Samuel George Morton: The Father Of Phrenology

Phrenology is the study of the physical shape of the skull to determine the intellectual and emotional characteristics of an individual. In the 18th century, early phrenologists were interested in the brain; however, technology that allowed for the study of a brain within a living person (such as MRI’s) did not exist. As a result, phrenologists hypothesized that the outside layer indicated something about the inside matter. This pseudoscience grounded itself in the flawed assumption that bumps and dents on the surface of the cranium found through a visible examination served as a measure of mental capacity.
Researchers in the 19th century pondered the question of whether or not the skull was indicative of intellectual ability. This interest
Historically, there was already research on the crania for the same purpose by Samuel George Morton. The “Samuel George Morton Papers” by the American Philosophical Society provides an overview of his career. He was known as the father of the field of craniometry, the measurement of the craniums. As the founder of craniometry, he was passionate in researching human skulls and started collecting them in 1830. His job, however, was not limited to researching, he was also a physician, natural scientist, and anatomy professor at Pennsylvania Medical College. Consequently, he became a respectable man who was trusted to analyze skulls that were donated by people from all around the world. His collection comprised of more than 600 skulls that allowed him to develop techniques to measure them. With this, Morton developed a hypothesis to prove that racial differences could be recognized from the skull itself. He conducted experiments with a bias mindset to record data that only matched his hypothesis. The public was blind to the unreliability of his research and considered “his work in craniology and craniometry …the most enduring of [his] scientific contributions” (“American Philosophical Society”). This wide acceptance of his research was due to the racial superiority of Caucasians at that time. Ultimately, Morton’s research supported the idea of scientific
Race science was a pseudoscience used to justify the belief of racism. It was a way to group individuals into racial categories based on physical characteristics resulting from different phenotypes. Scientists tried to find a correlation between phenotype and intellectual capabilities. This correlation was then used to create a hierarchy of mental intelligence based on race. With Morton’s “research”, he concluded that the brain volume of races in descending order was Caucasian, Mongolian, Malay, Native American, and Negro (Menand 110). Menand analyzes much of the data reported in Morton book, Crania America. In the book, Morton goes into depth describing each race with specific physical and mental characteristics. He describes Caucasians with having faces that are “small in proportion to the head, of an oval form with well-proportional features” and is “distinguished for the facility with which it attains the highest intellectual endowments” (Morton). Whereas he describes African Americans as “[appearing] to be fond of war life enterprises…”. Much of his report consists of stereotypes put on a group of people. He uses the phrase “appearing to be” illustrating that his conclusions relied on observations unsupported by numbers or data. Morton’s bias resulted in a lack of tangible intellectual descriptions not based on prevailing