Check Your Head

Lydia Kang

As a physician, I am in the business of seeing people and making judgments. Most of the time, I have with me the aid of my stethoscope, a gentle hand, and a hospital replete with laboratory tests, scanning machines, and consultants. But I can also foretell the future without touching a person. I have sensed a lethal cancer over a video call; I have seen heart failure that portended death from across the room. Before the experiences and technologies of today, the future was a vastly larger, unknown black box. But if there is anything I know about human nature, it’s what I know about myself: humans are desperate to discern who they are, and what fate will befall their bodies and minds.

I have turned that diagnostic focus inward with a relentlessness that has amplified over time. Even spending time with my family, I find myself watching them, almost creepily, as if they were the contents of my personal scrying bowl.

I have my mother’s long fingers. Good for piano. I also have her spine, which is to say, I have her osteoarthritis. I see surgery and syringes full of steroids in my future.

I have my father’s compact, sturdy frame, which made me unexpectedly strong when I was younger. During my residency years, I’d occasionally lift the end of a two-hundred-pound ICU bed (patient included) into an elevator when the wheels got stuck. But I also possess my father’s high cholesterol, which rises to alarmingly higher levels on my annual blood tests and threatens to turn my very heart into a waxy candle, ready to burn.

I tick off the list of these things I have also inherited: the tendency to hold grudges for decades, the ability to become explosively and unexpectedly angry at household clutter. Also, there is the thinning scalp hair and doomsday anxiety that only creeps up on me when the lights are out at bedtime. Alzheimer’s disease on my father’s side. Cancers on my mother’s.

Staring at the mirror, I watch my face age. (You don’t see it? Oh, let me show you!) I wonder what bubbles in my blood, ready to boil over here in my gray-zone age of fifty. I am young, but far from it. I am old, but far from that, too. According to statistics, I have less than half a decade left. What else is barreling my way?

Since 400 BCE, the balance of squishy humors—the supposed four main constituents within the human body—told of your temperament and your tendency towards sickness. Blood humor was associated with a cheerful, sanguine outlook; yellow bile with a fiery, choleric personality; melancholy people had a lot of black bile; and phlegm excess was aligned not with stuffy noses, but with a calm, phlegmatic attitude. Tilt a little in excess in any one humor, said the famous and overbusy Hippocrates and Galen, and you become ill. Tilt it back to the norm with bloodletting or a poisonous mercury concoction that makes you explode black diarrhea, setting you aloft over the privy. Humoral theory told you what to eat. How to treat. How you would die.

But in the eighteenth century, a new kind of soothsaying emerged in Europe and America. It had everything to do with appearance. Now, we are a visual-centric culture. We make all manner of judgments and dictates of destiny, both consciously and subconsciously, based upon the appearances of others. A tall teenager must be a good basketball player. A kid with glasses must be smart. Urban legend says that a man with large hands or feet possesses a large penis, and hence, sexual prowess; a woman with large breasts is either made for rearing children or being a wanton receptacle for morally prohibitive amounts of sex. Most people are aware of how these beliefs are myths—joke inducing, inappropriately so, but not real.

This is where anatomy and correlative common sense disintegrates. Nose size doesn’t correlate with ability to smell, after all. But for a while, in the shadows of the late 1800s, there existed a specific neurological belief that physical findings spoke of your destiny. These theories were considered scientific fact.

It was called phrenology. Arising from the Greek words for “mind” (phren) and “knowledge” (logos), phrenology was the study of human behavior and aptitude based upon the measurements of the skull. The basic tenet went like this: if certain parts of the brain were particularly well developed, then it affected the overlying skull. Which meant that you could assess a person’s sexual appetite, eating habits, genius or lack thereof, penchant for lying and criminal activity—all based on the texture and bumps of their skull.

This story begins with Franz Joseph Gall, the father of phrenology and an eighteenth century Viennese physician. He was a skilled anatomist whose interest began as a child. He’d noticed that some of the best student classmates had large, prominent eyes. Surely, he thought, they must have enlarged brain matter shoving those eyes forward. Hence, verbal memory must be located behind the eyes.

