transcript

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
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Speaker 4:
[01:00] Come out and see me at City Winery on May 26th, 2026 for another edition of Bowery Boys History Live with special guest Carl Raymond from the Gilded Gentleman podcast, American Revolution historian Billy Nimitz, and Laurie Gwen Shapiro, author of a new biography on Amelia Earhart. That's Bowery Boys History Live on Tuesday, May 26th, at City Winery in Manhattan. Get your tickets at the City Winery website, and I'll see you there. On this week's episode of the Bowery Boys podcast, The Mysteries of Phrenology, the 19th century discipline which mapped the human skull in order to unlock the secrets of the brain within. Featuring author Paul Stob.

Speaker 5:
[01:40] You would go inside and in the front display, the windows outside were basically rows of skulls, actual human skulls or casts of skulls. But you could look at them. They were right there looking back at you.

Speaker 4:
[01:51] The Bowery Boys episode 484, The Phrenology Craze. Hey, it's The Bowery Boys.

Speaker 5:
[01:58] Hey.

Speaker 4:
[02:12] Hi there, welcome to The Bowery Boys. This is Greg Young. Tom Meyers is away this episode, but I do have a special guest with me. And we'll be talking about skulls and the strange science known as phrenology, which in particular captivated New Yorkers in the mid-19th century, thanks in part to the Fowler family, a group of phrenologists and publishers who ran a salon and cabinet of curiosity in Lower Manhattan. In sight, believe it or not, of New York City Hall. Now, today in our world, people are turning to all sorts of unusual beliefs and disciplines on the outskirts of medical science and psychology, all in search of a better understanding of how the human mind works, and how we became who we are. Phrenology was a bit more than a mere fringe science or pseudoscience, we'll discuss that. In fact, it was touted by some of the greatest figures of the 19th century, writers and politicians, even P. T. Barnum, whose American Museum, famed American Museum, sat just a stone's throw away from the Fowlers. In fact, the phrenological cabinet of Fowler and Wells became a bit of a tourist attraction even. But this was more than just a parlor trick. There's also a disturbing side to phrenology as it was used by a great many to justify elitist and racist philosophies. I have always been fascinated by the phenomenon of phrenology and especially like how it played out here in New York, where it seemed to actually be like a social craze. Well, to explore this mysterious chapter in American history further, I'm joined by Paul Stob, author of the new book Empire of Skulls, Phrenology, The Fowler Family, and The New Nation's Quest to Unlock the Secrets of the Mind. Stob is the director of the program in Culture, Advocacy, and Leadership at Vanderbilt University, where he also teaches in the Department of Communication Studies and the program of Communication of Science and Technology. And Paul, it is so nice to have you here. Welcome to The Bowery Boys.

Speaker 5:
[04:30] Thank you so much for having me. It's just delightful to be here.

Speaker 4:
[04:33] And you brought someone with you. So we're in a room, we're in a recording space with a copy of the book, but we also have, well, a replica of a human head here. We're gonna talk a lot about the skull and the landscape of the skull and the top of the head. But why don't we just get right back to the beginning, to the absolute basic, because many people may have never even heard of that word before. So, can you give an explanation of what phrenology really is or was back in the 19th century?

Speaker 5:
[05:08] Absolutely, so what we have here on the desk and between us is a phrenology bust. This was created by LN. Fowler, Lorenzo Niles Fowler. We'll talk more about him and the Fowler family later on. But this was given out with pretty much every subscription that you would have to their phrenological journal that they ended up publishing later. And it was really a teaching tool for spreading phrenology.

Speaker 4:
[05:31] It's like a normal head without distinguishing features, but on top of it, the head is divided into little plots, almost like little states on top of his head.

Speaker 5:
[05:44] That's right. And all of those little plots on top of the head represent different organs of the mind, as the Fowlers and as other phrenologists would talk about it. There's basically two scientific principles undergirding phrenology. The first one is that different parts of the brain do different things. And that was actually a new idea at the time. It's something that we still know and believe today. Different parts of the brain do different things. But that was not widely accepted at the time. Phrenologists were some of the first people to really put that on the scientific map and say the brain is not one unified mass. It's rather a collection of different organs doing different things at the same time. Now, the other part of phrenology, the second sort of principle, is that the curvature of the head, sort of the bumps and the spans and the masses on the top of the head, mirror the brain underneath. So, if you have a bump on this part of your head, it mirrors a bump on the brain underneath. That is not true and we now know that for a fact. But at the time, that was the way you would sort of get in touch with somebody's brain while they were still living through the top of their head. So, you feel the top of their head so that you can understand where the parts of their brain are most active and doing the most work. And that's where you come up with all of these different organs on the top of the head. At the very bottom back of the base of the skull, these are sort of the more animalistic organs, as the Fowlers talked about it.

Speaker 4:
[07:02] At the very back, when you're at the barber and they're taking out the shaver, that part of the, like, right there at the bottom is animalistic.

Speaker 5:
[07:10] That's right. This collection of organs are what humans have in common with non-human animals. And at the very bottom there is an organ known as amitiveness. Amitiveness was sex drive.

Speaker 4:
[07:20] Oh.

Speaker 5:
[07:21] So if you have a big bump back there, it's all the way back there and down there. It's about propagation of the species.

Speaker 4:
[07:25] I should, before you move on, this is actually kind of an extraordinary thing if you think about it. The skull shape. But sometimes the skull shape changes. Like, what if you get a bump? So, like, would they have believed that, like, oh, that just changed. So the underlying drive also changes.

Speaker 5:
[07:44] That is exactly right. And that is actually the secret to the power of phrenology, particularly in the United States. It's a little bit different in Europe, but in the United States, you had the power to think in new directions or to refrain from thinking in other directions. And that would actually change the size of your brain. And that would also in correspondence change the size and shape of your skull. So the best way to think about it is to think about it like working out, right? You get a barbell and you lift it, and your muscle grows bigger, right? As you're exercising it, right? The phrenologist believes same thing happened with your brain. You think in particular directions, and your grain will grow bigger in that particular part, and it will change your sort of mental constitution.

