Creation Date
1847
Height
19 cm
Width
11 cm
Medium
Genre
Description
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").
Phrenological illustrations published by Fowler and Wells and others allowed untrained Americans to conduct their own phrenological readings. Similar illustrations were available to a British audience throughout the 1800s. The mapped head was essential in a non-expert examination as it allowed even the lay “reader” to “project upon the living body a whole network of anatomo-pathological mappings: to draw the dotted outline of the future autopsy” in order “to bring to the surface that which is layered in depth” (Foucault 200). Ultimately, however, phrenological guides trained the nineteenth-century reader in a gaze which privileged the exterior and the scientific—a gaze Michel Foucault identified as the "clinical gaze" (Foucault 103ff).
The image depicts a hairless head, with numbers mapped upon the exposed skin and face, indicating the location of the organs. The corresponding text identifies which characteristic or faculty is associated with each number.
Associated Works
Copyright
Copyright 2009, Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI
Collection
Accession Number
BF 870.F6
Additional Information
Bibliography
“Article VI.” American Phrenological Journal. (1841): 185-9. Print.
Colbert, Charles. A Measure of Perfection. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997. Print.
Combe, George. Outlines of Phrenology. 5th ed. London: Longman & Co., 1835. Print.
Dames, Nicholas. "The Clinical Novel: Phrenology and 'Villette.'" NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction29.3 (1996): 367-390. Print.
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.
Fowler, Orson Squire. Fowler’s Practical Phrenology: Giving a Concise Elementary View of Phrenology. New York: Fowler & Wells, 1847. Print.
The Phrenological Journal and Miscellany Vol. 3. (August, 1825 – October, 1826): Edinburgh, 1826. Print.
“The Phrenological System.” The Bristol Mercury 1697 (September 30, 1822). Print.
Spencer, Frank. History of Physical Anthropology. New York: Garland Pub., 1997. Print.
Wrobel, Arthur. "Whitman and the Phrenologists: The Divine Body and the Sensuous Soul." PMLA 89.1 (1974): 17-23. Print.