What followed was the premise that the brain wasn’t one uniform organ, but a patchwork quilt of specialized areas. Furthermore, unlike previous millennia of thought that mental activity was situated in the heart, the mind was in the brain. Areas of the brain that were stronger were bigger and caused the skull to rise with palpable bumps. Twenty-seven bumps, to be exact. The particularly human qualities (nineteen were shared with animals) were mapped across the skull and included wit, sagacity, mimicry, poetic ability, and religious instinct. Vanity? There was a bump for that. Instinct to kill? There was a bump for that too. Amativeness? That’s a tendency towards amorous behavior and “the sexual instinct.” [1]

Gall started getting his curious fingers onto as many heads as possible—people who had committed crimes, who were artists, who had psychiatric diagnoses. He’d obtain their skulls when he could and amassed a collection of them. One of his most enthusiastic students and followers was J. G. Spurzheim, who aided Gall in brain dissections. The Kaiser at the time, Holy Roman Emperor Francis II, banished Spurzheim and Gall from Vienna, accusing them of being amoral materialists—those who believed that consciousness and mental faculties reside in brain matter itself.

Others later complained that phrenology was a pseudoscience from the get-go. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (d. 1894), a professor at Harvard, had this to say: “Can you tell how much money there is in a safe, which also has thick double walls, by kneading its knobs with your fingers? So when a man fumbles about my forehead, and talks about the organs of Individuality, Size, etc., I trust him as much as I should if he felt the outside of my strongbox and told me that there was a five-dollar or ten-dollar bill under this or that particular rivet.” [2]

But Gall was on a mission. He left Vienna to promote himself around Germany in his own style. He toured countries like an eye-catching carnival act, complete with animal and human skulls, plaster casts of skulls, a wax modeler, and two monkeys. He wasn’t welcomed everywhere. The Austrian government asked him to stop lecturing, fearing people would “lose their heads” and become amoral materialists. Eventually, he retired and thoughtfully gave his brain to Spurzheim to study after his death. Spurzheim continued Gall’s work, adding another eight “faculties” to the list Gall had created. This would prove to be a recurring issue, and one of the downfalls of phrenology. It is never a good look when experts constantly change the foundations of their expertise.

Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, physiognomy, or the reading of facial features, also became part of the common vernacular. The direct relationship between looks and ability shows up throughout literature. In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Mr. Rochester and Jane have a frank discussion about his face, after Jane makes a social blunder by admitting he is not handsome.

"Criticise me: does my forehead not please you?"

He lifted up the sable waves of hair which lay horizontally over his brow, and showed a solid enough mass of intellectual organs, but an abrupt deficiency where the suave sign of benevolence should have risen.

"Now, ma'am, am I a fool?"

"Far from it, sir.” [3]

And later, Blanche Ingram remarks upon Jane’s appearance:

Then, in a lower tone, but still loud enough for me to hear, "I noticed her; I am a judge of physiognomy, and in hers I see all the faults of her class." [4]

I always imagined what Blanche would say about me in that situation. Ethnically Korean, petite, mortally fearful of public gaffes, with a nose that pronounced hilariously “flat” according to my third-grade classmates. I would be worse off than Jane. I shudder to think of how I’d survive in such a society back then.

In a confusing array of contradictions, phrenology found support for everyone’s point of view on society and anthropology. On the one hand, the upper class thought it solidified the notion that their exquisite noggins and patrician visages with “high-brow” features meant that highborn was better born than the “low-brow” kind. (Botox and a brow lift can fix the latter! See: influencers on Instagram.) Social hierarchy was thus deemed a good and natural thing, and science reinforced the notion. And yet, the working classes sought out phrenology for different reasons. Discovering that you had inborn faults meant you could improve upon them. You could rise up beyond what you were born to. Meritocracy found a friend in phrenology.

But it also reminded me of how commercial DNA testing has become both a vehicle for dictating your fate and an invitation to alter that fate. My twisty nucleic acids have told me that I have good pitch, enjoy eating cilantro, and have dry earwax, because hundreds of places on my DNA show associations with these traits. They also tell me I have a genetic predisposition to wake up at 7:14 a.m. I have no idea what gene this is, but there it is. And yet, I routinely challenge my nucleic acid fate by sleeping in until nine in the morning whenever possible. Far more troubling is the fact that I’m at risk for type 2 diabetes. So I have attempted to change my future by eating a Mediterranean diet and by thoroughly bottle-brush-cleansing my blood vessels most days with exercise. And yet I still look into the mirror and judge myself. As others judge me. And everyone judges each other. How much has changed?