Speaker 4:
[08:22] I just have to tell you too much information about myself last week when I was finishing up your book. I just had tooth extraction. I'm still in the middle of the process, by the way. And so there was a little pain last week. So I was reading the book, and I was like starting to massage my head as I was reading, just to relieve pain. But then I was thinking, well, wait a minute, am I pushing something like, for instance, these selfish propensities over here on the right side? Am I making that worse by pressing against it? Is that what they believe that you could actually, or is it just something like, this creates your innate personality?

Speaker 5:
[08:58] It's sort of your, and it's not even really your innate personality, it's your inner personality that you have the power to change. It wouldn't be as temporary as something like that, but they would definitely compare skull readings from when somebody was younger to when somebody was older. And they say there is a marked difference because of the way that person's life and career played out. And so the shape and size of their skull and the different bumps on the head represent the progress of that person over the course of a lifetime.

Speaker 4:
[09:24] So how then would a phrenologist actually identify these things? Because we're talking about mid-19th century Victorian society, and I can imagine that, I mean, that's pretty intrusive. The medical world wasn't even quite as intrusive as that. So would it be like a little bit like a, maybe today going to the doctor, or would it be more like going to a psychiatrist?

Speaker 5:
[09:52] It was a little bit of both, and it would sort of depend on who the sitter would be for the phrenology reading. The phrenology reading, phrenology is a very tactile science, or that's how they thought of it back then. And the fact that it relies so much on the human touch was sort of what gave it power, but also made it a little bit taboo and risque. So you could go see a phrenologist in sort of a doctor's office type setting if you wanted to, and that person would come and feel your head. They would literally put their fingers on your head, feel the spans and the bumps and the masses of your head, and they would tell you about your character. They would tell you what kind of person you really are based on that. They would also do house calls. So if sometimes people wanted their entire family to have a reading, they would bring one of the Fowler family or some of the other traveling phrenologists to the home, so that they could analyze not only the man of the family, but the wife and the kids and things like that, because it was a little bit taboo to have women in public going out and be doing this publicly, of course, right? So they would do that, but that also did happen, right? Women would get public phrenology exams, and it was a little bit risque, but it was part of the appeal and power and prominence of it.

Speaker 4:
[11:00] So there's something truly medical about this, and to the extent of just actually studying the human head and making some decisions. But FYI, as we'll get to, this particular place that we're going to talk about is in the middle of an entertainment district, and the middle of culture and restaurants and all that kind of thing. So that's a little bit of an interesting balance, right? Was it considered entertainment in some fashion?

Speaker 5:
[11:32] I think all of our distinctions and the lines we draw between medicine and science and entertainment, and even things like religion and culture, those lines were not nearly as pronounced back then as they are right now. So you would absolutely, phrenology was part of public entertainment. It was part of sort of platform culture at the time, great oratory, as well as live performance and spectacle. The phrenologists were part of that, and they did public phrenology exams on stage after they gave a lecture. And people would flock to the auditorium to hear what they had to say and to learn the secrets of their own character. They also would then invite people to come pay, of course, for private phrenological readings to learn more about their own character. So it's happening on all these different fronts at the same time.

Speaker 4:
[12:16] And by the way, I should add that like these segments, it's not just like the top, like the scalp, right? It's literally like they keep going, it goes into the eye, right? It's all the way down. The whole does incorporate the whole face, right?

Speaker 5:
[12:28] That's right. So as I said back here, these are just sort of the more animalistic ones. As you go up to the top of the head, these are the faculties that define us more as human, right? So you can see there are things like benevolence and veneration. Those are our spiritual faculties. And of course they're at the top of the head because that's closer to God as the way that they would think about it. These are sort of the faculties of human reasoning on the front forehead of the skull. And then right around the eye are what are known as the perceptive faculties. Where if you were a really good writer or painter, your brow ridge would be very pronounced because you have things like color and order and calculation. Under the eye is where the organ of language is. So if you have a sort of prominent bedding underneath your eye, that means you were going to be a poet or a writer or anything like that. And we'll probably end up talking about some of them later on here.

Speaker 4:
[13:17] It's just so bizarre because I mean today people say, well, I'm a left brained person, I'm a right brained person. I mean, obviously, those are working from different systems than this. But it is funny that it seems like they were beginning to tap into something with phrenology here, right?

Speaker 5:
[13:32] They were. I mean, phrenology ends up being sort of half right. That's probably a little bit too extreme to say, but it's not fully far off. Those two principles that I talked about, the idea that the different parts of the brain do different thing is correct. It's what we talk about today in neuroscience as cortical localization. This is where we know that different parts of the brain do different thing, and they're sort of working like a computer doing many different tasks at the same time. They were right on that. They were totally wrong on what happened with the skull and the shapes on the skull mirroring the parts of the brain. That's just not accurate.

Speaker 4:
[14:06] Yeah, right. So I must add that if people are interested in trying this at home, that your book actually, in the back of the book, you have a kind of at home little instruction manual, right? People can do themselves or at least follow along a little bit.

Speaker 5:
[14:22] Absolutely. DIY phrenology. They're at the back of the book.

Speaker 4:
[14:25] And wait a minute, so would you, could you do a phrenology session? Or is it even too obscure even for like a scholar to do today?

Speaker 5:
[14:33] I can absolutely do it. I do it. It's a party trick sort of. And it's sort of a fun party trick where you get people at a cocktail party or something and you get to do it. And what's so interesting about when you do it, people sort of get better why people back in the 19th century would have believed it because one, there's a sort of intimacy of putting your hands and fingers all over somebody's head. So the person has to be in the right frame of mind for it. But then I can sort of start describing them in a way that they can just see parts of their life fitting into what I say, right? They're going to disregard all the parts of their life that don't fit into the little model I give them. But I can sort of paint a story about what their head is like and what their character is like where they're like, yeah, that seems kind of accurate. And then sometimes they might say, well, though that doesn't seem very accurate. Let's just set that one aside, right? That was one of the issues with phrenology. It was great at getting evidence that confirmed the theory. The Fowlers were incredible at that. They were not as good as accounting for the evidence that sort of went against their theory. And that became a big problem for them later on.

Speaker 4:
[15:34] So I think this all is leading to, I feel like we've set it up. So I hope that people kind of understand what this says. And it's really leading to the question of like, where on earth did this come from? Right? What are the origins of phrenology? And then how did it eventually come to the United States? Because it doesn't it predate the United States? Or at least some of the thoughts of the original ideas behind it?

