Why is phrenology considered a pseudoscience

To learn more, view our Privacy Policy. To browse Academia. Franz Gall founded phrenology in the late eighteenth century. It represented the first attempt to understand the human mind in naturalistic terms. Phrenology would evolve into the paradigmatic pseudoscience of the nineteenth century, but its insistence on its naturalistic methodology ironically served to spread faith science.

Phrenology had enjoyed widespread, if controversial, application within Western medicine in the century's first decades, but by the s, it had been marginalised and largely branded as quackery, as laboratory-based biomedicine increasingly monopolised the medical marketplace.

Phrenology chart

Phrenology began in the late eighteenth century under the Viennese physician Franz Joseph Gall, who argued that the brain is an aggregate of mental 'organs' , each with localised and specific functions such as fidelity, ambition, or poetic talent. The larger the organ, the greater the corresponding faculty, which could be measured by the size and shape of the skull.

Thus, phrenology could explain the relative strengths and weaknesses of a person's mind and character. Although phrenology's claims were not substantiated by experimental scientific method, historians of science have traced the real and lasting impact of Gall's thinking, from the diffusion of scientific naturalism that prepared the public for Darwinian evolution, to its influence upon fields as diverse as.

Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, The history of phrenology in France has a number of unique features. It was in that country that F. Gall sought refuge; and it was, above all, in France that phrenology would subsequently attempt to establish its credentials as a new physiological science of the mind. Up until the s, phrenology expanded rapidly in the country, a growth that coincided with attempts to provide this new field with the trappings of respectable scientific endeavor-courses of lectures, learned societies, journals, and so on.

This ambitious intellectual project, despite its controversial nature, made a major cultural impact in the nineteenth century, both through its influence on the written word-from learned journals to the novel-and via its striking visual imagery sculpture, anatomical diagrams and models, engravings, caricatures, and so on.