8 - Young Holmes and Phrenology in Boston

Summary

Samuel Clemenss changing views about phrenology and its purveyors did not occur in a vacuum. Here we see how he was not the first person or even the first American to use humor to poke fun at the doctrine or to “expose” how its purveyors operated in public venues. He was preceded by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Boston physician whose widely disseminated criticisms of phrenology helped open his eyes to the head readers and influenced how he would lampoon them. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1809, Holmes received his Harvard undergraduate degree in 1829 and then attended a private medical school closely associated with Harvard. He proved to be an exceptionally bright student with a penchant for writing poetry and prose. He bore witness to how phrenology was the talk of the town when Spurzheim arrived in Boston in 1832. Many of his teachers were interested in phrenology and he joined them to hear Spurzheim. He also kept notes on Spurzheim’s autopsy and read about phrenology. But although he might have been skeptical about how much might be gleaned about the brain by studying skulls, he did not reveal what he was thinking while still a student in Boston.