In phrenology and physiognomy evaluations, there was always an ominous, evil side. It fanned an already heated argument concerning racism and slavery. One of Gall’s followers, Broussais, claimed that indigenous peoples lacked the cerebral organs that created great artists, and that white people were the most beautiful. And yet, abolitionists upheld some phrenologists’ findings in an 1847 phrenology journal that “the colored man has more natural talent than is generally ascribed to him.” [5] Many phrenologists, like Robert Collyer, abhorred slavery, and thus his work was unpopular with many.

Anthropological criminology, which burst onto the scene in the late nineteenth century through Italian criminologists, held that physical characteristics were linked to the propensity to commit crimes. Bushy unibrows, small chins, fleshy lips, sloping shoulders, beaked or flat noses, amongst a list of other characteristics, were telltale signs of delinquency and depravity.

I have a so-called “flat” nose, small chin, full lips (rapidly shrinking in volume with age), and sloping shoulders. In my youth, I stole two shot glasses from sushi restaurants. But it’s meaningless, because anthropological criminality was tossed away long ago. After all, there are plenty of criminals with “patrician” features. They all own enormous corporations or murder their troublesome wives, but I digress.

Back then in the days of phrenology and physiognomy, it was all too easy to gender stereotype, too. After all, women were said to have larger cranial areas for nurturing and child rearing. Thus, they were physically built for a domestic life. And yet women attended phrenological lectures and learned from many practitioners that there existed a mental equality with men. Most phrenologists, in fact, supported women’s equality. Many people despised phrenology’s newfound popularity, considering it a moral attack on the position of women in society.

It seemed that phrenology told what everyone wanted to hear (or didn’t want to hear), in some way. You were high class because you were bred to be high class. You were low class, but you could change your fate. The world could be a better place, through phrenology. Criminals could be rehabilitated with the right treatment. Societal effort could change people who were destined to be thieves and murderers. The “insane” could be cured.

And where there was a method to improving one’s life, there were people who would offer the perfect solution—for the right price. Ah yes, business and health were intricately linked for ages for the sake of profits, well before Pfizer made buckets of money on that certain blue pill tasked with keeping billions of penises perkily erect at a moment’s notice. While the academics tried to tease out the anatomical and clinical applications of phrenology, others were happily taking the money and running with it.

In the 1800s, you could get your head read for two pennies a pop. At a typical exam by a phrenologist, a customer’s head was felt for an hour or so, the examined bumps (each given a corresponding number) recorded on paper. A higher number correlated with better human potential. A motto for a family of phenologists at the time—the Fowlers—was “know thyself.”

The Fowlers didn’t just hawk their readings and their phrenological wares, including the porcelain busts with the locations of personal qualities mapped upon them. They published their own journal, and countless pamphlets and books, selling tens of thousands of copies yearly. They were more than happy to tell people how to live, how to eat, how to maintain their marriages, how to raise children, all based on the bumps on their skulls. During the Victorian era, the phrenologist became your closest counsel—they’d tell you who to hire in your home, or if someone was promising marriage material. Phrenology was no longer a discussion for upper echelon academics. It had been brought to a mass audience, by making it both entertainment and practical advice for every person.

One advertisement read almost as a warning: “Phrenological Predictions. Persons meditating any important change in their pursuits, parents, before deciding on a business or profession for their children, should consult this science, as their fortunes depend on the choice harmonizing with its predictions. Terms, five shillings and upwards.” [6]

Soon, it was all too easy for people to turn the corner and see someone to “get their head examined” and “shrink” the parts that were too commodious, by exorcising those behaviors to counteract that prominent bump. Words like “well rounded” spoke to an even mind and temperament to go with that skull. Phrenologists everywhere sold books, busts, charts, and skulls in addition to readings. Poorly trained practitioners were hard to distinguish from more properly trained ones. America was apparently replete with “humbug phrenologists,” “unprincipled quacks,” according to a follower of Spurzheim, Robert Collyer. [7] Still, Collyer also attracted a good deal of side-eye from academics for practicing phrenomagnetism, whereby he would put patients in a mesmeric trance and touch head bumps to manipulate them into bigger or lesser effects. For example, he might touch the bump correlating to self-esteem, giving the patient an arrogant expression. Phrenomagnetism became an embarrassment after mesmerism was attacked by medical journals in the 1830s to 1840s.

