Cranioklepty by Colin Dickey Page B

106
    But it was Ambrose Bierce who perhaps put it most eloquently and succinctly in his
The Devil’s Dictionary
: “Phrenology: n. The science of picking the pocket through the scalp. It consists of locating and exploiting the organ that one is a dupe with.” 107
    The Fowlers took it all in stride. Phrenologists had always viewed this resistance to their creed as a badge of pride, proof that bump reading was so revolutionary that the institutions of science were unready for it. One was either predisposed to find truth in it or not. “Self-made or never made” was the Fowlers’ favorite motto, and it could apply not just to their brand of reform and self-betterment but also to one’s own view of phrenology—either you believed in it or you didn’t. But in that dark decade leading up to the American Civil War, and in the bleak years that followed it, there were a lot of anxious souls looking for comfort, and for twenty-five cents one could be reassured not only of one’s innate goodness and intelligence but also of one’s capacity to better the world. It seemed a small price to pay.
    P HRENOLOGY WAS A
science for an uncertain time, and perhaps no one exemplified this better than the phrenologist andrevolutionary Gustav von Struve. The young Struve had come to Mannheim in Baden, Germany, to practice law, but his ambitions quickly grew. He began actively to promote both phrenology and radical reform, which he saw as inextricably linked.
    Ever since Gall’s expulsion from Vienna, German-speaking countries had lagged behind the rest of Europe when it came to phrenology. For Struve, this rejection accounted for Germany’s lack of progress and why it still lay captive to oppressive religious and aristocratic regimes. He set out to remedy the problem, co-founding the German-language
Phrenological Journal
and advocating tirelessly for the New Science. Combe recognized the value of his contributions in his own
A System of Phrenology
, and the Fowlers regularly translated excerpts of his work in their own journal. His colleague Alexander Herzen claimed that Struve was so devoted to phrenology that he deliberately chose a wife who lacked a “passion” bump. 108
    Struve’s own passion was for political and social reform. He argued for vegetarianism and temperance, against capital punishment. He set aside a portion of every day to meditate on the great secular heroes of revolution, from Washington and Lafayette to Rousseau and Robespierre. Contemporaries described Struve as having a face that “showed the moral rigidity of the fanatic . . . with uncombed beard and untroubled eyes,” but he was sincerein his desire for reform, and in 1847 he dropped the aristocratic “von” from his name in solidarity with the common man.

    Gustav Struve.
    Mario Vargas Llosa, in his 1984 novel
The War at the End of the World
, would reincarnate this archetype of the revolutionary phrenologist and put him in South America. An amalgamation of Struve and Combe, Llosa’s character, a Scotsman who takes the name Galileo Gall, comes to Brazil to foment revolution: “As other children grew up listening to fairy stories, he had grown up hearing that property is the origin of all social evils and that the poor will succeed in shattering the chains of exploitation and obscurantismonly through the use of violence.” Inextricable from this revolutionary fervor is a fervor for phrenology:
    Whereas for other followers of Gall’s, this science was scarcely more than the belief that intellect, instinct, and feelings are organs located in the cerebral cortex and can be palpated and measured, for Galileo’s father this discipline meant the death of religion, the empirical foundation of materialism, the proof that the mind was not what philosophical mumbo jumbo made it out to be, something imponderable and impalpable, but on the contrary a dimension of the body, like the senses,