Creation Date
1826
Medium
Genre
Description
A man sits while a woman examines his head. The right side of the image shows a mapped skull placed on a table. This image satirically portrays a phrenological reading. Considering that may caricatures of phrenology are set in a consultation room or lecture hall, the lack of specific context may suggest a private setting. Significantly, the viewer is invited to draw obvious parallels between the heads featured in the image: all three are in some way visually separated from any body, they all fall on the same diagonal line, and both the phrenological examiner and the mapped head gaze upon the head of the man being examined.
Bless Me, What a Bump! participates in a larger tradition of phrenological satirization, poking fun at the pseudo-science's claim to an infallible "reading" of the subject while further commenting on the extent of its popularity. The image’s non-professional characters and setting stress phrenology’s role as a “scientific” tool that enables non-experts to “read” each other, both as a form of entertainment and as a way to acquire knowledge. From its start, phrenology was popular with members of the upper middle class; eventually it “trickled down to clerks, shopkeepers and artisans” who learned the art of phrenology from lectures or from pamphlets (Stearns 2). Popular culture was flooded with literature on phrenology; 64,250 volumes on phrenology were published between 1823 and 1836 (Stearns 1).
The mapped head was associated with phrenology from its earliest publications throughout the nineteenth century. It provided a useful map of the locations on the skull discussed in phrenological tracts. One contemporary reviewer explained, “The author’s mode of treating the subject is illustrated and rendered very intelligible by a plate of the human head having the organs delineated” (“The Phrenological System”).
Social caricature satirized popular trends not simply in order to entertain but also to inform or alter public opinion. Caricatures of phrenology taught the “clinical gaze” by illustrating the pseudo-science’s usefulness (or lack thereof) in the interpretation of human appearance and—because the exterior or visible was here equated with the interior or unknown—in the reading of human character (Foucault 103ff).
Associated Works
Copyright
Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. Copyright, 2009.
Collection
Accession Number
826.0.26
Additional Information
Combe, George. Outlines of Phrenology. 5th ed. London: Longman & Co., 1835. Print.
Cowling, Mary. The Artist as Anthropologist: The Representation of Type and Character in Victorian Art. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Print.
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.
Karp, Diane. "Madness, Mania, Melancholy: The Artist as Observer." Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin 80.342 (1984): 1-24. Print.
McLaren, Angus. "Phrenology: Medium and Message." The Journal of Modern History 46.1 (1974): 86-97. Print.
Patten, Robert. "Conventions of Georgian Caricature." Art Journal 43.4 (1983): 331-8. Print.
---. George Cruikshank's Life, Times, and Art: 1792-1835. Vol. 1. Rutgers UP, 1992. Print.
“The Phrenological System.” The Bristol Mercury 1697 (September 30, 1822). Print.
Spencer, Frank. History of Physical Anthropology. New York: Garland Pub., 1997. Print.
Stafford, Barbara Maria. Body Criticism: Imagining the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. Print.
---. "From 'Brilliant Ideas' to 'Fitful Thoughts': Conjecturing the Unseen in Late Eighteenth-Century Art." Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte 48.3 (1985): 329-63. Print.
Stearns, Peter N. “Popular Science and Society: The Phrenology Movement in Early Victorian Britain.” Journal of Social History 8.1 (1974): 1-20. Print.