Science, it seemed, was the only thing that could finally stop a field that promised a panacea for every problem with probing fingers on every skull they could examine. By the 1840s, phrenology was soundly debunked. Those bumps, it turned out, did not correlate with where the faculties resided. But Gall’s original theory that there existed localized areas of the brain responsible for different faculties laid the groundwork for the future of neuroscience.

Still, a new device entered the public’s eye in the early twentieth century, and phrenology found another savior in Henry C. Lavery of Superior, Wisconsin. A deep believer in phrenology, Lavery created a device in 1905 that would take the guesswork out of phrenology practitioners and their very opinionated fingertips. He created the psycograph—which would both measure a person’s head shape and spit out a written assessment they would walk home with.

The psycograph was a metal helmet fitted with probes that touched parts of the head. The sensation ranged from ticklish to prickly. The probes then turned on a motor that received low-voltage signals from the probes (it measured size, not electrical brain waves) and printed out an assessment ranging from “deficient” to “superior” in thirty-two faculties.

So you, or your large-headed friend, or a grapefruit, or the neighbor’s gigantic garden zucchini could each wear the helmet and get a printout akin to a really detailed Magic 8-Ball answer of sorts. A typical subheading might say, “Suavity—Average—You can be pleasant, polite, and tactful with others, but with many people you achieve more by exercising more diplomacy and courtesy.” That’s right. It was also an asshole assessment.

Customers were also given a chart for finding a career, such as “zeppelin attendant” (they meant the blimp, not the band). A form would tell them what faculties were necessary or unnecessary in a particular career. Out of curiosity, I looked up the profession of “author” to see what I need to be concerned about.

Apparently, I don’t have to be concerned about “suavity” (see asshole comment above), “secretiveness” (propensity to be obnoxiously frank), and “sexaminty” (love life is severely unimportant). Very well. Apparently the psycograph can cause self-loathing, too.

The psycograph showed up in cinema lobbies and department stores, with the urging to “Get Your Head Examined.” But despite earning an astounding $200,000 at the world’s fair in Chicago in 1934, the psycograph didn’t stay popular. It’s hard to make a living on a science that most people knew was already a joke for over fifty years.

I doubt we will stop trying to discern our futures (or make assumptions about others) by evaluating our physical characteristics. We are always looking for the secrets whispered by fate in the vessels of our family blood lines, or the normal values in a lab test. We estimate our longevity the way an ancient merchant weighs out grains of opium for sale. How much time do we have? How can we squeeze out an extra high-quality year of life? How many pounds of daily kale does that require? Can you tell if that fellow over there is a criminal by his jawline? (Answer: you cannot; science has proved this.) And yet one thing I am sure of. We will all keep doing it. All of it.

Because no matter what, the future is often unknowable even to the most erudite of scholars. And despite the fact that we are all the same species of Homo sapiens, we will keep judging each other in ways that can be fatal. We will keep judging our own bodies and begging our very cells to own up to our destiny. I don’t need a psycograph to know all this. But very likely, I will continue, relentlessly, to give myself headaches by squinting at my own physiology for the secrets of my fate.

Know thyself. But don’t believe everything you hear.

***

1. Donald Simpson, “Phrenology and the Neurosciences: Contributions of F. J. Gall and J. G. Spurzheim,” ANZ Journal of Surgery 75, no. 6 (2005): 475–482.

2. Lionel Strachey et al., eds., The World’s Wit and Humor: An Encyclopedia of the Classic Wit and Humor of all Ages and Nations. (New York: The Review of Reviews Company, 1906); https://www.bartleby.com/380/, 2013.

3. Charlotte Bront​​ë, Jane Eyre (London: Penguin Classics, 2006), 154.

4. Bront​​ë, Jane Eyre, 205.

5. “Natural Capabilities of Negroes,” American Phrenological Journal, new series, VIII (June 1846): 197.

6. Phrenological Journal and Miscellany XI (1837–38): 342.

7. Robert Collyer, Lights and Shadows of American Life (Boston, n.d.), 15–17.

Lydia Kang is an author of young adult fiction, adult fiction and nonfiction, and poetry. She graduated from Columbia University and New York University School of Medicine, completing her residency and chief residency at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. She is a practicing physician who has gained a reputation for helping fellow writers achieve medical accuracy in fiction. Her most recent nonfiction book is Patient Zero: A Curious History of the World's Worst Diseases, co-authored with Nate Pedersen. She believes in science and knocking on wood, and currently lives in Omaha with her husband and three children.