Profs & Pints Nashville: The Rise of the Skull Readers

Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “The Rise of the Skull Readers,” on how the pseudoscience of phrenology became a force in American life, with Paul Stob, scholar of the history of ideas in America, director of Vanderbilt University’s Program in Culture, Advocacy, and Leadership, and author of Empire of Skulls: Phrenology, the Fowler Family, and a New Nation's Quest to Unlock the Secrets of the Mind.

[Doors open at 6 pm. Talk starts at 7.]

The nineteenth century saw the emergence of phrenology, a newly discovered “science” premised on a simple yet revolutionary idea: The bumps on your head mirror those on your brain and serve as the keys to understanding your past, present, and future.

Today we generally hear phrenology described as a racist pseudoscience or used as a punchline in discussions of silly ideas of the past. Such dismissals, however, downplay the tremendous role phrenology played in its heyday’s intellectual discussions and blind us to how much it was seen as a force for positive change.

The reality is that phrenology’s leading proponents influenced some of the most significant reforms in American history, including abolitionism, women’s suffrage, public education, temperance, and the greater embrace of democracy. They also garnered the support of many prominent Americans—including William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Henry Ward Beecher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman—all of whom embraced phrenology as a science of liberation and hope.

Help your brain absorb a deep understanding of phrenology by coming to Nashville’s Fait La Force taproom for this talk by Paul Stob, a professor of communication studies who has written extensively on quirky aspects of American life, including new sciences and reform efforts.

He’ll especially focus on how a single family, the siblings Orson, Lorenzo, and Charlotte Fowler, played an outsized role in phrenology’s rise. Spreading a message of hope in the decades before the Civil War, they preached a scientific gospel perfectly fitted to the problems and possibilities of a growing nation. From the displays at their popular Phrenological Cabinet in New York to their lectures across the country to the thousands of books and periodicals they shipped to their followers every month, they built an empire that touched almost all aspects of American society.

Professor Stob will explain phrenology through captivating imagery and hands-on visual aids. If you are brave enough you can receive your own free phrenology exam—just as millions of Americans did in the nineteenth century. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: Porcelain phrenology head busts for sale in Clearwater, Florida (Photo by Justin Waters / Creative Commons.)