Book Review: An Organ of Murder: Crime, Violence, and Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century America

• Author: Andreas Kuersten
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00938548221110452
• Published date: 01 November 2022
• Date: 01 November 2022
• Subject Matter: Book Review

CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR, 2022, Vol. 49, No. 11, November 2022, 1720 –1724.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/00938548221110452

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© 2022 International Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology

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BOOK REVIEW

Phrenology and Criminality

Thompson, C. E. (2021). An Organ of Murder: Crime, Violence, and Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century America.

Rutgers University Press. 259 pp, $28.95 paperback. ISBN 978-1-9788-1306-9.

At the turn of the 19th century, an innovative new mind ‘science’ emerged: phrenology.

In practice, it entails “reading the shape of the skull to interpret and predict powers of

mind and character” (p. 2). Though now an exemplar of pseudoscience, phrenology experi-

enced a brief but impactful heyday in the West in the 1800s.1 During this time, phrenolo-

gists ardently deployed their specialty to describe and forecast human psychology and

explain a bevy of social issues. Nothing, however, “caught their attention quite like criminal

vice” (Beshara, 2010, p. 37). Enter An Organ of Murder by Courtney Thompson, Assistant

Professor of History at Mississippi State University.

Professor Thompson received her doctorate in history from Yale University through the

Program in the History of Science and Medicine and has published extensively on medical

history and historical intersections of medicine, criminology, and criminal law. An Organ of

Murder is the culmination of her doctoral dissertation. In it, across six concise and lively

chapters, Professor Thompson charts the rise and fall of phrenology in 19th-century

America, phrenologists’ consistent “focus on the problem of crime and the criminal,” and

their intimate interactions with and influence on criminal legal thought and institutions

(p. 3). Her chief contentions are that phrenology was built on and around the study of incar-

cerated individuals, affected follow-on theories of crime, and continues to meaningfully

undergird prominent contemporary approaches to criminality. The first two claims are cred-

ibly supported; the third, less so. Nevertheless, the book has important implications for

modern criminology and criminalistics: it serves as a cautionary tale of a particularly mis-

guided ‘scientific’ search for homo criminalis.

Conceived by German physician Franz Joseph Gall, phrenology rests on the shrewd

insights that the brain is the core machinery of the mind and that mental functioning in the

brain is, to a meaningful extent, localized (Rose & Abi-Rached, 2013, p. 61). But Gall

asserted three further (problematic) premises: (1) the brain consists of “mental organs” with

distinct and consistent cerebral locations, each responsible for a specific mental faculty

(e.g., combativeness, cautiousness, wit, etc.); (2) the relative sizes of these organs in a per-

son indicate the strength or weakness of a given faculty and, thereby, individual cognitive

capacities and character; and (3) the contours of a skull can reveal the proportions of the

mental organs housed therein such that cranial shape conveys psychology (i.e., the skull is

a viewport to the mind). Those criminally inclined, for instance, allegedly possessed rela-

tively large “animal” or “selfish” organs (e.g., “destructiveness” and “acquisitiveness”) and

relatively small “moral” or “religious” organs (e.g., “benevolence” and “veneration”),

which predisposed them to offensive conduct (pp. 20–21).

1110452CJBXXX10.1177/00938548221110452Criminal Justice and BehaviorBook Review

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