The Tragedy of Phrenology and Physiognomy

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• The Tragedy of Phrenology and Physiognomy
• Haimo Li (bio)

Rachel E. Walker, Beauty and the Brain: The Science of Human Nature in Early America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022. 288 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00.

Between the 1770s and the 1860s, physiognomy and phrenology were very popular sciences in America. Both elite intellectuals and ordinary men and women tended to buy into their core (and essentially prejudicial) teaching: that “facial features or skull shape could reveal a person’s intelligence, character, and personality,” that “countenances and craniums reveal people’s inner capacities,” and that “external beauty is a sign of internal worth” (p. 145). In this new book, historian Rachel E. Walker offers us a clear and thorough account of the details and fate of these popular sciences of human nature in Early America.

Walker nicely displays how the American founding generation deliberately used the ideas of physiognomy “to craft an idealized vision of the disinterested republican citizen” and “superior specimens of humanity” (pp. 14–15). The teachings of physiognomy and phrenology also suggested that “old hierarchies were not only legitimate but also based on bodily realities” (pp. 23–24), “wealthy white men” tended always to have “better brains and bodies than their compatriots” (p. 5), so it would be absurd (and futile) to challenge the exclusive sociopolitical status occupied by established elites. Walker also shows that beginning from the 1830s, physiognomists and phrenologists had broadened their attention to the heads and faces of Native peoples and people of African descent, mainly in order to prove that members of these groups were intrinsically inferior to white people. Many physiognomists believed that physiognomy “demonstrated the reasonableness of racial hierarchies” (p. 66). Building on this foundation, new groups of craniometrists and ethnologists emerged, their main arguments and purposes generally similar to the old groups of physiognomists and phrenologists. Together, these intellectuals formed the so-called science of “a racist ethnological system,” which was firmly based on “the faulty assumption that external beauty conveyed internal worth” (pp. 65–68). “Working women, immigrants, and women of color” had also been depicted as “inferior” in human capacity (p. 70). According to physiognomy [End Page 341] and phrenology, there exists a “clear hierarchy of humanity” (p. 74). Within this structure, there were some physiognomists and phrenologists with more progressive mindsets, but they still expressed and participated in a system of “bigotry” (pp. 75–76).

Even as physiognomists and phrenologists “dangled the promise of personal betterment before the United States population,” they never really provided “a coherent roadmap for eliminating the country’s most entrenched structural inequalities.” Instead, they simply “reproduced the inconsistencies at the heart of American democracy, nurturing a hopeful vision of meritocratic possibility while scientifically rationalizing the very hierarchies that existed within nineteenth-century American society” (p. 46).

Moving into the 1870s, intellectuals in new fields such as craniology, evolutionary biology, and physical anthropology largely stopped treating physiognomy and phrenology as serious academic sciences, oftentimes dismissing these old fashioned theory as “quackery” (p. 198). Nevertheless, as Walker points out, almost all of these supposedly new fields themselves “built on physiognomic theory, silently perpetuating some of its most basic doctrines” (p. 198). Moreover, they not only “validated the physiognomical and phrenological imperative to root human difference in the body,” but also stripped these old “sciences” of their “previous malleability while enshrining their most deterministic impulses” (p. 199). Eventually, this alliance of pseudosciences helped to usher in the eugenics movement.

Walker acknowledges that she is not the first scholar to discover the increasing popularity of physiognomy and phrenology in mid-nineteenth-century America. However, since previous scholars almost all focused on the dark side of the story, namely, the tendency of describing “social inequality as a natural reality” and looking for “evidence of social hierarchies in the human form,” they missed the positive elements (p. 78). For many mid-nineteenth-century Americans, their belief in physiognomy and phrenology did not necessarily mean that they “believe[d] bodies were permanent and inflexible shells” (p. 78). Rather, in their mind, the essential value of physiognomy and phrenology was located in the fact that these so-called sciences never ruthlessly precluded “the possibility that all...