Edinburgh Phrenological Society

rdf:langString Edinburgh Phrenological Society

rdf:langString Edinburgh Phrenological Society

rdf:langString Edinburgh Phrenological Society

rdf:langString an unmarked bay window

rdf:langString The Society's former museum in Chambers Street, Edinburgh bears sculpted portraits of prominent figures in the field of phrenology.

rdf:langString The last recorded meeting of the Society took place in 1870. The Society's museum closed in 1886.

rdf:langString George Thomas

rdf:langString George Combe and Andrew Combe

rdf:langString Bettany

rdf:langString Combe, Andrew

rdf:langString The Edinburgh Phrenological Society was founded in 1820 by George Combe, an Edinburgh lawyer, with his physician brother Andrew Combe. The Edinburgh Society was the first and foremost phrenology grouping in Great Britain; more than forty phrenological societies followed in other parts of the British Isles. The Society's influence was greatest over its first two decades but declined in the 1840s; the final meeting was recorded in 1870. The central concept of phrenology is that the brain is the organ of the mind and that human behaviour can be usefully understood in broadly neuropsychological rather than philosophical or religious terms. Phrenologists discounted supernatural explanations and stressed the modularity of mind. The Edinburgh phrenologists also acted as midwives to evolutionary theory and inspired a renewed interest in psychiatric disorder and its moral treatment. Phrenology claimed to be scientific but is now regarded as a pseudoscience as its formal procedures did not conform to the usual standards of scientific method. Edinburgh phrenologists included George and Andrew Combe; asylum doctor and reformer William A.F. Browne, father of James Crichton-Browne; Robert Chambers, author of the 1844 proto-Darwinian book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation; William Ballantyne Hodgson, economist and pioneer of women's education; astronomer John Pringle Nichol; and botanist and evolutionary thinker Hewett Cottrell Watson. Charles Darwin, a medical student in Edinburgh in 1825–7, took part in phrenological discussions at the Plinian Society and returned to Edinburgh in 1838 when formulating his concepts concerning natural selection.