Head Masters: Phrenology, Secular Education, and Nineteenth-Century Social Thought.

Head Masters: Phrenology, Secular Education, and Nineteenth-Century Social Thought. By Stephen Tomlinson. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, c. 2005. Pp. xviii, 437. $47.50, ISBN 0-8173-1439-3.)

This aptly titled book tackles an important subject: the influence of phrenology on educational and other social ideas in the nineteenth century. Long ridiculed as "the science of bumps," phrenology has rarely attracted serious attention from American historians. One historian who did examine it seriously, John Davies, called it a fad and a science. But as Stephen Tomlinson shows, many respected intellectuals accepted it as a science for decades before it became a popular curiosity at fairs and sideshows. Tomlinson's thesis is that phrenology had a far greater impact of the development on the thinking and policies of nineteenth-century reformers than historians have recognized.

The book opens with a detailed discussion of the intellectual background to phrenology: Enlightenment environmentalism and sensationalism and the French Ideologues' attempt to construct a "science of man." It then examines the origins of phrenology in the work of Franz Joseph Gall and his disciple, Johan Gaspar Spurzheim. The rest of the book focuses mainly on George Combe, the Scottish phrenologist, a thinker whose importance historians have long underestimated, Horace Mann, and Samuel Gridley Howe. The ideas of Mann and Howe, Tomlinson claims, owed far more to phrenology in general, and to Combe in particular, than historians have acknowledged or admitted. The writings of Combe and his circle formed much of the theoretical foundation for the reforms Mann and Howe promoted in education and the treatment of the insane, the deaf and dumb, blind, feeble-minded, and criminals.

Phrenology a la Combe began with Gall's basic concept of cerebral structure. According to Gall, humans were born with a brain that was divided into a number of organs, each housing discrete mental and behavioral faculties or propensities such as acquisitiveness, amativeness, destructiveness, and benevolence. To Gall's consternation, Spurzheim transformed phrenology from a natural, objective science into a social science and a program for secular reforms. In the hands of Combe, phrenology became a powerfully attractive ideology for middle-class reformers who rejected traditional ways of molding and controlling the populace but recoiled from the radical environmentalism of socialists like Robert Owen. Combe emphasized the importance of the inherited mental organization, but he also argued that proper education and individual effort could develop one's "good" propensities and suppress the "bad" ones. He produced a phrenological theory that mixed hereditarianism and environmentalism in a form that, like the little bear's porridge in "Goldilocks and the Three Bears," tasted "just right" to Mann and Howe. They might have been Unitarians in revolt against the rigidities of Calvinism, but they remained Puritan elitists. They were also racialist and sexist advocates of what later became known as positive eugenics.

Head Masters: Phrenology, Secular Education, and Nineteenth-Century Social Thought is a useful book for anyone interested in the history of education, disability, mental illness, and penology. Tomlinson provides a convincing and overdue reassessment of phrenology's impact on nineteenth-century reform ideas. But many of the ideas Tomlinson attributes to phrenologists predated them and were incorporated into phrenology rather than originated by them. The book's major weakness is an overly detailed presentation in which the main arguments sometimes get lost. Editing problems also abound. Georges Cuvier is variously rendered as "George Curvier" (p. 49) and "Curiver" (p. 352); the Concordat of 1802 as "Concordant" (p. 40); and secession as "succession." (p. 289). There is also one glaring historical error, the statement that Texas and California were admitted to the Union in 1850 as slave states (p. 289).

PETER MCCANDLESS

College of Charleston