An Organ of Murder

Crime, Violence, and Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century America

Courtney E. Thompson

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781978813083
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

An Organ of Murder explores the origins of both popular and elite theories of criminality in the nineteenth-century United States, focusing in particular on the influence of phrenology. In the United States, phrenology shaped the production of medico-legal knowledge around crime, the treatment of the criminal within prisons and in public discourse, and sociocultural expectations about the causes of crime. The criminal was phrenology's ideal research and demonstration subject, and the courtroom and the prison were essential spaces for the staging of scientific expertise. In particular, phrenology constructed ways of looking as well as a language for identifying, understanding, and analyzing criminals and their actions. This work traces the long-lasting influence of phrenological visual culture and language in American culture, law, and medicine, as well as the practical uses of phrenology in courts, prisons, and daily life.

Chapter 1

Origins and Organs

The plot of the 1824 English play The Phrenologist focuses on the romantic pairings of George Wonder and Captain Percy, dashing young men in pursuit of the affections of two young ladies, Rhodanne Fairlake and Eliza Wonder. Rhodanne and Eliza are the ward and daughter of the buffoonish antagonists, Sir Thomas Wonder and General Alfight, who intend to keep the young ladies as their own wives. The young men, having escaped the debtors’ prison in which their uncles had arranged their imprisonment, decide to avenge themselves on Sir Thomas and General Alfight by disguising themselves “as teachers of the new science of Phrenology,” in order to make fools of the older men and steal away the young ladies.¹ Phrenology, in this short play, provides a means for amusement and petty revenge, as well as a mechanism through which this complex matrimonial contest can be decided.

At first glance, “The farce of all farces is surely Phrenology,” as one song in the play proclaims.² Yet the low stakes and silly premise of The Phrenologist aside, this farce nevertheless suggests serious potential consequences for the uses of phrenology, particularly in the realm of crime and punishment. In between the encounters between the would-be lovers, Sir Thomas adopts the principles of phrenology and begins to apply them to his patrimony. In Scene III, Sir Thomas, now a fervent convert to phrenology, examines the head of an accused murderer brought into his study. Sir Thomas declares that, according to his reading of the prisoner’s head: “This poor, harmless, inoffensive young man never broke any thing in his life; he has no organ of destructiveness.”³ When the prisoner himself claims responsibility for his actions, Sir Thomas argues that the prisoner’s own organ of lying was causing him to act in this way, and that he had no organ of murder at all. Sir Thomas determines, based on “the organs of murder, malice, destructiveness, and lying” on the skull of the deceased victim, that “the case is clear; he is in the conspiracy, and has killed himself to get this inoffensive man hung.”⁴ Later in the play, Sir Thomas reveals the grand plans his phrenological study has inspired: two acts of parliament related to jurisprudence, which would require that “every judge, magistrate, police officer, constable, and all persons concerned in the preservation of his Majesty’s peace shall be Phrenologists.”⁵ Further, “the judges being convinced of their guilt on a phrenological investigation, shall order a skilful surgeon to cut out the offending organ.”⁶ This farce had a sharp edge.

Even within the light context of a farce, The Phrenologist suggests the darker potential of phrenology to be used as a tool to exert social control, to assess culpability and criminality, and to determine punishment and imprisonment. Few phrenologists had ambitions for phrenology as extravagant as Sir Thomas, who proposed a system of phrenological hegemony over crime and punishment. And yet, the potential for phrenology to serve such a significant social and political role was an object of interest—one that inspired enthusiasm, criticism, and satire alike—among both phrenologists and their opponents. In The Phrenologist, the idea of phrenology as a mechanism for crime and punishment was played for laughs, but some phrenological enthusiasts saw in phrenology real potential for solving such complex social problems.

This chapter explores the origins of phrenology in the Continental context, as well as its translation into the Anglophone world via the United Kingdom. I illuminate the origins of a phrenological approach to crime, which I argue was foundational to the discipline of criminal science and essential to the enthusiasm for phrenology in Britain and particularly in the United States. From its origins, phrenology was prefigured with concerns about criminal minds and behaviors, and its conception of crime was essential to its spread, its mobilization within elite circles, and, as in the case of The Phrenologist, its wider circulation in popular culture. While phrenological criminology would achieve its pinnacle within the American context, it developed in response to conversations set into motion by European phrenologists. Later chapters will unpack the ways in which phrenological enthusiasm in the United States was predicated on the applicability of phrenology to crime; this chapter focuses on the development of the theoretical underpinnings of a phrenological criminology in the Continental and British contexts.

Continental Craniology

Franz Joseph Gall was a physician and an anatomist before he became known as the founder of the new science of what he termed Schädellehre (doctrine of the skull), or organologie—which was later transmuted to “organology” or “craniology” before becoming “phrenology.”⁷ Born in 1758 in the village of Tiefenbronn in an area that would become part of the Grand Duchy of Baden, Germany, Gall studied first in Baden Baden and then Bruchsal before beginning medical studies in 1777 in Strasbourg.⁸ He continued his medical studies in Vienna, receiving his medical doctorate there in 1785 and establishing a private practice in the city.⁹ His anatomical studies and reading, particularly of philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder, inspired his early publications and developing theories of mind and cerebral localization, and by 1792 or 1793 Gall began to develop his theory of organs corresponding with innate faculties.¹⁰ In the late 1790s, Gall began lecturing and publishing on the subject in Austria, before his lectures were deemed to be subversive by the state, due to their materialistic implications for morality and religion. His lectures were banned in December of 1801, which paradoxically increased the public knowledge about and popularity of his system.¹¹