Speaker 5:
[15:56] It absolutely does. It starts over in Germany with a physician known as Franz Joseph Gall. And Gall was really sort of the, they would call him the discoverer of phrenology, not the founder, right? He discovered a new natural science is how they would think about it. And Gall is a really interesting character because the way he describes it, the way he sort of narrates his sort of founding and his discovery of phrenology is by noticing commonalities among his classmates between physical traits and mental capabilities. So one of the things he talks about repeatedly is how he would notice among some of his classmates, even when he was a young kid, that people who had sort of far set apart eyes, he called them cow eyes, right? Far set apart eyes had incredible verbal memory. They could remember things really, really well. And he sort of like made a mental note of that when he was younger. As he grew up and he encountered more students, including at medical school when he went there, he saw more people like this. And he started to think, that's interesting. What is the correlation between people's physical manifestations and what they are able to do mentally? Maybe something is going on there. One of the other stories I tell in the book about Gaal is how he encounters this young girl, her name is Bianchi and she is a musical prodigy. And Bianchi's parents bring her to Gaal when he's a physician to sort of help them with her. She has this incredible ability for musical memory. She can hear a sonata, an entire concerto once and play it back on the piano flawlessly. She has a terrible time when it comes to other kinds of memory, when it comes to remembering like different passages for school, right? If it's musical, she's all over it. If it's not, she's bad at it. That's interesting, Gaal thinks. And Gaal thinks that tells us a lot about different kinds of memory in the brain. It's not just memory in the brain. There are different places that do different kinds of memory. And this gets to Gaal's big discovery or big breakthrough, which is different parts of the brain do different things.

Speaker 4:
[17:51] Literally, the physical aspect of the brain, like truly thinking of it as parts at this point, right?

Speaker 5:
[17:59] Think about it as just little pieces all over the brain that are doing different jobs.

Speaker 4:
[18:03] So it becomes acclaimed in Germany, but takes a little bit longer to get to the United States. So how does it occur?

Speaker 5:
[18:10] Gall ends up spreading it pretty far around Germany and other parts of Europe, and that becomes particularly valuable when he hires an assistant. His assistant's name is Johann Spurzheim. And Spurzheim is much more charismatic than Gall. He's a much better public speaker. He also happens to be a handsome gentleman. And he gets a much sort of grander public reception than Gall does, especially when Spurzheim ends up moving to the United Kingdom. So in England and in Scotland, he is able to spread phrenology far and wide. And at that time, news of phrenology, basically in the 1820s, starts to make its way across the Atlantic to the United States, particularly to New York City. People become very intrigued by it. They become so intrigued by it, they resolve to get Spurzheim to come to the United States. And this is going to be Spurzheim's new stomping ground. He is probably gonna end his life and career here. He had just lost his wife recently in England. She had passed away. Gall had passed away a few years before. And he's like, I need a fresh start. Now is the time. So in 1832, he boards a ship, crosses the Atlantic, and comes to the United States for his next great act in life.

Speaker 4:
[19:19] But he doesn't, he's not in the picture for very long. I mean, this is a really tragic part because you can see a sliding door moment. If he had lived a long, healthy life, he could have done some of the things that we're about to talk to, which the Fowler family would do.

Speaker 5:
[19:33] He arrives in New York City amid a huge outbreak in yellow fever. And right when he steps off the boat, he has to basically, and everyone on the boat has to basically quarantine for a week to two weeks because they are at risk of it. Finally, Gall is able to sort of, after this quarantining period, get up and travel outside of New York City. He goes up to Connecticut. He goes to Massachusetts. He travels sort of all around the Northeast. But he has caught something. And effectively, two or three months after Gall arrives in the United States, he is absolutely racked with illness. And he ends up passing away in Boston, basically just a couple months into his new, the new portion of his life. And this is 1832. And all of a sudden, there is sort of a vacuum in the leadership around phrenology in the United States.

Speaker 4:
[20:21] And who steps in to fill it? But the fascinating members of the Fowler family will get to the Fowlers and their unbelievable cabinet of curiosities here in lower Manhattan, where phrenology became a craze. We'll get to all of that right after this. Hey, New Yorkers, enjoy the gorgeous weather by taking a Bowery Boys walking tour featuring the best guides in the city. This is the best way to learn about New York. Yeah, even better than a podcast. Our licensed tour guides will take you to places that we have spoken about on this show, from the subway to the cemeteries, from Gilded Age Mansions to Art Deco Skyscrapers, from the restaurants of Chinatown to the restaurants of the East Village in a brand new tour for Bowery Boys Walks by Creek or Daglion. All that and more awaits you. Go to boweryboyswalks.com to book your tickets.

Speaker 2:
[21:19] America's best network just got bigger. Switch to T-Mobile today and get built-in benefits the other guys leave out. Plus our five year price guarantee. And now T-Mobile is available in US cellular stores.

Speaker 3:
[21:34] Best mobile network based on analysis by Ucloof Speedtest Intelligence Data 2H2025. Bigger network. The combination of T-Mobile and US. Cellular Network Footprints will enhance the T-Mobile network's coverage. Price guarantee on talk, text and data. Exclusions like taxes and fees apply. See tmobile.com for details.

Speaker 6:
[21:48] Hi, I'm Gabby Windy with Long Winded. I'm not going to lie, I'm desperate. I'm desperate for your attention in any way possible, so listen to my podcast, won't you? It has great insights, exceptional humor and plenty of pop culture to fill your dark souls. Some even say it's a great way to fall asleep due to my soothing voice. I don't take that personally, fall asleep. A listen is a listen even when you're sleeping, and a view is a view even with your eyes closed. If you dare, and it doesn't take much gumption, enjoy. Listen to Long-Winded wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 4:
[22:29] This episode of The Bowery Boys is brought to you by Aura Frames, and I'm about to provide you with the perfect Mother's Day present idea. Now, I know your mom always worries about you. She wants to see your beautiful shining face. So I know that the best present to give her for Mother's Day involves pictures of you, of your life and family. But in a presentation that she can really appreciate. And that's where Aura Frames comes in. This is more than just an attractive picture frame. Photos can be preloaded before the frame ships, so it arrives already filled with favorite memories and a custom message that can be added to create an extra special unboxing experience. In other words, an Aura Frame actually makes a more lasting and personal gift than flowers or candy. It's a gift that instantly feels one of a kind. My mom loved her Aura Frame, and I'm sure yours will too. Named number one by Wirecutter, you can save on the gifts moms love by visiting auraframes.com. For a limited time, listeners can get $25 off their best-selling Carver Mat Frame with the code BOWERY, B-O-W-E-R-Y. That's $25 off their best-selling Carver Mat Frame with offer code BOWERY. Terms and conditions apply. So, let's actually introduce finally the main characters of your book and the family, the people that are most responsible for popularizing phrenology in the United States, the Fowler family.

