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I was reading November's Discovery magazine and came across a picture of a skull from the 19th century owned by Napoleon III's physician to study and teach phrenology. Got to show it to my fiance who just finished reading Seventh Son, not believing the practice was real.
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My personal favorite is in Pratchett's Discworld books (forget which exactly) where Sam Vimes runs through the office of a Retro-Phrenologist.
Stands to reason, of course, that if you can read personality traits and other things by examining bumps on the head, you can certainly induce personality traits and such by creating new bumps on the head.
Usually with a large mallet.
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Sadly, phrenology has been used to lampoon psychology ever since, despite the progress made in the field. When phrenology was in vogue, physicians were still bleeding patients and worrying about "humors."
Heck, the germ theory of disease wasn't even universally believed by physicians (despite the knowledge since the late 17th century that microbes existed in samples from diseased patients.)
Ah well. phrenology persited into the mid 1800's as a respected "science" before being discredited.
The history of science and medicine, especially as it relates to the mind and personality, is full of stuff that is just laughable in retrospect.
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Oh, here we go with that PC bs. 'Don't dis leeches! Don't dis hookworms! Don't dis Karl Rove!' My Bob, you bleeding-heart liberals make me sick!
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It's funny now to realize that while you can't tell much from external bumps, in fact the brain DOES shape the skull inside (as the skull shapes the brain) and certainly human brains do differ from other animals' brains in the relative size of different brain areas ... which has an influence on the shape of the skull. The phrenologists were rightish in theory, sort of, but hopelessly unable to access the information they sought through the methods available to them.
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Certainly by looking at (or toward) the physical brain, they were coming closer to finding the source of madness than Freud was by looking at your mother's childhood treatment of you.
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I'm not a fan of Freud—and his harmful, absurd excesses—but if you're saying that all mental illness is rooted in physiology, and none of it in experience, I don't agree.
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Well, he didn't say that. He just said that looking at the brain was more of a right direction in the search for madness than what Freud was doing.
Although, to be fair, Freud was more interested in the workings of "normal" minds, I think. Or at least, the workings of a mind within a physiologically normal brain, it seems a bit of a stretch to call the Freudian mind normal just because the brain is undamaged.
My own analysis of the concepts involved suggests that a behavior pattern resulting entirely from a physically normal brain cannot be "illness" unless we accept the term as being rather vague in actual meaning. Which I think it is, really.
But then again, Card used the less popular but much more precise term "madness".
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