The strange reason why Queen Victoria asked Edinburgh lawyer to run his fingers over her son Bertie's head

Spurzheim was in town looking for a showdown. His work, and the work of his then-friend and colleague Gall, had been called into question by Edinburgh doctors. Their new approach to the relationship between the human brain and personality had been given something of a kicking in the normally sober Edinburgh Review. The eminent Scottish anatomist James Gordon had labelled their findings as “trash, despicable trumpery”.

Spurzheim and Gall preferred the term ‘phrenology’. As part of his defence of their work, Spurzheim addressed his audience of Edinburgh worthies, and in the course of the evening, he dissected a human brain. Well, probably made a change from gentle discourse over a sherry.

Brains with lumps and bumps

Their theory was beguilingly simple. Human skulls are lumpy. Gall and Spurzheim believed that those lumps indicated bigger bits of brain under the bone. Surely, they suggested, these bulgy brain bits were controlling aspects of personality or talent. At school, Gall had observed that classmates with bulging eyes were good with words. He claimed musicians displayed bumps on each side of their heads.

Gall cut up a lot of brains, and finally announced that he believed the brain to be an aggregate of mental ‘organs’. Each one was responsible for different talents and uses. Gall identified 27 separate areas of the skull that indicated all sorts of talents and character traits from musical ability to criminal intent.

On that Edinburgh evening, as Spurzheim sliced his way through the temporal lobe and the cerebellum, he expanded on a theory that at last went some way to explaining madness, genius, joy and even criminality.

Moral behaviour explained?

George Combe was mesmerised, not an easy thing to do to an Edinburgh lawyer. He and his brother Andrew were very much products of Scotland's upwardly mobile and ambitious merchant/trader class. Their father had been a wealthy brewer, which must have helped to finance his sons' climb up the professional ladders. George went into law, Andrew medicine.

Both brothers became convinced that phrenology held the answers to those tricky questions of moral behaviour, but it was George who really took it and ran. He gave lectures, read voraciously and published his first essay on phrenology.

Notably, this was in the Scots Magazine, and not the Edinburgh Review. Finally in 1828, he published, ‘The Constitution of Man, Considered in Relation to External Objects’. It may not have been a snappy title by today’s standards, but it flew off the shelves and had a far-reaching impact.

How to read a skull

When George wasn’t writing, lecturing and producing pamphlets, he and his brother found the time to set up the Edinburgh Phrenological Society in 1820. It was to become the gold standard institute for Britains skull-stroking phrenologists.

The society was originally based out of a building near St Andrews Square. The energetic membership gave lectures, hosted debates and gave public demonstrations.

It was important to read the skull properly. Practitioners ran their hands and stoked their fingertips over the heads of their sitters to read the lumps and bumps. Porcelain heads, plaster casts and wall charts were produced to identify where ‘combativeness’ and ‘language’ were stored.

Royal patronage

Some practitioners even suggested that the skulls of children could be read and any potential problems in future life could be massaged and manipulated. Victorian families flocked to have the heads of their offspring carefully examined by a phrenologist. Should young Edwin show signs of over-development in ‘secrecy’ and ‘destruction’, just above the right ear, then steps could be taken to prevent the child turning into a closet arsonist.

Edinburgh phrenology hit the big time when Queen Victoria and Prince Albert summoned Combe himself to come and take a look at their son, Bertie. His behaviour had raised cause for concern.

Combe carefully ran his fingers over the princely scalp, but we are not privy to his findings. Whatever he suggested to the royal parents, it clearly didn’t work, since Bertie’s behaviour was a source of grief to his mother to her dying day.

As accurate as palm-reading

Phrenology seized the entire Empire. In 1820s India, George Murray Paterson, a Scottish surgeon with the East India Company, took his callipers to his students' heads. “On entrance every lad’s head was manipulated, measured and registered…, and every month afterwards it was regularly measured again, so that any slightest alteration might be noted with extreme accuracy.”

Sadly, this apparently medically endorsed belief opened the door to darker theories of race and superiority. Phrenology moved from the realm of mildly dotty to downright dangerous, like so many pseudosciences before and since.

The Edinburgh Review was right, all along It was quackery. A criminal’s brain floating in a jar looks pretty much the same as anyone else's, and a lump on the skull is not a sure fire way to spot a budding musical genius. Phrenology was really utter bilge, as accurate at foretelling future life prospects as palm-reading, and as useful a treatment as monkey-gland injections.

A lasting presence in Edinburgh

It fell from fashion like radioactive water. The last meetings were in 1870, but the phrenologists have left their mark on the city. The University of Edinburgh's Anatomical Museum holds their incredible collection of skulls and plaster casts. They take great and respectful care of those human remains. One of them is the skull of George Combe himself.

Phrenology’s last great achievement in Edinburgh was a museum on Chambers Street. It closed in 1886. Above one of the windows, the sculpted faces of Gall, Spurzheim and Combe still stare out, perhaps looking for tell-tale lumps on the passers-by.