The evidence against the system of phrenology. Being the substance of a paper read at an extraordinary meeting of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh ... / [Thomas Stone].

  • Stone, Thomas.
Date:
1828
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The evidence against the system of phrenology. Being the substance of a paper read at an extraordinary meeting of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh ... / [Thomas Stone]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    mologic diviner was never introduced by any of the royal family, not even by the jocular, good-tempered father of Titus, but by Narcissus, a manumitted slave. Juvenal expressly represents 44 The Science” as a superstition of the vulgar only, and satirizes the degrading extent to which the higher order of females were addicted, to the astro- logic arts. (( But if she be poor,” (says he) 44 she will draw cuts with straws, or stretch out her forehead to the seer, who generally has a smack for his pains/’* Cicero alludes to the same doctrine, when he mentions 44 Zopyrus the Physiognomist, who pretended to decypher the dispo¬ sitions and characters of individuals from their persons, eyes, countenance, and forehead.”-)* In the thirteenth century, Albertus Magnus pointed out the supposed sites of the several mental faculties; and Peter de Montagnana published a plate, representing their several relative positions and sizes. Vesalius, writing in 1542, condemns such notions, as being arrogant and impious; and denominates the phrenologist of that time a 64 would-be Prometheus,” and 44 a forger upon the great impress of the divinity.” j He quotes Thomas Aquinas, Scotus, and Albertus Magnus, as the most reprehensible * “ Si mediocris erit—frontemque, manumque, Pragbebit vati crebram propysma roganti.”—Juv. lib. vi. .581. •f- Cic. De Fato, cap. v. Vide etiam pro Roscio, p. 53, in Calp. p. 741.—. In both passages, he quotes the manifestations of the forehead. Thefrons of the ancients extended to the vertex, and, therefore, comprehended the twem ty principal organs of modern Phrenology. £ Vesalius, Anat. lib. viii. 623. * ft