[2] 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.

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.

This "craniological" aspect was greatly extended by his one-time disciple, Johann Spurzheim, who coined the term phrenology and saw it as a means of advancing society by social reform (improving the material conditions of human life).

In 1815, the Edinburgh Review published a hostile article by anatomist John Gordon, who called phrenology a "mixture of gross errors" and "extravagant absurdities".

[10] The Society acquired large numbers of phrenological artefacts, such as marked porcelain heads indicating the location of cerebral organs, and endocranial casts of individuals with unusual personalities.

[11] The hostility of other critics, including Alexander Monro tertius, anatomy professor at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, actually added to the glamour of phrenological concepts.

Browne caused a sensation at the university's Plinian Society with an attack on the recently republished theories of Charles Bell concerning the expression of the human emotions.

[11] Almost a century later, psychiatrist Sir James Crichton-Browne said of the book: "The Constitution of Man on its first appearance was received in Edinburgh with an odium theologicum, analogous to that afterwards stirred up by the Vestiges of Creation and On The Origin of Species.

It was denounced as an attack on faith and morals.... read today, it must be regarded as really rather more orthodox in its teaching than some of the lucubrations of the Dean of St Paul's and the Bishop of Durham".

Her son, Archibald Sillars Hamilton left for Australia in 1854, developed a successful phrenology practice there, and published an account of Ned Kelly's skull.

[17] Society co-founder and president Andrew Combe had two successful publications in the early 1830s: Observations on Mental Derangement in 1831 and Physiology applied to Health and Education in 1834.

In 1838, some eleven years after his hurried departure, Darwin revisited Edinburgh and his undergraduate haunts, recording his psychological speculations in the M Notebook and teasing out the details of his theory of natural selection.

At this time, Darwin was preparing for marriage with his religiously minded cousin Emma Wedgwood, and was in some emotional turmoil: on 21 September, after his return to England, he recorded a vivid and disturbing dream in which he seemed to be involved in an execution at which the corpse came to life and joked about having died as a hero.

Darwin committed his "gigantic blunder" concerning the parallel roads of Glen Roy while on this Scottish trip, suggesting an element of mental distraction.

This theme of cerebral asymmetry was picked up rather casually by the London society physician Sir Henry Holland in 1840, and then much more extensively by the eccentric Brighton medical practitioner Arthur Ladbroke Wigan in his 1844 treatise A New View of Insanity: On the Duality of Mind.

[23] Like Robert Chambers, Watson later turned his energies to the question of the transmutation of species, and, having bought the Phrenological Journal with the proceeds of a large inheritance, appointed himself as its editor in 1837.

Some of the phrenologists' concerns drifted into the related fields of anthropometry, psychiatry and criminology, and also into degeneration theory as set out by Bénédict Morel, Arthur de Gobineau and Cesare Lombroso.

I had hardly expected so dolicocephalic a skull or such well marked supra-orbital development.... A cast of your skull, sir, until the original is available, would be an ornament to any anthropological museum..." – Arthur Conan Doyle The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902).Together with mesmerism,[26] phrenology exerted an extraordinary influence on the Victorian literary imagination in the later 19th century, especially in the fin-de-siècle aesthetic, and comparable to the later cultural influences of spiritualism and psychoanalysis.

Examples of phrenology's literary legacy feature in the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, George du Maurier, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson and H. G. Wells.

Browne) delivered the Ramsay Henderson Bequest Lecture entitled The Story of the Brain in which he recorded a generous appreciation of the role of the Edinburgh phrenologists in the later development of neurology and neuropsychiatry.

[27] Many of the society's phrenological artefacts survive today, having passed to the University of Edinburgh's Anatomical Museum[27] under the direction of Professor Matthew Kaufman, and some are now on display at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

The activities of the Edinburgh phrenologists have enjoyed an unusual afterlife in the history and sociology of scientific knowledge (science studies), as an example of a discarded cultural production.