Empire of Skulls
Phrenology, the Fowler Family, and a New Nation's Quest to Unlock the Secrets of the Mind
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
An absorbing tale of science and showmanship, ideology and enterprise, that provides not just a fascinating history of our country, but also crucial insight into the deep currents that continue to propel modern life
During the contentious and progressive antebellum era, the Fowler family preached a gospel of self-improvement to a nation eager to embrace its foundational beliefs. For the first time, this new “science” of phrenology offered all Americans the ability to improve their station by unlocking their innate mental and emotional truths. Revered politicians, quirky celebrities, infamous criminals, and social outcasts all found their way to the Fowlers for skull readings.
Brimming with the energy to change the world, the Fowlers connected phrenology to practically every aspect of life in the young nation—from abolition to women’s rights, temperance to prison reform, spiritualism and mesmerism to vegetarianism and sexual education. But there was a dark side to this fad and to the Fowlers, and soon nefarious forces co-opted this once-hopeful sensation to justify racism and xenophobia.
Phrenology’s complex history stands as a commentary on the dreams and follies of the American republic. Though phrenology (and the Fowlers) ran afoul of the tide of history, its aspirational insistence on an individual’s ability to improve oneself became embedded in the fabric of the nation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stob (The Art of Public Speaking), a professor of American studies and communication studies at Vanderbilt, casts an uneven light on one family's outsize role in the rise of phrenology. After tracing the pseudoscience's foundations in German academia, the author tracks how the blue-blooded Fowler siblings—Orson, Lorenzo, and Charlotte—relentlessly advocated for phrenology in 19th-century America via lectures, heated arguments with skeptics, their own publishing house, and a Lower Manhattan storefront-cum-tourist attraction filled with skulls. Stob contextualizes their work within the era's broader pop-culture amalgamation of self-improvement, celebrity, and spectacle, along the way providing numerous oddball anecdotes about the Fowlers' examinations of subjects' heads (a butcher's child was deemed to have "extremely large Destructiveness," accounting for his macabre glee at watching cattle being slaughtered). Stob also offers captivatingly bizarre profiles of the Fowlers themselves, especially Orson, who penned thousand-page books on sex and promoted octagon-shaped houses. However, the author's fondness for the Fowlers and apparently earnest desire to reappraise phrenology, long associated with eugenics, leads him to, at times, downplay the siblings' racist views. Similarly peculiar is a concluding section offering tips on "DIY phrenology" ("Whenever you examine a stranger, you'll need to start a bit more carefully"). Such sour notes overshadow an otherwise morbidly fascinating tale of obsession.
