Empire of Skulls: Phrenology, the Fowler Family, and New Nation’s Quest to Unlock the Secrets of the Mind

Stob (The Art of Public Speaking), a professor of American studies and communication studies at Vanderbilt, casts an uneven light on one family’s outsize role in the rise of phrenology. After tracing the pseudoscience’s foundations in German academia, the author tracks how the blue-blooded Fowler siblings—Orson, Lorenzo, and Charlotte—relentlessly advocated for phrenology in 19th-century America via lectures, heated arguments with skeptics, their own publishing house, and a Lower Manhattan storefront-cum-tourist attraction filled with skulls. Stob contextualizes their work within the era’s broader pop-culture amalgamation of self-improvement, celebrity, and spectacle, along the way providing numerous oddball anecdotes about the Fowlers’ examinations of subjects’ heads (a butcher’s child was deemed to have “extremely large Destructiveness,” accounting for his macabre glee at watching cattle being slaughtered). Stob also offers captivatingly bizarre profiles of the Fowlers themselves, especially Orson, who penned thousand-page books on sex and promoted octagon-shaped houses. However, the author’s fondness for the Fowlers and apparently earnest desire to reappraise phrenology, long associated with eugenics, leads him to, at times, downplay the siblings’ racist views. Similarly peculiar is a concluding section offering tips on “DIY phrenology” (“Whenever you examine a stranger, you’ll need to start a bit more carefully”). Such sour notes overshadow an otherwise morbidly fascinating tale of obsession. (Apr.)