Beginning in 1805, Gall staged a triumphant tour through Europe before settling in Paris in 1807, by which point he had become a minor medical celebrity.¹² Gall was well received in Paris and remained there until his death in 1828. Shortly after his move to Paris, he published the first book of his four-volume Anatomie et physiologie du système nerveux en général, et du cerveau en particulier,¹³ eventually followed by a more accessible account of his localization theories, Sur les fonctions du cerveau et sur celles de chacune des parties (1822–1825).¹⁴ Along the road to Paris, Gall was joined by an assistant, the German physician Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, with whom he collaborated on Anatomie et physiologie.¹⁵

Gall’s theory of “craniology” was based on a few simple tenets. Craniology proposed that the brain, the organ of the mind, was an aggregate of mental organs that were localized into specific functions. Further, the relative size of these organs could be used to assess the power of that organ, and the shape of the skull external to the organ could be used to assess the power of that organ and hence the mental faculties.¹⁶ The final tenet of craniology—that the disposition of the skull, especially its “bumps,” indicated power of mind—is most commonly recalled today, but craniology also broadly articulated a theory of localization of mental capacities well before anatomical localization efforts in the mid-nineteenth century.¹⁷ However, Gall’s craniology was not, in spite of his training, primarily influenced by his anatomical and physiological research. While the new science drew on the credibility his education provided, it was based on Gall’s correlation of his subject’s self-descriptions of their characters with his manual examination of their skulls.¹⁸

One of the earliest features of phrenological practice was the phrenological visit to the prison. Gall and Spurzheim initiated this practice in the early years of the science, and it was replicated by leading practitioners as they worked to find a place for their science. Although phrenology drew its credibility from the association with anatomy and physiology, Gall’s experimental method was primarily subjective and impressionistic.¹⁹ He invited diverse individuals into his house to take personal histories exploring the characters of his subjects.²⁰ Only then would he examine the head, tracking the shape of the skull to correspond with each individual’s self-reported character. These individual examinations would have been time-consuming. Larger groups of individuals were also needed for study, and it was here that institutions, chiefly the prison, became useful research sites.

In 1805, Gall visited the prisons of Berlin and Spandau in order to examine hundreds of convicts.²¹ According to contemporaneous accounts, among these prisoners he found the “organs of Secretiveness and Acquisitiveness predominated … sometimes so strikingly apparent, that at a glance the thief might be distinguished from the other criminals,” as well as large organs of Destructiveness in others.²² In prison visits, he “gave the most convincing proofs of his ability to discover such malefactors, as were among the prisoners.”²³ Among the hundreds of convicts Gall viewed at these prisons, he found so many with the “organ of thieving” that “no innocent person was found,” and in others he identified “the organ of murder” as well.²⁴ Newspapers confirmed Gall’s remarkable abilities, observing that his analysis “uniformly corresponded with the register of their crimes.”²⁵ Other accounts described more focused displays of virtuosity, as in one article that described Gall examining six anonymous skulls, in all of which he discovered the organ of theft; the skulls were confirmed after the fact to have belonged to a gang of robbers.²⁶

Such “practical test[s] of the truth of this system,” conducted on the heads of convicts, were framed by contemporary commentators as the defining moment of craniology.²⁷ Even books and essays that expressed skepticism about phrenology nevertheless framed these prison trips as an essential moment in which phrenology was tested and the doctrine formed: “It was at Berlin, and the fortress of Spandau, where they first put their doctrine to the test of experiment, by its application to congregated multitudes.”²⁸ Even if this author expressed skepticism at these findings, he nevertheless represented these prison trips as essential experiments.

By entering the prison, Gall was able to examine hundreds of subjects in a single visit, and he had, by virtue of the prison registers and the reports of their crimes, detailed accounts of the prisoners’ characters that he could compare with their skulls. These spaces were also sources for material capital, particularly the criminal skulls he acquired from prison authorities.²⁹ These prison visits were research trips, where the volume of captive heads and characters available to Gall rendered the prison a laboratory for the production of knowledge about the correspondences between heads and characters. Thus, the basis of both phrenological criminal theory and phrenological theory more generally was predicated on findings from within the prison, as were later defenses of the science staged within prisons, as I discuss in chapter 4.

Gall continued this research in prisons in Berne and Fribourg, in Switzerland, and Celle and Torgau, in Germany, as well as other prisons—sites that served as laboratories for the further development of his science and for proofs of the same.³⁰ Spurzheim followed his mentor’s path into the prison, though his visits were much farther afield. Spurzheim’s early visits to prisons, workhouses, and hospitals were a part of his extended tours throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland, more representative of a kind of tourism than an experimental exercise, as his letters to his later wife suggest.³¹ Despite this, reports of Spurzheim’s prison visits framed them as demonstrations of virtuosity in culling criminal minds from a mass of subjects. During an 1827 visit by Spurzheim to Hull, Englan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: Through a Mirror, Darkly
• Chapter 1. Origins and Organs
• Chapter 2. Transatlantic Societies and Skulls
• Chapter 3. Phrenology on Trial
• Chapter 4. The Prison as Laboratory
• Chapter 5. Policing the Self and the Stranger
• Chapter 6. A Victory for Phrenology?
• Epilogue: Phrenological Futures
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author
• Series List