The history of science is pretty interesting; all sorts of discoveries — and entire fields of study — have flourished, only to be eventually disproven. This is still going on; just look at the news in the past few weeks about a “room-temperature superconductor,” or think back a few years to “cold fusion.”
Charlotte Fowler Wells, who was born August 14, 1814, became a leading scientist in one of those fields that no longer exists, and even founded a publishing company to popularize her own and her colleagues’ work. And at the time, many people were convinced it was a real area of scientific inquiry.
Fowler’s field was phrenology, the idea that the shape of your head is associated with various kinds of abilities and behavioral tendencies. The theoretical basis for the science was established by Franz Joseph Gall in 1796, and held that different areas of the human brain were responsible for different aspects of a person. Those “aspects” were sometimes a bit odd; if you had a bump in a particular place at the back of your head (to make more room for this part of the brain), you would be well equipped with “philoprogenitiveness.” And if you had a lot of that, it meant you particularly loved your children. There were supposed to be 27 of these “mental facilities,” which worked like muscles in that the “stronger” they were, the larger they became, and of course the skull would have to stretch to make room. The bumpier your head, the more talented you should be, I guess.
But back to Charlotte (I’m using her first name because there are other people named both Fowler and Wells in this story). She had two older brothers who were deeply involved in phrenology, and she opened a school to teach the first classes in phrenology in the US. Her publishing business was sparked by Samuel Wells, who learned phrenology beginning with a chart created by Charlotte herself (when she was just a teenager) — he helped organize and run the business, and in 1844 Charlotte and Samuel were married. They worked together for the next 31 years. Wells and the brothers travelled extensively, promoting both phrenology and selling books, and Charlotte ran the business single-handed. She became the vice president of the American Institute of Phrenology, served as the de-facto editor of the American Phrenological Journal (which her company published), and in 1863 helped found the New York Medical College for Women — which actually taught things besides phrenology.
It’s not clear whether Charlotte ever acknowledged the evidence that phrenology was, not to be blunt, nonsense and based on disproven theories, but she may have. She lived until 1901, when it was generally recognized that phrenology was just pseudoscience — but at the time there were still “believers,” so she may have been one of them. But either way, for a woman in the 1800s in the US, she was amazingly accomplished. There is at least one surviving photograph of her, when she was in her late 70s, and strangely enough, her head doesn’t look lumpy at all.
