Unmasking the past

Published on Thursday 31 January 2008 19:02

SOMNAMBULISTS ****

SCOTTISH NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, EDINBURGH

SCIENCE is full of dead-ends. phrenology is one of them and is now justly long-forgotten, but 200 years ago it was both widely popular and influential. Now, in the Somnambulists at the Portrait Gallery, artist Joanna Kane has brought it back to life in an unexpected way.

There was once a phrenological museum in Edinburgh. There is a bow window in Chambers Street adorned with carved stone heads that shows where it was housed. The residue of its collection of casts of skulls and life and death masks was in Edinburgh University's Anatomy Museum for many years, but recently moved to the Portrait Gallery.

Working from this collection and using sophisticated photographic techniques, Joanna Kane has turned some of these plaster relics of the famous, the infamous and the simply anonymous into spooky black-and-white photographs that are hauntingly suggestive of the actual people whose likeness they record. A dozen or so are on view, selected from the much greater number she has made, together with a small group of the original plasters.

Among the famous, they include William Blake, John Keats and James Hogg. Alongside them hang the inventor of phrenology, Viennese physician Franz Joseph Gall and his disciples, Johann Gaspar Spurzheim and George Combe, together with a number of less well-known individuals, male and female. They all have their eyes closed because the casting process requires it and so they look as though they are asleep, suspended in some dream world.

That is why Kane has called her show and the accompanying book the Somnambulists. She might equally well have called it "Night of the Living Dead". These eerie images are strangely nocturnal – ghostly creatures of the night. There is a touch of the Resurrectionist about the way she has brought these people back to a kind of half-life, suspended between life and death.

Phrenology was the pseudoscience of reading character from the shape of an individual's skull. The "bumps" were what mattered. The contours of the skull were divided up into areas, each identified with different gifts and aspects of character. The degree to which these characteristics were supposedly developed in an individual were read from the size and shape, or indeed the absence, of the appropriate protuberance or "bump". It sounds quite daft and is, in fact, about as scientific as palmistry and is very similar. Nevertheless, it sprang from a profoundly important observation, even if it was itself entirely unsupported by any empirical truth at all. The corner stone of Thomas Reid's hugely influential philosophy of Common Sense was that our knowledge of the world is intuitive and depends, not on abstract "ideas" as Hume had it, but on the direct, physiological interaction between our minds and the world of which they are part. Thus it became accepted that the mind is not some kind of insubstantial spirit, but has a physical locus in the brain; it has a physiology.

This realisation marked a dramatic shift in our self-awareness and towards our modern understanding of what kind of creatures we are – so much so that scientists are still pursuing its implications. At the time, the impact was immediate, too. The concept of mental disease became possible, for instance. If the mind is a function of the brain then like any other part of our physiology it can be subject to sickness, just as its normal functioning depends on its health. The origins of the humane treatment of mental disorders lie in that observation. In Scotland they are commemorated in the Royal Edinburgh Hospital whose founder, Andrew Duncan, pioneer of the humane treatment of mental illness, was one of the first people to grasp this concept and act upon it.

Recognition of the mind's physical origin raised questions, too, however, some of which remain unanswered. How do our mental functions relate to the form and construction of the brain? Can we interpret its physical appearance in any way and so, from outside, see in? Expression, or physiognomy, was one study that seemed to offer a window into the mind and artists and surgeons cooperated very fruitfully in its study. It was the basis of Wilkie's art and Darwin published a study of human expression. The presence in the collection of the face masks from which these photographic images derive makes clear that phrenology and the study of physiognomy were closely linked. Phrenology too was part of the response to the dramatic realisation of the mind's material existence, and that it is a reflection of the physical constitution of the brain. This was the starting point for the inventor of phrenology, Franz Josef Gall. He proposed that just as the muscles are visible on the surface of the body and their size, shape and location relate to their function, so as it is echoed in the contours of the skull that contains it, the shape of the brain must also relate to its function. The idea caught on. Edinburgh was the world centre of medicine and although the medical establishment was largely hostile to this quackery, one of Gall's followers, George Combe, set up in the city.

His success and the huge popularity of phrenology are explained by what it claimed to do. This was nothing less than to provide a taxonomy of human nature, a system of scientific measurement by which to understand and classify human diversity. You could, if you were credulous enough, even suppose that this was the scientific extension of Hume's treatise of Human Nature. And, as there was no empirical basis whatever for their theories, the evidence collected by phrenologists could be used to support whatever thesis they wished.

It could be used to argue that the distribution of human gifts relates to the hierarchies of social organisation, or the opposite, and to his credit George Combe argued that they are distributed evenly irrespective of social advantage; they could support theories of racial superiority, as sadly they did, or they could confound them. Mostly, however, they provided a supposed taxonomy to underpin the existing hierarchies of class, race and gender.

But whatever your argument you needed specimens. Collecting, measurement and classification are the necessary tools of taxonomy. Casts of those who had distinguished themselves, by geniuses such as Blake, or by great criminality – and the original Resurrectionists, Burke and Hare, were included in the collection – were valued as exemplars. At one time the Edinburgh Phrenological Collection numbered nearly 3,000 specimens and this number was greatly extended by the collection of skulls in the Anatomy Museum.

These were measured and classified into racial types, largely to support arguments of racial superiority. The sinister consequences of that approach indelibly mark the 20th century.

We should not be smug looking back at this apparent dead-end science. Kane reminds us vividly that the ideas that shaped it were potent, whether for good or for evil, and as Duncan Forbes and Roberta McGrath point out in their joint essay in the book of the show, they still are.

Biometrics, and the sinister drive to impose identity cards on us they are being used to support, reflect the same urge to classify and, through classification, to control. The Somnambulists, the authors conclude, remind us of the dangers of sleepwalking through history.