Speaker 5:
[23:59] Yeah. The Fowler family are the ones who turn phrenology into a cultural phenomenon, into a scientific, religious, even a business phenomenon that ends up forming what I talk about in the book as this empire of skulls. At the center of it really are three siblings. The oldest is Orson Fowler, the middle is Lorenzo Niles Fowler, and the youngest is Charlotte Fowler. They really end up becoming the hub for spreading the ideas of phrenology at the time. Now, unlike somebody like Gall or Spurtheim, they have no training in medicine, no real training in science beyond what they would just learn in normal classes. But boy, do they have ambition. They decide that this is their ticket to doing something new and to doing something great in the United States. So right in 1832, as Spurtheim passes away, Orson Fowler is actually at Amherst College with a buddy of his. His buddy's name is Henry Ward Beecher.

Speaker 4:
[24:58] Oh.

Speaker 5:
[25:00] Son of the famous Lyman Beecher.

Speaker 4:
[25:02] A surprising name to pop into the story here.

Speaker 5:
[25:05] Absolutely.

Speaker 4:
[25:05] Brooklyn's famous preacher here.

Speaker 5:
[25:08] Absolutely.

Speaker 4:
[25:08] But not this time. He's besties with Fowler.

Speaker 5:
[25:11] He's besties with Orson Fowler and Beecher and Fowler end up becoming sort of enthralled with phrenology as students at Amherst College. And they think there's actually something really to it. They think there's something so promising about it, not only from a scientific perspective, but of course, from a business perspective as well. So they sort of set up a little shop where they start examining the heads of classmates for a couple cents.

Speaker 4:
[25:33] Henry Ward Beecher.

Speaker 5:
[25:34] Henry Ward Beecher is a proud prominent phrenologist alongside of Orson Fowler. And not only that, they end up touring around Massachusetts to different cities. And it was sort of a two-man show. Beecher would get up and he would lecture about phrenology. He was an incredible orator. And then afterwards, Orson would end up examining the heads of audience members and sort of doing a public proof of concept of phrenology. And they would end up examining the heads of people on stage to sort of pronounce upon their character. And wow the audience. And then of course, everyone else in the audience could come see them afterwards and get their own phrenology reading for money.

Speaker 4:
[26:09] This is so extraordinary. It really is a mix of religion, science, entertainment, right? In the way that all these things spread together. And I imagine in how the audience perceived them, like that they were being very entertained, but they were learning so much about themselves and learning about the human mind all at the same time.

Speaker 5:
[26:27] All at the same time.

Speaker 4:
[26:28] And so, but then Beecher leaves the story because of course, he has his own legacy here in Brooklyn at the Plymouth Church. How did the rest of the family come in and how do they eventually get to New York? Because I do know that they do spread the wealth around the country.

Speaker 5:
[26:43] Absolutely. So, Beecher ends up moving out of the picture, going to Lane Seminary where his father is the president, and that leaves Orson in need of a partner. It's a lot easier to do these frontological performances if you have at least two people involved, right? Somebody to speak, somebody to examine or to split the duties like that. So, there's really no one better than his younger brother who happens to be living with him at his apartment in Amherst while he's going to school. And of course, Lorenzo, who is two years younger than Orson, ends up studying phrenology and reading about phrenology right along with his bigger brother. So, he sort of studied up on it. By the time his brother gets the idea, they were both going to go be ministers just like Beecher, right? That was a very, of course, common calling for college-age men at the time. That's what you did. You were a doctor, a minister, a lawyer. They were going to both be ministers. But then Orson had the idea based on the money he had made with Fowler or with Beecher that if he and Lorenzo split up, they could actually go make a killing this summer. They didn't yet know this would become their career in life, but they were taken with it and it was a great way to make money. So, they team up and they go on their own sort of lecture tour across the Northeast in Massachusetts, but also all across upstate New York. That is sort of where they were born and raised. They were born and raised in Cahokton, New York, and they end up going all around sort of middle and upstate New York to little towns where they would do the same kind of performances that they did with Beecher. Eventually, Orson and Lorenzo, after several months of doing this, decide that actually they should divide and conquer because they can make more money if they split up. So, Orson goes further up the coast into like Maine and into the Northeast there, and Lorenzo ends up circling through the Midwest and down through the South, on effectively a two-year long lecture swing. Before, they end up back in New York City, ready to settle down and create a new headquarters for Phrenology.

Speaker 4:
[28:29] I want to take a tour of this place. So, this opened south of City Hall, in a place called Clinton Hall, is that correct?

Speaker 5:
[28:38] Clinton Hall, that's correct.

Speaker 4:
[28:40] As it goes through the years, it expands and gets larger and larger. I mentioned earlier that it becomes a tourist attraction. It really does, right?

Speaker 5:
[28:49] It absolutely does.

Speaker 4:
[28:50] Could you describe what the experience would have been as a visitor coming in for the first time?

Speaker 5:
[28:54] I think a great way to understand the popularity of the Phrenological Cabinet, that's what they called it, is to contrast it a little bit with Barnum and the American Museum. So, you go to Barnum's American Museum, that was the most popular tourist attraction at the time. You go there and you are told about these wonders, right? There are these amazing wonders, there's the Fiji Mermaid and everything that Barnum dreams up and conjures up. And you can get inside and you pay 25 cents to get inside the American Museum and you can take a look at all these amazing things. Now, when you got inside, you are oftentimes a little bit disappointed because the Fiji Mermaid does not look like the beautiful mermaids he has on a banner outside the American Museum.

