Phrenology - the science of the brain localization of mental functions - was popular in the 19th century. In Europe, North and South America, doctors carefully measured the skulls of patients. Their work was monitored by the police. After all, the new technique could become an important help along with the doctrine of the uniqueness of skin lines - dactyloscopy.
For some anatomy enthusiasts, the police helped to get biological material for research - fresh heads of criminals of pronounced specialties: murderers, swindlers, robbers. Thus, a powerful weapon was forged from the scum of the city bottom to protect the citadel of law.
MAN OF ONE IDEA
The creator of phrenology Franz Josef Gall was born on March 9, 1758 in the Austrian city of Tiefenbrunn. He was a man of one idea, to which he devoted his whole life.
The idea from which phrenology subsequently arose came to Franz Josef in childhood, literally at his desk. At school, he noticed that all his peers with particularly good memories had slightly bulging eyes. The curious idea of goggle-eyed cramps found a warm response from Gall's negligent classmates.
The boy, who earned his approval, decided to develop the initiative and made several more similar discoveries. Then again and again. Observations began to form a system: the shape of the head, unique for each person, with hollows, planes and bumps, clearly demonstrated the character traits. Franz Josef was so interested in the revealed truth that by the time he graduated from school he did not lose interest in his hobby. He noticed and compared.
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The hobby grew into a habit, the habit determined the fate. Gall decided to become a doctor. In 1785 he
received a medical degree from the University of Vienna and soon became widely known not only as a brilliant medical practitioner, but also as a gifted lecturer who charmed wide circles of the Viennese intelligentsia in a new way to characterize people by their appearance.
For Gall, a quick glance at the interlocutor was enough to predict how he would behave in a given situation. It was amazing. Much more surprising was the fact that the miracle had a completely scientific basis. Gall willingly revealed the secrets of the "trick" to the public.
There was no shortage of listeners at the doctor's lectures. Vienna at that time was the scientific center of the Old World. In terms of importance, it was surpassed only by the cultural center - Paris. Dr. Gall tasted the fame he deserved in both cities.
I AM THE FATHER OF ANOTHER SCIENCE
At the insistence of the highest circles of the Austrian clergy, the authorities banned lectures on cephaloscopy in 1802 (this was the name of the new science). For some time, Dr. Gall continued to work with a narrow circle of students, but in 1805 he was forced to leave an inhospitable country.
For two years he moved from Berlin to Switzerland, from there to Holland and France, until he settled in Paris, a stronghold of free thought, where he gained real fame: a collection of human and animal skulls replenished at the expense of the Academy of Sciences, a complete collection of works, students who became recognized authorities in medicine. Still not old, Franz Josef Gall saw the triumphant march of the system he developed, which received the well-established name "phrenology".
Gall himself did not recognize this term. “They call me the father of a new science - phrenology. But this is not the case. The word "phrenology" was introduced by my student Spurzheim. I am against this term and use the terms "kefaloscopy", "cranioscopy", "craniology", - he wrote in his multivolume work "Anatomy and physiology of the nervous system in general and in particular the brain."
Dr. Gall died on August 22, 1828 in the vicinity of Paris, in Montrouge, and was buried in the Pere Lachaise cemetery without a head, which he bequeathed to replenish his collection. By this time, his teaching had stepped far beyond the ocean and into the vastness of Russia.
TURGENEV, PUSHKIN AND OTHERS
In Russia, a new scientific fad spread at a truly great speed and captured many enlightened minds. Let us recall at least "a small plaster head, divided into numbered quadrangles" in the study of Father Bazarov from "Fathers and Children". And this is understandable, because Bazarov the elder was a district doctor.
However, Gall's teachings were popular among people far from medicine. So, Lermontov, describing Dr. Werner, on behalf of Pechorin, among other things, remarks: "He cut his hair under a comb, and the irregularities of his skull, exposed in this way, would have amazed the phrenologist with a strange interweaving of opposite inclinations."
The Gall system and people from Pushkin's inner circle were also taken seriously. A friend of the poet, II Pushchin, recalling the life of the lyceum, and in particular of the lyceum's uncle Sazonov, wrote about him that it was “an extraordinary physiological phenomenon; Gall would undoubtedly find confirmation of his system in his skull."
Gall's ideas are also mentioned by Pushkin himself. The earliest of these is in a letter to Anna Kern from 1825. Semi-seriously, half-humorously suggesting that she leave her husband and come to him in Mikhailovskoye, Pushkin sees one of the prerequisites for such an act in Kern's "highly developed organ of flight."
In the poem "Count Nulin" the hero at night unmistakably finds his way to the touch, for, according to the draft version, he "had an organ in local memory according to Gallova."
The organ of local memory (aka the organ of love for travel) was indeed among the brain organs mentioned by Halle. In his multivolume work, he was listed under the number XIII, manifested by two protuberances located from the root of the nose to the middle of the forehead.
People who have a pronounced local memory, or a sense of the locality, according to Gall, tend to travel. Gall believed that these properties are inherent primarily in birds, in connection with which Pushkin, in relation to Kern, poetically calls the part of the brain in charge of them "the organ of flight."
But if in Russia "Gallova cranioscopy" gained popularity mainly in the medical and literary circles, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean it turned to the population with an ominous side.
UNSUCCESSFUL EXPERIMENT
Dr. Gall's assistant Spurzheim and his students brought a lot of new things into the science of phrenology he promoted. In particular, the role of the influence of cerebral gyri and their forms on the formation of character traits. An active popularizer, Spurzheim infected the scientists of the New World with his ideas.
At the end of the 19th century, Buenos Aires was considered the Paris of South America. The huge and rich port city was a haven of brutal crime. The police dared to enter the labyrinths of seaside slums only during the day and in large detachments.
A real war with shooting, massacre and hostage-taking was going on between law enforcement agencies and thieves kings. Both sides committed atrocities. Against the background of this eerie specificity of the urban criminal situation, the black star of Adolfo Pedro Ribeira has risen.
Unsurprisingly, Buenos Aires police were actively interested in any means of crime prevention. The promising science of phrenology was no exception. If the criminals can be identified by fingerprints, then the replenishment of their army can be suppressed by taking measurements of the head of the newcomers - apparently, this is how the officials of the city police reasoned when the forensic doctor Ribeira offered to assist in the preparation of a phrenological atlas.
In return, Ribeira promised a reliable method for determining a person's criminal inclinations. For this, the authorities of Buenos Aires were ready to make a deal with the devil himself.
Ribeira asked for the heads of bandits, gamblers, prostitutes and thieves to be examined. The detectives met, and soon the doctor plunged into intense work. In 1890, Adolfo Pedro Ribeira published an illustrated atlas, a significant part of which was devoted to the description of the features of the convolutions and skulls of criminals of various professions.
The illustrations showed photographs of dissected heads with exposed areas of the brain and cranial bones. The Atlas was provided with rich explanations.
The crime in Buenos Aires has not been reduced. Phrenology did not develop. Already at the end of the 19th century, it was officially recognized as a pseudoscience in all European countries, and this position remains unchanged to this day. True, in the 1930s, the Nazis tried to revive it to confirm the theory of racial superiority. But that's a completely different story.
Yuri GAVRYUCHENKOV