Abstract
Courtney Thompson's An Organ of Murder joins the body of research that prompts us to think seriously about phrenology. Contra the easy temptation to dismiss phrenology as a quackish pseudoscientific fad, historians has shown that it constituted a serious and respectable attempt at progressive and reform-minded explanation of human behavior. Phrenology, uncomfortably, is a forerunner of significant portions of the contemporary human sciences. However, its precise relationship to the history of criminology has remained obscured. Does phrenology's status as one of the first systematic and putatively scientific frameworks for explaining crime mean that criminology is in some way indebted to or influenced by it? Or did criminologists successfully rationalize away these outdated beliefs about skulls and disordered mental organs.
Thompson's answer is decidedly that phrenology occupies a central place in the history of criminology and managed to “inflect the discourse of criminal science and medical jurisprudence” (163) long after it faded from popularity. Focusing in particular on American phrenology from roughly 1830 to 1860, Thompson emphasizes the centrality of crime, criminals, and prisons to the phrenological project. Criminals were the ultimate test cases and proofs of concept for phrenologist, because crime offered a specific set of behaviors that could be predicted. And prisons offered repositories of skulls and bodies already matched to those behaviors, which phrenologists could explain or “predict” (even after the fact) to demonstrate their authority. But phrenology was also culturally influential in its visual representation of deviance and in the tools it provided to jurists who desired observable and verifiable indicia of responsibility. In establishing popular images of criminals or medicolegal frameworks, Thompson suggests that phrenology has lived a full afterlife.
An Organ of Murder is short and accessible, organized into six chapters that are mostly chronological (some temporal overlap is inevitable to organize the different themes Thompson discusses). Chapters 1 and 2 deal with the emergence of phrenology in the United States early in the 19th century, including a detailed treatment of the medical professor Charles Caldwell, an early American adopter of French phrenology, and a study of the professional reception of European phrenology within American medicine and law. These chapters chart concrete transatlantic connections in proto-criminological theory. Chapter 3 discusses the legal significance of phrenology and its use in trials, and is well written, though some material may be familiar. Chapters 4 and 5 deal most directly with phrenology and punishment. Chapter 4 is concerned with phrenological uses of the prison, ranging from the skulls and bodies of the condemned to the prison as a site of validation for the phrenologists’ supposed predictive powers. Chapter 5 describes the imagination of phrenology as a social model of discipline, including suggestions that it offered prescriptions for child-rearing, tracking, education, and the policing of youth. Chapter 6 and the epilogue both consider the afterlives of phrenology. Chapter 6 observes that the ultimate triumph of the phrenologists is the existence of books such as Thompson's: they have secured their place in the history of the human and psychological sciences. The epilogue finds echoes of phrenology in recent resurgences of biological and predictive criminology, including studies on face imaging and body ratios. Thompson forces the reader to consider whether the impulses behind the phrenological project remain animating forces in contemporary research.
The book will be of clear interest to those interested in phrenology, but it will also be relevant to scholars working in the history of criminology and punishment. One reason is Thompson's excellent demonstration of phrenology's reliance on the prison, which raises larger questions about criminology's relationship with confinement. Thompson argues that phrenologists were publicly reformist while depending on a severe system of punishment to generate the materials for their research. Prison studies are certainly not exceptions in the history of criminology, and Thompson's work invites us to reflect on the larger problem of whether an etiological criminology can truly be reformist. One thinks of Nicole Rafter’s (1998) point that eugenic criminologists constructed mental inferiority to justify their own mental superiority; it turns out that this was already an old trick by the end of the 19th century.
Another point of general interest in Thompson's work is its focus on transatlantic connections. Cyrille Fijnaut (2017) and others have pointed out the need for more consciously international work in the history of criminology, a challenge that researchers are only beginning to answer. Thompson carefully charts the international exchanges and conceptual transformations that produced a more local body of American criminological knowledge. Thompson succeeds in bringing the international history of criminology to life within a local context.
Thompson's work also calls attention to visual aspects of criminology's history. Visual criminology has included explorations of Lombroso's sketches and later photographs, but Thompson reproduces materials ranging from early 19th-century pamphlets to later advertisements for phrenological lectures. She demonstrates how phrenologists constructed the image of the lazy, the thief, and other categories of social deviant. One image, the “Two Paths of Life,” (117) reproduced from an 1855 issue of the American Phrenological Journal, shows the possibility inherent within any child to follow a noble or deviant course of life. The visual representation of life courses suggests not only that phrenological organs shape behaviors, but that behaviors shape the skull and organs (sloping the forhead, elongating the nose), thus ensuring that crime can be read from appearances. The intersection of history of criminology and visual criminology in this book is welcome.
Thompson's own analysis of the book's contribution to the history of criminology does not always feel well situated within the existing literature. Her claim that the book “decenters the traditional history of criminology, which has located its origins in 1870 s Continental positivism,” (4) does describe a certain old style of textbook history, but feels dated in a world after Bierne, Rafter, Rock, and many others. I am not convinced that a book published in 2021 can claim to show that we should not regard Lombroso as the origin of criminology. Thompson seems interested in contributing to the history of criminology, but mostly engages literature in the related (but not precisely overlapping) space of the history of science and technology. It would have been interesting to read how Thompson views phrenology's relationship to a subtler and messier development of the science of criminal man. Nonetheless, An Organ of Murder will prove interesting and helpful to scholars working in the history of criminology and punishment.