Speaker 4:
[29:32] The way he advertised things were like on a different scale than the actuality, but he had already gotten your money.

Speaker 5:
[29:37] He had already gotten your money. And that's okay, there's 20 more people in line outside to come in. But let's say you are a little bit disappointed. You could go basically kiddy corner from the American Museum, and you could go to the Phrenological Cabinet. Now the Phrenological Cabinet was free for entry. You could go inside there, and it wasn't really, we think about skulls these days, I think there's a sort of dark oddities type of thing that's going on.

Speaker 4:
[30:00] People do Halloween decorations.

Speaker 5:
[30:01] Absolutely, absolutely. That was not what the Fowlers were doing. They had a public laboratory. This was, according to them, an institution for scientific research. So you would go inside, and in the front display, the windows outside were basically rows of skulls, actual human skulls or casts of skulls. But you could look at them. They were right there looking back at you. What's interesting is that when you go inside, there are rows upon rows of skulls, busts, things like this little, the head in between us, and casts of the shape of the head of living people as well. So these were actual skulls that had once been covered by flesh and hair and blood, but also then casts of other people. They ranged from everyone from world famous politicians, John Quincy Adams, his head was there, George Washington, other people like that, Napoleon's head was there, but also the skulls of infamous people. There were unnamed people, of course, but there were murderers and there were pirates and there were rapists and there were insane people. And the best, the coolest thing about phrenology is you go inside there for free and you got to touch the skulls. They would lift one down from the shelf and they would put it in your hand and they would explain to you this new science was unlocking humanity. So you'd get to hold an actual human skull. Let's say it was a skull from a murderer. And what the Fowlers would do, they would walk you through exactly why that person was a murderer. They would sort of unlock the secrets of humanity, right? Why was this person so twisted? Why were they capable of doing this?

Speaker 4:
[31:31] Like pointing to one section of the skull and be like, you see the sedention or you see how it curves this way. And then saying like that explains their particular behavior.

Speaker 5:
[31:41] Yeah, there is this one murderer that they had the skull of. His name was Burley. And Burley was this guy who was sort of a drunken philanderer, but also incredibly religious. He ends up murdering a sheriff after a sheriff comes to arrest him for killing a calf and eating it basically. That didn't belong to him. He ends up, the sheriff comes to arrest him. He ends up murdering the sheriff. And the Fowlers get his skull. And what they would do is they would tell people, feel this part of the skull. Do you feel how it's bumpy but it's also thinner in that part? That's because his brain was very active right there. It was active in the part of the head known as destructiveness and combativeness. Those are parts of the brain and he was thinking a lot because he was a very destructive person. But it was also very thin and bumpy around benevolence and veneration. And the reason was his brain was also very active there. So he was both devoutly religious and a murderer. And there was no contradiction in that. That's just how his brain worked. And that was, we don't need to wonder any more of how somebody could be that interesting combination. He could be that because that's the way his brain was functioning and that's the parts of his brain he fed. So it unlocks this and you get to feel it in your hand in a way that you couldn't go, you couldn't feel the Fiji mermaid. You could look at it. But here you can unlock humanity.

Speaker 4:
[32:56] Well, you could explain contradiction, which is one of the things that are often unexplainable. How can one person be this and be that at the same time?

Speaker 5:
[33:05] Why do we do what we do? They open that up for people.

Speaker 4:
[33:08] So you said these casts were made from different kinds of people. We'll talk about some of the famous names in a second. But I'm just thinking of how horrible that must have been to put a cast like right. You were like your head was placed in something and create a plaster cast to such detail because they had to get the size of the skull. It wasn't just like you're getting your features. It was like just it was so tight. It must have gotten every little nook and cranny on the head.

Speaker 5:
[33:32] It was a horrible process by all accounts. Famous people went through it. Goethe, the famous poet and statesman, actually sat for his friend Gaul to get a cast of this made. Basically, you breathe through a straw and you just get covered in this plaster. It's impossible to get out afterwards and you have to sit there for a really long time. But then we had an account of Goethe's head and we were able to feel it and see it and understand it. The Fowlers did the same thing in the United States and they would pay people lots of money in order to have them sit for a reading like this and for a cast of their head to be taken so that they had it. They would pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for people to sit through this relatively horrible process, but then they had the cast of their head.

Speaker 4:
[34:15] And they could use that as examples of just like, well, this person was exceptional over here.

Speaker 5:
[34:20] Absolutely right. It becomes proof of their science.

Speaker 4:
[34:22] And it wasn't just that people sat for the casts. There were a lot of very iconic figures from this period who really thought that phrenology was the way. And you go through, it's like, with every name that you mentioned in the book, I'm just like, that person was also into it? I mean, let's actually start with the man across the street, with P.

Speaker 7:
[34:42] T. Barnum.

Speaker 4:
[34:43] He was into this?

Speaker 5:
[34:44] He was absolutely into this. He went over to the Phrenological Cabinet for several readings. He thanks the Fowlers in a couple of his different books for their friendship. And they end up running this incredible publishing house called Fowler and Wells, but Barnum thanks them for publishing the most useful books known to mankind. And he's good friends with them. They would also, whenever Barnum had a new sort of human oddity at his American Museum, he would invite the Fowlers over to come give them a phrenology exam to understand who that was, right? We can understand more of the variety of humanity if we are able to account for everyone like this, all these sort of human oddities that would sit for a phrenology reading from the Fowlers.

Speaker 4:
[35:23] And then another, maybe not so shocking the more I think about it, but like I remember doing a double take when I saw Walt Whitman pop into the story. Although he would always be, I think, interested in new technologies, he was also a phrenologist.

Speaker 5:
[35:37] Yes. Walt Whitman, again, sat for many different phrenology exams. He was actually even closer friends with the Fowlers for a period of time than Barnum. He would spend hours before he was the famous Walt Whitman at the phrenological cabinet, talking to the Fowlers, understanding it. When he ends up trying to get his publishing career going, Walt Whitman is a book distributor, a book dealer, and he represents the Fowlers. He sells a ton of their books. He absolutely believes them. When he's editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, he publishes a number of notices and accounts of the Fowlers. Even one of the most exciting parts of the Whitman Fowler story is the second edition of Leaves of Grass, is a famous book, is published by Fowlers and Wells. It's published by the Fowler Publishing House.

