A changing society was ready for new ideas to explain the functions of the brain and many people welcomed the doctrine of Phrenology (Critchley, 1965). People began to believe less in God and phrenology offered an innovative view, starting to question both materialism and fatalism. After an attack on phrenology by the Edinburgh Review, which was a very highly respected magazine, the Edinburgh Phrenological Society decided to accommodate the science to become appealing to the public. The Society thrived on large debates, pulling in huge crowds, and after the Edinburgh Review refused to publish one of their debates, Phrenologists started publishing their own journal ‘The Phrenological Journal and Miscellany’. This gave them a lot more freedom
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Within a short period of time, 40 to 50 phrenological societies were founded across the country. A couple of years after Spurzheim's death, Orson Squire Fowler, a student minister, and his younger brother Lorenzo Niles Fowler became itinerant lecturer-practitioners of phrenology (Lilleleht, 2015). They sponsored the monthly American Phrenological Journal and operated a very popular phrenological museum that contained thousands of skulls, casts, and paintings illustrating phrenological principles. Moreover, during the ninetieth century, Phrenology was used to justify slavery and abolition in United States as well as in other parts of the world (finding converts among reform-minded Bengalis in Kolkata, India, and colonial settlers in Australia). A representative example of this in the popular culture was given in the American movie Django Unchained by Quentin Tarantino. In the movie, Calving Candie (Leonardo Dicaprio) used phrenology to justify racist discrimination and slavery since the skull bump associated with "submissiveness" was supposed to be greater developed in African Americans. Nevertheless, this fictional character was based on real-life Charles Caldwell, a doctor from Kentucky who reveled in both phrenology and slave ownership. In 1837 he wrote to a friend claiming that "amiableness" explained the apparent ease with which African Americans could be enslaved. This was a standard phrenological argument. Areas located towards the top and back of the skull, such as "veneration" and "cautiousness", were routinely claimed to be large in African Americans and for this reason it was right to make them
Within a short period of time, 40 to 50 phrenological societies were founded across the country. A couple of years after Spurzheim's death, Orson Squire Fowler, a student minister, and his younger brother Lorenzo Niles Fowler became itinerant lecturer-practitioners of phrenology (Lilleleht, 2015). They sponsored the monthly American Phrenological Journal and operated a very popular phrenological museum that contained thousands of skulls, casts, and paintings illustrating phrenological principles. Moreover, during the ninetieth century, Phrenology was used to justify slavery and abolition in United States as well as in other parts of the world (finding converts among reform-minded Bengalis in Kolkata, India, and colonial settlers in Australia). A representative example of this in the popular culture was given in the American movie Django Unchained by Quentin Tarantino. In the movie, Calving Candie (Leonardo Dicaprio) used phrenology to justify racist discrimination and slavery since the skull bump associated with "submissiveness" was supposed to be greater developed in African Americans. Nevertheless, this fictional character was based on real-life Charles Caldwell, a doctor from Kentucky who reveled in both phrenology and slave ownership. In 1837 he wrote to a friend claiming that "amiableness" explained the apparent ease with which African Americans could be enslaved. This was a standard phrenological argument. Areas located towards the top and back of the skull, such as "veneration" and "cautiousness", were routinely claimed to be large in African Americans and for this reason it was right to make them