Americans first learned about Gall’s doctrine from reviews in British periodicals and physicians returning from France, where Gall and Spurzheim had settled. After Spurzheim split from Gall in 1813 and began lecturing throughout Britain and publishing books in English, they learned more. Spurzheim made some modifications and began to call the doctrine “phrenology,” while still retaining craniological correlations as the primary method. He attracted many people to it, as did his Scottish disciple, George Combe, who started the first phrenological society and journal, emphasizing how it could be used to lead to happier, healthier lives and promote institutional reforms. In 1832, Spurzheim came to America but died in Boston that year, drawing more attention to phrenology. Soon after, Orson and Lorenzo Fowler formed a business reading heads and selling all things phrenological, including books, journals, charts, and specimens. The Fowlers were masterful at promoting phrenology. Although Gall had focused on phrenology as a science, phrenology now became synonymous with head readings, thanks in part to the Fowlers and their associates. In this era with little in the way of new research to support phrenological assertions, head readings became faddish among the laity.

During the 1790s, Franz Joseph Gall, a German now practicing medicine in Vienna, came forth with a new way of thinking about the mind and brain. He envisioned the mind having many specialized functions, each dependent on a different part of the brain for its expression. He had a variety of methods for determining these function–structure relationships but relied most heavily on skull features. Bumps and depressions on specific parts of the skull, he reasoned, reflected the growth of the underlying parts. Hence, by studying the heads and crania of humans and animals, one could find separate organs for music, mathematics, and even color perception. Stated differently, a skilled observer could use craniology for probing the mysteries of the mind and understanding the functional organization of the brain. In 1805, Gall left Vienna with his new assistant, Johan Spurzheim, to present his “organology” in various European centers of learning. He never returned. He settled in Paris in 1807, where he lectured and published his books on his ideas. He died there in 1828, still believing in his new science of man, yet knowing that his skull-based assertions were still the most controversial features of his doctrine.

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 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.

Clemens must have continued to have his doubts about the head readers into the 1870s, because he decided to conduct an experiment of his own on a leading head reader in 1872. Having discovered some of the tricks mediums were using, he made two trips to Lorenzo Fowler’s phrenological emporium in London. He dressed and acted like a nobody during the first trip. Then, after some weeks had passed, he returned and presented himself as the famous American humorist and author Mark Twain. He would later describe his great awakening in a short but serious published letter, and with humor and artistic liberties in an autobiographical dictation and his posthumous but never-completed novel Eddypus. The letter and phrenological parts of his dictation and Eddypus are presented in this chapter. Being told on his first visit that his head had a cavity above the organ for a sense of humor and on his second that he had a Mount Everest in the same spot would change how he would depict the head readers in his most famous novels. Writing as Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens would now set forth to educate the gullible public.