Speaker 4:
[36:20] This is actually a big thing to kind of remember about this, is that they were huge publishers. It was like, phrenology, publishing in the same space. And at first it was publishing about phrenology, but then they just ended up being a regular publisher, right?

Speaker 5:
[36:36] They are incredibly shrewd business people at the time, and they are able to take advantage of some of the technologies that make publishing sort of plentiful and cheap at the time. The Penny Press and the Steam Press that come along, the Fowlers are right here in New York City, able to take advantage of all of that. And as you said, they start by publishing phrenology, phrenological works, but they expand, and they start publishing novels, and they start publishing general interest periodicals, they start publishing how-to manuals. And the brains behind that operation, well, there are really two people. Charlotte Fowler, the sister, is really the one who runs the day-to-day operations of the publishing house. And her husband, Samuel Wells, marries into the family and becomes sort of the business tycoon that really turns the publishing operation into the publishing empire. They are publishing some of the most sought after books at the time. They were known as incredibly sort of high quality publishers. They would put money into good products. And authors loved that.

Speaker 4:
[37:33] I mean, and they were kind of in the center of the New York publishing world, which was, in many ways, the center of the American publishing world, which was all here around City Hall. It was all this center where all this was happening. I want to go back to phrenology. And the perception today that phrenology is a racist pseudoscience, right? Because anyone with these skills could see anything they wanted to see. And so you have a lot of really harrowing examples of that in your book. But what I was surprised by is that that's only kind of like one pocket of phrenology. And in fact, many people, which I guess we would say, like more progressive, even radical people, also were into phrenology, right? And they found things about it to admire, right?

Speaker 5:
[38:27] That's absolutely right. Phrenology, no doubt, has a lot of it that is incredibly problematic when it comes to race, right? And you can go back and you can look at even writings and illustrations by the Fowlers and see lots of problems with it. But I think it's not only that, that's the problem, right? It is sort of a racist pseudoscience in a lot of ways. But it's not only that, because once we understand it in its historical context, it was a breath of fresh air to a lot of people, to the most radical social reformers of the time. Not only sort of leading abolitionists, people like William Lloyd Garrison, the founder of the Liberator, an incredibly dedicated phrenologist, but also many of the leading black abolitionists at the time. Somebody like Martin Delaney, who was sort of the father of black nationalism, the tradition that Marcus Garvey and later Malcolm X would inherit. Martin Delaney is a proud phrenologist. And the reason he's a proud phrenologist is, one, phrenology was a better science than a lot of alternatives at the time. We can look back at it and see those problems, right? But there's a lot of sciences with a lot of problems at the time.

Speaker 4:
[39:28] There's even more problematic things.

Speaker 5:
[39:29] Exactly right. It's a better option in a lot of ways, but it also holds promise. And it holds promise because if I am able, as a human, to think in particular directions, I can get better. There's always at the bottom of phrenology the idea of hope for improvement. So if I am someone who is enslaved in the 19th century, phrenology becomes proof of the possibility of what black Americans become if they are no longer enslaved. If you don't enslave me, watch what I can become. I can become as great of a thinker as any of the white Americans around, right? This is why we have black abolitionists going across the country talking about phrenology as proof of what black people can become when they are out of their shackles. That is an incredibly exciting opportunity for so many different reformers at the time.

Speaker 4:
[40:22] I think that will lead us to our next subject of conversation because if phrenology can be interpreted by so many different people, it can even go into some, I guess more wackier corridors like spiritualism, which we'll get to right after this.

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Speaker 4:
[42:24] Okay. So we were talking about the kind of relative versatility of phrenology, right? That it can be something hopeful. It can also be something kind of evil. It's also associated with other, I thought rather surprising, what do we want to call them? The ideas, pseudosciences of the time, which I found really interesting that like as it goes throughout the years, it gets kind of lumped into or lumped with. So I just want to run through three of them really quickly. And you have a lot of examples in the book that people should check out. The first one I've always been interested in is this water cure, right? So what does that have to do with phrenology and why does that get caught up with it?

Speaker 5:
[43:06] Water cure is basically another new science, right? There's a lot of new sciences happening at the time. Water cure is one of them where if you have to go through it, it's actually really horrible. It is just a sort of painful process. It involves ingesting more water than you could ever be comfortable with, but also sort of standing under freezing cold showers for hours at a time. And also anytime you're not immersed or underwater, you are putting very cold, wet blankets all over your body. The idea was to use water to flush all of the toxins out of your body. The Fowlers end up getting interested in it because they have a friend, his name is Joel Shue. And Joel Shue is sort of the leader of a water cure institute right here in New York. And he publishes the Journal of Water Cure. And this is right around the time that the Fowler publishing empire is really ramping up. And Joel Shue ends up being a really good sort of advocate for water cure, not a very good publisher or businessman. And so his journal is about to go under. He ends up talking to his friends, the Fowlers, and saying, you know, I wonder if there's room in the Fowler publishing empire for something like the Water Cure Journal. And they decide to take it on. And because they have this sort of business acumen when it comes to publishing, they are able effectively to quadruple the number of subscriptions to the Water Cure Journal in the first year. And it becomes the other sort of main pillar in their journalistic publishing. They have the Phrenological Journal, that's their flagship. Close behind it is the Water Cure Journal. And it is another new science that can get us better.

Speaker 4:
[44:34] Well, it sounds like, I mean, just like phrenology, it's like there's an aspect that's real, right? That's true. I mean, like drinking water is very good for you.

Speaker 5:
[44:42] Yes. I mean, one of the things we have to understand about this time period, when it comes to things like phrenology or water cure, mainstream science, mainstream medicine was not very good. Hospitals were places where you would go to die, not where you would go to get better. Boy, if there was any alternative where I wouldn't have to go somewhere to die, maybe I would try that. And so, why don't I just experiment with something like water cure, which sounds horrible to us today, right? We have, I don't know, penicillin and we have antibiotics, we have other things like that. In an era where you don't have that, anything I can do to avoid the trappings of modern medicine sort of as it was emerging at the time would have been very good. It was also a way for me to take control back in my own hands, right? If I can understand my mind and my character, or if I can sort of get myself full of water to flush out all the toxins, there's hope for me.

