What Is Phrenology?

Phrenology is a pseudoscience that was both popular and widely respected in the 19th century. Its practitioners claimed to be able to assess a person's character by feeling the indentations in the skull. They believed that distinct parts of the brain corresponded exactly to the presence of certain qualities in a person's mind, for example that one part of the brain may be responsible for kindness, another for intelligence and so on. Furthermore, they thought that the physical size of each of the relevant parts of the brain determined the extent of this quality in the person, and that the shape of the skull in each part was proportionate to the size of the brain inside at that point.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries it was common for people to receive phrenological readings in much the way that people visit astrologers or palm-readers to have their fortunes "told" today.

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