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A Prehistory of the Social Sciences: Phrenology in France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Angus McLaren
Angus McLaren
Affiliation:
University of Victoria, British Columbia
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Extract

“Phrenology is of German origin: Vienna was its birthplace, Gall and Spurzheim its progenitors. But it was in France that it acquired its European eclat”, stated George Lewes in 1857. But he went on to declare that it was in America and Britain that the pseudo-science had its widest popularity amongst the “general thinking public”. The writing of the history of phrenology has also broken along national lines. Its impact on America and Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century has attracted the attention of a generation of young social historians, whereas its progress in France has drawn the interest only of historians of medicine.

Type
The Progress of Social Science
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , January 1981 , pp. 3 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1981

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References

I would like to thank Roger Cooter, Christopher Friedrichs, and Ludmilla Jordanova for their helpful comments and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its financial assistance.

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52 P. H. Frère and Armand Harembert drifted into magnetism, Henri Scoutten into electricity, E. A. Boisseuil and Theodore Labbey into homeopathy.

53 Edouard Seguin, who opened the first school for idiots in France, commented that though Gall was short-sighted in his analysis of mental problems, his denigrators were scarcely more gifted: “The authors who succeeded him: Georget, Esquirol, Lélut, Foville, Calmeil, Leuret, Pritchard, seem to have studied idiocy only to use its phenomena for the destruction of Gall's system, but not for the benefit of the poor idiots, whom they declared incurable”. Seguin's sympathy was no doubt sparked by his own interest in Saint-Simonian reformist policies. See Lane, , Wild Boy, 296.Google Scholar

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