Quotes About Phrenology

Phrenology taught us that the mind thinks by means of the brain, is liable to become fatigued by too long attention, as the locomotive muscles are by too much walking; and I therefore proposed to them to take a brief rest.

I look upon Phrenology as the guide to philosophy and the handmaid of Christianity. Whoever disseminates true Phrenology is a public benefactor.

Ever notice that phrenologists have funny-shaped heads?

PHRENOLOGY, n. The science of picking the pocket through the scalp. It consists in locating and exploiting the organ that one is a dupe with.

A new field of study, neurotheology, explores the possibility that certain religious and visionary experiences—for example, a sense of oneness with the universe or union with a greater power—may originate within a particular part of the human brain. Curiously enough, a phrenologist named Joseph Rhodes Buchanan posited a not dissimilar theory in 1841: he identified a specific spot on the human head that when stimulated, he wrote, produced visions of spirits.

when they lived in Rochester, every newspaper, parlor, and street corner buzzed with talk about mesmerism and phrenology, abolition and suffrage.

After all, in the nineteenth century, racists relied on phrenology, or the "science" of determining personality traits based on the shape of the head, to declare that people of color, Jews, and others had different minds. Thus, even having an identical mind is not sufficient if there is a reason and desire to discriminate.

The mid-eighteen-thirties marked the rise of eugenics and racialism, with phrenology emerging as just one of the many pseudosciences that sought to enact, reinforce, and restrict racial difference.

He sighed. 'Phrenology is where the size and shape of your skull determines whether you dunnit or not.

Though his formal education had ended after seventh grade, he grew up to be a voracious consumer of dime detective novels, tabloid newspapers, and the tracts of various occult and pseudoscientific beliefs—phrenology, astronomy, palmistry, spiritualism.

I suspect that our own faith in psychiatry will seem as touchingly quaint to the future as our grandparents' belief in phrenology seems now to us.