Dr. Cassandra Clark: "Landscape of the Mind" (Season 2, Ep. 4 - Part 1)

**Brad Westwood** (0:09)
Welcome. This is Brad Westwood, and you're listening to the podcast Speak Your Piece.
We're in our second season, and I hope you'll come back and listen to all the prior podcasts. This is a podcast about Utah's history, produced by the Utah Department of Heritage and Arts. My job as Senior Public Historian is to make the very best, the most interesting, the most accurate history of Utah accessible to the widest audience. If there's one place, one podcast to get your Utah history fix, I hope this is the place.
My guest today is Dr. Cassandra Clark. Hello, Cassandra. I know you as Cassie. Can I call you that?

**Cassandra Clark** (0:47)
Yeah, that's fine. Thank you.

**Brad Westwood** (0:49)
Dr. Cassandra Clark is an adjunct professor at the Salt Lake Community College, and is a public history marketing content coordinator for the Utah Department of Heritage and Arts. She completed her doctorate in American history at the University of Utah in August of 2020 Her dissertation title is Landscapes of the Mind, The Brain, Space and Scientific Race Theory and the Environment in the Intermountain West, 1840-1950. Dr. Clark's research focuses on Western history, history of mental health and the intersection with race and scientific race theory. In today's podcast, we'll be discussing Dr. Clark's dissertation while also focusing on Utah as much as possible. However, her dissertation focused on the interior Western states, so there's more than Utah involved. But we're going to see if we can focus on Utah.
Again, thank you for being here, Dr. Clark and Cassie.

**Cassandra Clark** (1:56)
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

**Brad Westwood** (1:59)
Cassie, in your dissertation, you focus on three approaches or frames of thinking that has an impact regarding the mentally ill in the 19th and into the 20th century. The first being phrenology, which I guess today we see very clearly as a pseudoscience.
Let's talk about that. What is phrenology and what do followers or practitioners of phrenology believe in practice? Then taking a deep breath here, Cassie. Finally, in the 19th century, how did these ideas of race play into phrenology?

**Cassandra Clark** (2:34)
All right.
Phrenology is a study of the human mind by doing a thorough examination of the skull and the shape of the skull.
Phrenologists taught that a person's mind is composed of certain mental faculties dictated by brain size and shape. So basically, they thought that their brain was composed of a number of organs, anywhere between 27 to 40 different organs, and that the size and shape of those organs dictated your personality and your behavior. And so, if you had, there's an organ that dictates aggressiveness in a person. If they had an overly large organ or part of that brain, then they would be more aggressive, as opposed to people who had a smaller section of the brain that pertained to aggressiveness. And so, phrenologists taught that if they studied the shape and the size of the skull by just literally putting their hands on people's skulls, that they could not only identify what a person's personality and what their interests were, but also help them to understand what types of studies that they could do, or what types of education they could get, or even jobs that they could do, to best improve their lives. And so, the study of phrenology dates back to the 1700s. It becomes really popular in America, typically after the 1830s, once Orson Fowler becomes a big, he becomes a phrenologist and opens up his own office with his brother back in Boston, and then he proceeds to deliver lectures, and he goes on lecture circuits and cycles all the way to the end of the 19th century, where he ends up actually...

**Brad Westwood** (4:20)
In Colorado.

**Cassandra Clark** (4:21)
Yeah, he ends up, he starts a farm, or he starts a farming community in Colorado at three months before he dies. And then he died from, I'd have to look, he died of an illness, and then his wife at the time ran the farming community after that, but she managed to run this farming community by delivering phrenology lectures all throughout the West.
And at one point, one of the lectures that she delivered, she brought in like $18,000 on a weekend or something like that, just that she all funneled into the Orson Fowler agricultural community in Colorado.

**Brad Westwood** (5:03)
And how does phrenology intersect with the interaction with mental illness?

**Cassandra Clark** (5:09)
You know, phrenologists, one of the key focuses of why I looked at phrenology was that I was looking at this connection between how 19th century Americans understood the relation of brain function to race as well as brain function to mental illness. So, phrenologists are not necessarily speaking exclusively to why brains might get a mental illness or why someone might have one. They're looking more at like characteristics and personalities. But there's lots of studies that I read where phrenologists were called in to explain why a woman might in an insane asylum might have a specific mental illness. And a lot of times, for example, here in Utah, George Albert Smith, he on his eugenics, he filled out a eugenics study for his family and in that he had a daughter who had a mental illness and they, the eugenicists were that he sent the study into back east at the eugenics records office.