Phrenology Skull

Phrenological Bust

“I’m fascinated, once again, with deluded idiocy,” Winchester said, referring to phrenology, the long-ridiculed study of a cranium’s shape and size as it relates to a person’s personality and abilities. “Not only do we have the legacy of these rather nice museum pieces—these charts on bone or plastic or china heads showing things like amativeness and weird qualities like that—but the person that unmasked it all and derided it and eventually sent all the phrenologists fleeing in disarray is Peter Roget of Roget’s Thesaurus. If you look up ‘phrenology’ in Roget’s Thesaurus today, you’ll see that he got the last laugh by linking it with palmistry and all these other similar lunacies.”