Speaker 4:
[45:33] There's another interesting thing that then pops in, I believe it's the 1840s or even a little bit earlier, and that's mesmerism. Now, that I can actually see the connection because it is like powers of the mind, right? What's the connection between these two?

Speaker 5:
[45:48] There's a lot of great stories about the connection between these two, and the Fowlers were also big proponents of mesmerism. They preferred to call it magnetism because they didn't want a new science to carry the name of one person, in this case, mesmer himself. So they called it magnetism. Now, in their mind, they were sort of partners in a lot of this. So you think about it like this, mesmerism and magnetism work because there's an invisible fluid, the ether, that is sort of circulating in and through all things, and you are able to affect the ether and affect the human body as a result without even touching somebody. You could, you know, sort of... Through the ether, okay, you're right. You could look and you could do things. Well, maybe I can use that ether to affect particular organs on the brain, different phrenological organs. I might be able to use the ether to stimulate, let's say, your acquisitiveness. That's one of the organs on the brain. That means you want to get a lot of stuff, right? This is the organ that leaves a lot of people when it's perverted to steal. So...

Speaker 4:
[46:47] I think this is the... I read Barnum. Barnum loves the word because it means collecting money.

Speaker 5:
[46:52] That's right. That's right. It's getting things like money and goods. And so, the Fowlers would do a lot of what they called phrenomagnetic experiments, where they would influence parts of the brain through these organs and show what happened. And they would often do it on stage where they would say, I am going to influence this person's acquisitiveness. And they would do it on stage and then somebody would just start looking around when they influenced her organ and they would start stuffing their pockets with whatever was around them. And they would start hoarding different things on stage. And they would become obsessed with it. And that was evidence and proof that they could influence particular organs of the brain through the ether fluid.

Speaker 4:
[47:29] Wow. And there's another one that I want to mention that I think is in a way the biggest one because it's so pervasive in the mid and 19th century and that is spiritualism. Which that is, it gets so many people excited, involved, it's so controversial. And so, how were they able to fold those ideas, these more supernatural beliefs, into phrenology, which seems like very like hard science of the day, right? We have like, this is what this is, this is what that is. Whereas spiritualism is a mystery, right?

Speaker 5:
[48:04] Yeah. It's interesting because the way the Fowlers looked at it, and they, of course, being the publishing empire that they are, they start a line of publications that deal with spiritualism as well. They viewed it, and a lot of other people viewed spiritualism as a new science.

Speaker 4:
[48:19] Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[48:19] It was unlocking new natural laws that we don't really know about. In effect, spiritualists would say there's not this great divide between the natural and the supernatural. The Fowlers would say much the same thing, right? Is it that strange that we can unlock new parts of the brain and the same that we can unlock new parts of reality? All of the spirit guides around us, right, become possible through this. So it is just an extension of what actually happens with the human mind, right? The world is so much more complex and interesting, and we are able to actually account for it scientifically, whether it's through phrenology or whether it's through spiritualism. So the biggest players in spiritualism at the time are also some of the biggest players in phrenology and they're all sort of related. So Horace Greeley is one of the big sort of publishing magnets at the time. He is one of the people who sort of founds the modern Republican Party, a big proponent of spiritualism. He ends up mentoring one of the Fox Sisters. The Fox Sisters are...

Speaker 4:
[49:15] Who really popularized spiritualism because they would tour contacting the dead around tables and things like that.

Speaker 5:
[49:22] They were the ones that really turned it into this movement in the middle 19th century. They were also very closely connected with the Fowlers. So Lorenzo Fowler and his wife lived with Charlotte Fowler and her husband in a mansion together, where they basically end up holding, because they're very fascinated with it, they end up holding seances. They want to sort of uncover and unlock all these different secrets. And there's a Fowler brother, a stepbrother, basically. He's part of a second generation of Fowlers. His name is Edward. He believes he is able to communicate with the dead. This was not uncommon once the news of spiritualism spreads. Everybody's like, oh yeah, I think I can do that too, right?

Speaker 4:
[49:59] Wait a minute, I thought I felt something the other day. That's exactly right.

Speaker 5:
[50:02] So he would be the mediumistic subject at these seances. And at several of them, actually, one of the Fox sisters and Horace Greeley show up to be part and to witness Edward's powers. And he is able to communicate with some of the most amazing departed individuals. All of the founders of America are sort of just on the other side talking to Edward Fowler.

Speaker 4:
[50:23] Just waiting there?

Speaker 5:
[50:24] They're just waiting there sharing their ideas. And one of the things, this probably won't be surprising, one of the things they reveal to Edward is that on the other side, the departed all practice and believe in phrenology. So it's made its way to the spirit world.

Speaker 4:
[50:37] Wow, what a validation.

Speaker 5:
[50:39] What a validation, exactly.

Speaker 4:
[50:40] So I mean, the cool thing about a book like with this as a subject, is you actually get to tell a bunch of little stories throughout. And so you have so many interesting characters that you spend, like you'll spend a few pages talking about. I won't spoil any of them here because people should read them for themselves. But there is like one detail of the Fowlers that I wanted to point out right here, which is the whole octagon. Yeah. Okay. So there is a house in Westchester County, I think a lot. It's one of the most famous houses in New York called the Armour House. It's unusual because it's an octagon, like it's shaped like an octagon. And come to find out that that was not like just a one of a kind type house, that this was actually a kind of like architectural blip or craze, a trend. And the Fowlers are connected to that as well.

Speaker 5:
[51:35] That's right. Orson Fowler, ever the entrepreneur, decides after having sort of spread phrenology across the country, that he wants to lead yet another revolution. He is somebody who has never built a house in his entire life. He has no training in architecture. And yet...

Speaker 4:
[51:50] I mean, he didn't know anything about phrenology either, right?

