AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Francis gall12/29/2023 In order to fully understand the events that led to Morison’s eventual rejection of phrenology in favor of physiognomy, this paper is divided into three chapters. As a result, Morison eventually abandoned phrenology in favor of the study of physiognomy, which offered him a physical means of diagnosing the insane that did not challenge his religiously conservative world-view. In Britain, however, Gall’s disciple, Johann Spurzheim, and his colleague, George Combe, propagated a phrenology that was full of theological and philosophical discourse that challenged Morison’s beliefs and social status. As we will see, as an Evangelical medical doctor, Morison could tolerate Gall’s organology because it avoided metaphysical discourse, and did not overtly challenge his faith or social status. For these reasons, Morison’s story provides historians with insights into the differences between Gall’s organology in France, and phrenology in Britain. He is also an example of a person who once embraced Gall’s doctrine, and then rejected it after it became attached to radical social politics. Indeed, Morison is a novelty as he is one of the few examples of a British alienist who studied with Gall years before phrenology found a supporting audience in Britain. Morison’s life serves as a particularly useful point of departure for investigating the array of social and intellectual controversies surrounding phrenology in the early nineteenth-century. This paper breaks that convention by investigating the life and research of the Scottish alienist, Sir Alexander Morison. However, while most Anglo-American histories of phrenology have focused specifically on the reception and propagation of phrenology in Britain, there is scarce scholarship on those British intellectuals, who traveled to Europe to study with the originator of phrenology, Franz Joseph Gall, years before phrenology became a Victorian sensation. Indeed, there can be little doubt that the social and scientific claims of phrenology were absorbed, and processed, by a host of scientific authorities during the nineteenth-century. Now, after decades of discourse, most historians of science would agree with Erwin Ackerknecht that phrenology was “at least as influential in the first half of the nineteenth-century as psychoanalysis in the first half of the twentieth”. As a result, many quality books and articles have been published, and our understanding of the social contexts from which phrenology originated and evolved has been dramatically improved. In fact, ever since Steven Shapin’s monumental publication in 1975, the history of phrenology has been taken up by a hand-full of accomplished scholars in the history and sociology of science. In spite of this, during the 1970s and 1980s historians started to steer away from portraying phrenology as a failed doctrine that was overcome by the inevitable progress of science, and began to focus on phrenology’s influential role in Victorian culture and popular science. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth-century phrenology was almost universally discredited as a science, and historians of phrenology tended to reflect this bias. However, the ways in which historians have treated phrenology has not always been consistent. The historian, Rodger Cooter, was correct when he wrote that, “historical interest in phrenology is almost as old as phrenology itself”.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |