–39 skull of, 46, 178 split from Gall, xiii–xiv, 12–13, 36–37 symmetry of the phrenological organs, 122 test of, 124 use of the term “phrenology”, xiv, 9, 69 Stead, William, 118–119 Stern, Madeleine B., 55, 73, 120, 158–160, 225 stethoscope, 186–188, 209 Styles, Robert, 143–144 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 10–11 Tennyson, Charles, 242 Thackery, William, 97, 232 Tilton, Eleanor, 167 Tilton, Elinor M., 172 Tramp Abroad, A (Twain), 133, 303–304 Tremont Street Medical School, 209 Tuckey, John S., 107 “TheTurning Point in My Life use of the term “phrenology”, 288 Twain, Mark see also Clemens, Samuel Langhorne; individual works autobiographical story-telling abilities, 120–122 Cincinnati head reading, 149–151 creation of, 307–308 exposés of phrenology, xiv–xvi, 306–307, 309, 313 on the Fowler’s phrenology industry, 70–72 head reading in the works of, xiv–xv, 28 interest in phrenology, xiv lecture tour with George Cable, 146–148, 271–272 lecture tours, 93–94, 99, 155, 265 “Letter from Carson”, 89 in London, 104 To Mark Twain (On His Fiftieth Birthday) (Holmes), 272–273 name, 89–90 phrenology in the works of, 114–115, 127 piece for The Atlantic Monthly, 265–266 skepticism over phrenology, 128–129 story-telling abilities, 67–68 test of Lorenzo Fowler, xiv–xv, 2, 100, 104, 115–123, 136 use of Holmes’s writings on phrenology, 273–280, 308 use of phrenological language, 93, 96–97, 101

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346

Index

Twitchell, Joe, 273–274, 294 typewriters, 131 United States of America (USA) decline in faith in phrenology, 28, 167 phrenology’s arrival in via the British press, 27–29 phrenology’s fad status, 27–28, 48–49 physicians’s early criticism of phrenology, 32–33, 35–36, 48, 180–181 Spurzheim’s promotion of phrenology, xiii–xiv, 26, 27, 36, 43–45, 176–177 Velpeau, Alfred-Armand-Louis-Marie, 194 Villiers, Charles de, 180 Vimont, Joseph, 202–203 Volta, Alessandro, 10 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 114 Walther, Philipp Franz, 13 Ward, Artemis (Charles Farrar Browne), 92, 94 Warner, Charles Dudley, 127, 141 Warner, John Harley, 186, 192 Warren, John Collins collection, 204–205 concerns over phrenology’s comparative anatomy, 30, 176, 215 image of, 30

interest in French medicine, 191 introduction of phrenology in America, 29–31, 47–48, 176–178 meetings with Spurzheim, 43–45, 176–177 mentorship of Oliver Holmes, 176, 177, 209, 214–215 skull collections, 214 Spurzheim’s death, 45, 177 Warren, Jonathan “Mason”, 191, 195, 204–205 Weaver, George Sumner biography, 76–77 feel-good message re phrenology, 77 Lectures on Mental Science According to the Philosophy of Phrenology, 76–81, 87–88, 100, 115 moral sentiments, 139 mutability of the phrenological organs, 77–78 on the organs of the mind, 80, 87–88, 89 on the temperaments, 78–80 Webster, John, 293–294 Wells, H. G., 102 Wells, Samuel, 70, 73, 74, 97, 138–139 Western Union, 62, 68, 73–74 What Is Man? (Twain), 287–288 Whitman, Walt, 101, 104, 146, 218–220, 297 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 267–269 Whyte, Frederic, 114–116, 120 Wood, John George, 304 Wundt, Wilhelm, 303

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