THE INFLUENCE OF PHRENOLOGY ON EARLY AMERICAN PSYCHIATRIC THOUGHT
ERIC T. CARLSON M. D.1
1 The Dept. of Psychiatry of The New York Hospital—Cornell University Medical College Center, New York City.
Phrenology, which had its beginnings in the 1790s under Gall, reached the peak of its movement in medicine during the first half of the 19th century. When Spurzheim brought his modified form of this thought to the United States in 1832, he produced a wave of interest which lingered for over a century. Phrenology's maximum influence on American psychiatry occurred in the two decades after the visit, when most of the founders of The American Psychiatric Association showed evidence of phrenological concepts in their thinking about neurophysiology, preventive psychiatry, psychopathology, and psychotherapy.
