Materials of the Mind: Phrenology, Correspondence, and the Global History of Science, 1815-1920

In 1828, the Edinburgh phrenologist George Combe (1788-1858) published his now famous work, The Constitution of Man. Over the course of the nineteenth century, this book sold more than 300,000 copies, and was translated into at least six different languages, including Bengali and Japanese. From American senators to Indian social reformers, phrenology soon found supporters stretching across the globe. These individuals were bound together by the increasingly globalised postal networks of the nineteenth century. In this paper, I explore how phrenologists used the postal service to build a global movement. In doing so, I focus particularly on the materiality of these networks along with the objects that were sent alongside letters. These objects include skulls collected in the Arctic, plaster busts manufactured in Paris, and phrenological charts printed in Bengal. This focus on materiality also allows me to explore the limits of phrenology as a global scientific movement, suggesting the ways in which particular people and regions were cut out of the story. More broadly, this paper suggests how the global history of science can be written through the global history of material culture. In the nineteenth century, what it meant to be a global science of the mind was in part a product of global material exchange.