An American Circus of Skulls: Paul Stob on Phrenology, the P.T. Barnum of Pseudosciences

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody. Earlier this month, we did a show with the historian Michael Blanding on one of the wealthiest Christian nationalist families in America, the Greens, who founded Hobby Lobby, the do-it-yourself store. He has a new book out, The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby.
And these Greens, they're worth about $14 billion, a very odd. They've invested massively in all sorts of things, including the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC. Very controversial museum. I think one of the things that strikes me about the wealthy in America is that they tend to be somewhat odd. And we are talking about another group of rather odd, wealthy Americans today, a 19th century family called the Fowlers. This family owned a company called Fowler and Wales. And they were supporters of a science or pseudo-science called phrenology. And we have another historian on the show, Paul Stob, who has a new book out. It's called Empire Of Skulls All About The Fowlers, The Phrenologists From New York. And John, not John, Paul is joining us from Nashville, Tennessee, where he teaches at Vanderbilt. Paul, congratulations on the book. How odd were these Fowlers? Are they particularly odd characters, or can we explain them in the oddity of mid 19th century America?

**Paul Stob** (2:13)
You can definitely explain them in terms of the oddities of mid 19th century America. But even for that age, they were quirky, to say the least. They were interested in creating revolutions, even utopias, and they saw phrenology as one way of doing it. It's three siblings, when we talk about the Fowler Family and phrenology at the time. Orson, Lorenzo, and Charlotte Fowler.
By far, the most eccentric of the group was the oldest brother Orson, who was really the lead force behind phrenology in America, and also started a number of other revolutions as he saw them at the time.

**Andrew Keen** (2:57)
Yeah, maybe then Orson Fowler is the David Greene of the 19th century America. So tell me, Paul, about this pseudo-science of phrenology. Of course, it was taken as a science up and to about the middle of the 19th century. What was it? What does it mean, phrenology?

**Paul Stob** (3:18)
So, phrenology literally means discourse of the mind, and at the time, in the early to middle 19th century, it had sort of two foundations to it. The first belief that phrenologists held were that different parts of the brain do different things. They perform different functions and have different jobs.
That's actually true. We know that today. At the time, that wasn't very clear to a lot of people. They thought the brain, a lot of people thought the brain was just a sort of unified mass that carried out one thing and then did another and then did another. But the Fowlers and other phrenologists were at the forefront of saying, actually, the brain is doing many different things at many different times and different parts of the brain are carrying out these different operations. So that's the first sort of basis of it. The second basis of it is basically that the bumps and shapes and masses and divots on your head, the shape of your skull, mirror those on your brain. And by touching and feeling those, we can actually see and in effect feel what's part of your brain underneath. And that way we can feel which of your organs, these different parts of the brain, are big or small and which ones are sort of really controlling the brain and performing these different functions. And that's just not true. We know that.

**Andrew Keen** (4:36)
I mean, it's really bizarre.
Your book got a nice review in the New York Times and it headlined, Was Phrenology Real? Ask the lump on your forehead and the Wall Street Journal asked a similar sort of question. How bizarre is it? I mean, it seems particularly bizarre now, looking back, Paul. But even for early to mid 19th century scientists, was this considered bizarre or were there serious scientists who investigated it, who took it seriously as a science?

**Paul Stob** (5:11)
There were a number of scientists that took it seriously as a science. Many of them came to the conclusion, rightly, we now know, that the phrenologists were really good at counting evidence that was supportive of their theories and really good at discarding evidence that was not supportive of it. So they weren't doing the best job collecting the most balance of evidence on the whole. But for a lot of people, they took it seriously and they understood it as a potential step towards a proper understanding of the brain. And they were cautiously optimistic about what the future of phrenology and our understanding of the mind could be.