Phrenology

By the time Frances Ida Jones, of Oak Hill Cottage, had the bumps on her head recorded by American phrenologist Orson Fowler in 1871, the pseudoscience had been widely discredited by the elite of the medical professions. But it had persisted as a money-maker for its practitioners. 

Fowler was one of the best-known promoters of phrenology in the United States from the 1840s onwards along with his brother Lorenzo Fowler, their partner Samuel Wells, and Lorenzo’s wife Lydia. In addition to publishing periodicals and books on the subject, he was on the road doing lectures and readings in hotels like the Hutchins House in Houston, Texas where this one took place. The traveling phrenology business also included the sale of phrenology busts like the one found in the Jones family collection.

Phrenology carried with it the baggage of being used as racist apology, but it did have a deterministic quality in that instruction was given in “cultivation” and “restraint” of the characteristics that a person needed to improve. Lady Jones dogeared the pages at “Amativeness; sexuality, gender, and the love element”  in which she rated  highest, and at “Self-esteem” where she rated lowest.

Charts and books were central to establishing authenticity and authority to the patient, at a time when reading something printed on paper or in a book was the equivalent to the modern “I saw it on the internet”. Some saw it as authority, while others recognized its invalidity. There was money to be made off of the former.

Back at Oak Hill Cottage, the inscriptions in this little book are a clue, along with saved hotel menus through different traveling seasons, that Frances Ida Jones may have gone on the road with the doctor more than we ever previously suspected.