Free Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal by Katherine Ramsland Page A

from the nonviolent mentally ill. By mid-century, while they had no tool for systematic diagnosis, these psychiatrists had established the notion that a person who seems unaware of doing something wrong when he or she commits a crime should be viewed as medically insane. Because some of them seemed obvious by appearance, the fashion, coupled with physical anthropology, was to develop a way to use the obvious for making a diagnosis, but to offer this as a controlled result of observation and measurement. The earliest attempts looked to the shape of the head.
    CRIMINAL INSANITY
    With the rise of modern science and the emphasis on natural law and material substance, the appraisal of human character from external appearances became a fashion. Phrenology, first proposed by Austrian physician Franz Joseph Gall in 1796, espoused that the brain was the organ of the mind and thus the basis of personality. Gall stated that moral and intellectual faculties are innate, they’re locatable in specific areas of the brain—“organs”—and the form of the head represents the form of the brain, which reveals the development of the various areas. Gall called his idea organology, but later in Britain, physician T. I. M. Forster coined the term
phrenology
. Gall’s colleague and disciple, Johann Spurzheim, also referred thus to the practice.
    Phrenology involved feeling the various bumps or depressions on a person’s skull to determine how different areas of the brain were functioning. It was dividable into thirty-five distinct organs, each associated with a specific trait such as “secretiveness,” “firmness,” “adhesiveness,” and even “philoprogentiveness.” The larger the area of the organ, as evidenced by a bump in the skull, the more pronounced the trait was believed to be.
    When phrenology filtered into mainstream society, the phrenologists became matchmakers and employment advisors as people consulted them on everything from the best qualities for a romance to whether they should hire a certain person. Yet it was not accepted as a science in quite a few circles, notably in Edinburgh, largely because there were many counterexamples for which the phrenologists failed to account, so its proponents had to fight to have their work taken seriously. Eventually they gained a foothold, even in Edinburgh, where the first phrenological society was founded. Although the British Association for the Advancement of Science excluded phrenologists, their own journals and associations were modeled on the practice. This approach to understanding and predicting behavior proved highly popular in America, especially toward the middle of the century. It also spawned other approaches with a similar notion that physicality was key to personality types. Hubert Lauvergne, a physician at Toulon Penitentiary, observed that many convicts had unusual faces, which he believed must reflect their criminal instincts. For a time, prisoners would be classified according to their phrenological profiles—a listing of traits specific to them, based on skull formation.
    Brain damage supposedly caused insanity, and theorists set about distinguishing the mentally deficient from the deranged. Autopsies were often performed on mental patients to locate affected areas of the brain that would account for some trait or behavior. The superintendents of mental institutions during the nineteenth century, called alienists from their expertise with
aliéné
or mental alienation, founded the rudimentary practice of psychiatry and encouraged one another to report interesting cases.
    Despite the growing emphasis on free will operating in criminal behavior, there were clear instances in which someone acted from a delusion or uncontrollable impulse, and some experts who studied them were pleading for greater understanding. In 1837, Matthew Allen published an essay on the classification of insanity. He discussed the role of stressful relationships as a precipitator and described