Speaker 5:
[51:52] That doesn't stop Orson. That doesn't stop Orson. So Orson ends up saying, you know what, I think I have a better way to build homes. I want to build homes that are more functional from a space perspective. I want to build homes that are cheaper and stronger. I want to build homes for the democratic masses, for the people who to be able to flourish in life, the laborers, can build this house themselves. And then it'll last a long time. It's not just a shack that's put up, right? It's a house that will last a long time. And that will enable them to have kind of generational wealth. Okay. So Orson decides the best shape for this is an octagon. Now the reason it's an octagon is because ideally it would be a circle, because nature's forms are all circular. There's very few squares in nature, as Orson liked to point out. The closest I could get to that practically is an octagon, which gets me close to being a circular form, but is actually practical to build. That allows me to enclose more space on the same amount. So you can enclose in an octagon using the same amount of sort of siding, much more space than you could if it was just a rectangle. And so Orson decides, not only am I going to build one of these houses that I just came up with, I'm also going to publish a book about it. And so he does. He publishes this book about octagon home building. It's called A Home for All because it is the promise of a new housing for everybody. And lo and behold, it actually catches on. People decide this is a great way to build. They end up building octagon homes, but they also build octagon cottages. So you'll see octagon houses of every shape and size because it was a very adaptable kind of form.

Speaker 4:
[53:29] He would really have loved the Guggenheim, by the way. He would love it. Circular spaces.

Speaker 5:
[53:34] Exactly.

Speaker 4:
[53:35] But again, it's sort of a fad because a lot of them aren't built very well. But there are still some.

Speaker 5:
[53:41] There are still some.

Speaker 4:
[53:42] And you researched or you found a few of them that are still around.

Speaker 5:
[53:45] Estimates are that anywhere between 500 and 1,000 octagon homes were built during this time period, basically, the second half of the 19th century. Most of the time in the northeast or in the midwest, that was sort of where a lot of it happened. A lot of them ended up not being as robust as Orson had hoped. But they were built. And a lot of them do still survive. I mean, they require a lot of maintenance. And inside of an octagon home, it is a very sort of blocky and chopped up floor plan. It's not sort of the open concept stuff that we know today. But if you're ever able to go inside of an octagon home or tour it, you can sort of get a sense of why this was considered a revolution and why a lot of people got excited about it.

Speaker 4:
[54:26] Wow. Well, we still have some octagon houses. But thankfully or not, we do not really have phrenology anymore except for your book and the stories. How did it fade away? Was it just that science disproved a lot of things and people kind of saw through it or?

Speaker 5:
[54:43] There are a lot of factors at play that sort of lead to it. And you can point to the heyday of phrenology as basically 1830 to 1860. So the three decades prior to the Civil War in the United States. These are also the decades known as the era of reform. Because we've gotten past the founding of the nation. It looks like at least kind of America is going to survive. But then the question becomes, how can we make it good or how can we make it much better? There seems to be promise and hope here, but we also know there are lots of problems. There are lots of problems when it comes to slavery, when it comes to women's rights, when it comes to alcohol, when it comes to prisons, when it comes to mental health, when it comes to education, there are lots of problems. Phrenology is part of this wave of reimagining what's really going to come from America now that it's sort of secure, at least in its existence. The Civil War comes and all of the sudden, all the hope and optimism that the phrenologists had been preaching about seems wrong. Yes. We get a lot of skulls in the Civil War, but they are the skulls that represent human evil and the capacity for cruelty, which was of course always there. But it's much harder for people to overlook that now. All of the sudden, the decades of the Fowlers saying, we will create effectively a heaven on earth through phrenology is no longer that believable. Sure. We have the Civil War. We also have the arrival of Darwinism and the idea of evolution and natural selection. Darwin changes our understanding of the world from very brief time periods to massive expanses of time that the Fowlers and phrenology don't really know how to contend with, right? Improvement and development is part of the story of Darwinism, but this is taking place over millennia. The Fowlers are like, if you just think really hard over the next decade in these different directions, you will change your brain and you will change that. All of the sudden, people just start to look at it. It just looks a little bit old and a little bit silly. Effectively, after the Civil War, phrenology will exist in one form or another into the early 20th century, but it really starts to decline once we confront the realities of what the war and new scientific discoveries like Darwinism bring us.

Speaker 4:
[56:51] You have spent a lot of time in your research getting to know mid-19th century Americans like 180 years ago, 190, 170 years ago. If this is America, this brain here, that you have been studying the phrenology of Americans during this period, what did you learn about the people who wanted to find answers in this? What did you learn about Americans of this period?

Speaker 5:
[57:20] The Americans of this time period responded really well to the entrepreneurial spirit and the spirit of hope and improvement that is undergirding all of phrenology. If the idea is just by tuning your brain in certain directions, thinking in this direction, refraining from thinking in this other direction, you could become a better person. There's a lot of hope and there's a lot of promise there. People really latched on to that, right? We talk about America and the sort of self-help culture that pervades American history. That sort of gets started later in the 19th century. But phrenology is a really, really important precursor to it. The idea that you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps, however inaccurate that idea ultimately is, is nonetheless very, very appealing to people. Phrenology offered that to people. They said, if you subscribe to our journal, or if you come get a phrenology reading, we'll send you this head and you can study it for yourself. You can understand where you are already headed in the right direction or how you have to change yourself. But you can become a great person if you just move yourself in this direction. You can become successful in career, you can become successful in life, you can become successful in your relationships. Phrenology is the bedrock and the foundation that allows us to build a new and a better self. People responded to it huge back then, they respond to it still today. That's why self-help books are still incredibly popular.

Speaker 4:
[58:44] Well, someone may take your book on TikTok, and there may be a new movement of phrenology on TikTok. I'm just warning you, you might have inspired something because you do have this wonderful little do-it-yourself section at the end.

Speaker 5:
[58:56] You can do it yourself and you can learn how to do it and just remember none of it's true.

Speaker 4:
[59:02] Well, the book is Empire of Skulls, Phrenology, The Fowler Family and A New Nation's Quest to Unlock the Secrets of the Mind. Paul, thank you so much for joining me.

Speaker 5:
[59:12] Thank you so much.

Speaker 4:
[59:13] Pat the head for good luck here.

Speaker 5:
[59:15] That's right.

Speaker 4:
[59:15] So thank you very much for joining us. And by the way, just to remind everyone, I know most of you are listening, but we are on YouTube now. So if you want to analyze my skull while we're talking, if you want to see, does the head here have a name? Fowler, let's call him Fowler. If you want to see Fowler in all the little sections of his head, you can see that over on YouTube. So thank you very much for listening. Have a great New York week, whether you live here or not.

Speaker 7:
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