You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Phrenology was the most popular mental science of the Victorian age. From American senators to Indian social reformers, this new mental science found supporters stretching around the globe. Materials of the Mind tells the story of how phrenology changed the world--and how the world changed phrenology. This is a story of skulls from the Arctic, plaster casts from Haiti, books from Bengal, and letters from the Pacific. Drawing on far-flung museum and archival collections, and addressing sources in six different languages, Materials of the Mind is the first substantial account of science in the nineteenth century as part of global history. It shows how the circulation of material culture underpinned the emergence of a new materialist philosophy of the mind, while also demonstrating how a global approach to history could help us reassess issues such as race, technology, and politics today.
The dome of thought is the first study of phrenology based primarily on the popular – rather than medical – appreciation of this important and controversial pseudoscience. With detailed reference to the reports printed in popular newspapers from the early years of the nineteenth century to the fin de siècle, the book provides an unequalled insight into the Victorian public’s understanding of the techniques, assumptions and implications of defining a person’s character by way of the bumps on their skull. Highly relevant to the study of the many authors – Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, among them – whose fiction was informed by the imagery of phrenology, The dome of thought will prove an essential resource for anybody with an interest in the popular and literary culture of the nineteenth century, including literary scholars, medical historians and the general reader.