Holmes was one of the founders of the Atlantic Monthly, which quickly achieved a large readership, helped by a pithy serial that appeared in 1857–58. This was Holmes’s The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. It involved an erudite man and others at a Boston boardinghouse, who expressed opinions on many subjects. The series proved so popular that he came forth with a sequel in 1859. He called it The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. Holmes used the Professor in the latter to pillory phrenology. He repeatedly referred to it as “pseudo-science,” explaining that it was based on only accepting positive cases and ignoring all exceptions. Using a two-column format and a lot of humor, his Professor contrasted what a phrenologist might tell a client and what he might reveal to his pupil. And he emphasized that phrenologists were not really reading heads, attending instead to other cues, such as how a client dressed and answered questions. The remainder of this chapter shows how others lampooned the head readers before Holmes, and presents his 1861 Harvard lecture, which has the same take-home message. Notably, he praises phrenologists in this lecture for helping to draw attention to human differences, inborn tendencies, and the brain.

Holmes also presented his thoughts about phrenology and its purveyors in what he called his three “medicated novels,” which also began as serials in the Atlantic Monthly before coming out as books. The first was Elsie Venner, published as a book in 1861. The Guardian Angel followed in 1867 and A Mortal Antipathy in 1885. In these three works, he asks pertinent questions, such as whether people with mental disabilities are morally responsible and are accountable for their crimes. He is bothered by how the insane rarely received proper attention from physicians or compassion and understanding from the public. Another common theme is how mental traits can be transmitted through multiple generations. These were the same issues that the founders of phrenology raised, and he is in agreement with them. Yet he also states that phrenology “has failed to demonstrate its system of special correspondences.” That is, its system of bumps is worthless or, as put by the brilliant Lurida Vincent, “nonsense.” This chapter concludes with what a leading phrenologist wrote about Holmes after he died in 1894. He felt Holmes was a gifted writer, yet, and as might be expected, one very much mistaken about phrenology being a pseudoscience.

Neither Holmes nor Clemens was rejecting everything about phrenology. They were most concerned about phrenology’s craniological tenets – the unsubstantiated idea that small bumps and depressions on the skull can reliably reflect the growth and development of underlying parcels of brain tissue and reveal the organs of mind. They did, however, seem to accept the concept of many independent organs of mind, though not necessarily the ones listed by Gall or others. They also bought into the idea that the front of the brain is more intellectual than its posterior. Additionally, they agreed that character traits are inborn, stable, and run in families and that juries should consider the state of a criminal’s brain. Moreover, neither man had any use for metaphysics. Interestingly, Holmes saw phrenology as a branch of anthropology (broadly defined). As he put it: “Strike out the false pretensions of phrenology, call it anthropology; let it study man the individual in distinction from man the abstraction … and it becomes the proper study of mankind, one of the noblest and most interesting of pursuits.” Twain was also fascinated by the diversity he observed among his fellow human beings, and also felt the family of man deserved further study.

Holmes went to Paris to further his medical studies in 1833, because the French were leading the way in basing medicine on hard scientific facts and new tools, such as the stethoscope. He took full advantage of all that Paris had to offer in the classroom, clinics, and dissecting sites. Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis, who railed against worthless therapies (e.g., bloodletting) and unsubstantiated theorizing, was his favorite teacher. Holmes agreed with Louis about medical quackery and learning more about phrenology while in Paris, where some of his teachers embraced it, while others damned it. Many French physicians were then publishing books on phrenology, and Paris was now home to a very active phrenological society, the Société Phrénologique. Some of the Americans he was with also visited phrenology shops. For example, John Collins Warren’s son bought books and specimens for his father while there. Yet Holmes was still not ready to present his own opinions about the new science in print. He did not even bring it up in private letters to his parents, though he did mention finding charlatanism running rampant in Britain, which he visited. He did not elaborate.

Samuel Clemenss changing views about phrenology and its purveyors did not occur in a vacuum. Here we see how he was not the first person or even the first American to use humor to poke fun at the doctrine or to “expose” how its purveyors operated in public venues. He was preceded by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Boston physician whose widely disseminated criticisms of phrenology helped open his eyes to the head readers and influenced how he would lampoon them. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1809, Holmes received his Harvard undergraduate degree in 1829 and then attended a private medical school closely associated with Harvard. He proved to be an exceptionally bright student with a penchant for writing poetry and prose. He bore witness to how phrenology was the talk of the town when Spurzheim arrived in Boston in 1832. Many of his teachers were interested in phrenology and he joined them to hear Spurzheim. He also kept notes on Spurzheim’s autopsy and read about phrenology. But although he might have been skeptical about how much might be gleaned about the brain by studying skulls, he did not reveal what he was thinking while still a student in Boston.

Holmes and Clemens wanted to educate the public about the head reading fad. But Clemens was taking on a less controversial topic when Mark Twain began to assail the head readers during the 1870s. By this time, Paul Broca had shown that the clinical-pathological method could delineate a brain region for fluent speech. Further, Fritsch and Hitzig in Germany and David Ferrier in England were now discovering special forebrain areas for voluntary movements, the different sensory systems, and even higher functions by stimulating different parts of the brain in animals and making lesions. Holmes did not recognize these better ways to understand the mind and brain when he began to lampoon phrenology in 1859. Thus, there was a great scientific divide separating what Holmes and Clemens did, even though both men shared similar objectives and helped take the luster out of head readings. I conclude with the thoughts that popular literature can be a valuable tool for appreciating scientific and medical developments, and that Holmes and Clemens were right not to paint with too broad a brush. True, phrenological craniology deserved to be ridiculed, but phrenology also had positive features that would become fundamental tenets of psychology and the neurosciences.

When Holmes returned to America in December 1835, he quickly completed the requirements for his Harvard medical degree and began practicing medicine. Soon after, he began teaching at Dartmouth and then Harvard. He was now using his pulpit and pen to rail against superstitions, quackery, and unsubstantiated beliefs and therapies in medicine, while making seminal contributions to his profession. He gave a lecture on phrenology in 1850, but it is not clear what he communicated. We also know that he had several phrenology books in his personal collection and used the university’s libraries, also meeting with other New England writers interested in the subject. Wanting to learn more, he had Lorenzo Fowler evaluate his head in 1859, twelve years before Mark Twain used the same phrenologist for his “little test.” What Fowler reported was preserved and is presented. Importantly, Holmes was now prepared to state what he thought about phrenology and the head readers in public.

The extent to which Holmes opened Clemens’s eyes about the head readers as frauds, served as his leading guide into the pseudo-science of phrenology, and provided a template for him to lampoon the head readers is addressed in this chapter. Three questions are asked. First, was Clemens familiar with Holmess writings? Second, did he meet Holmes? And third, is there evidence to suggest that Clemens “borrowed” some of Holmess ideas and humorous ways of presenting his thoughts about the head readers and their so-called science? Each of these questions is answered in the affirmative using the letters they exchanged, showing when they met, and by examining their writings. Most notable is how Mark Twain used the same two-column structure that Holmes had used in 1859 to present what the head reader was telling a client but really thinking. This chapter is particularly important because Holmes has not been recognized for having such an influence on Clemens/Twain. Nor had it been shown how Mark Twain borrowed rather freely from Holmes. Then again, scant little has been published on Clemens’s/Mark Twain’s forays into phrenology and there is nothing on Holmes and the head readers.