Johann Spurzheim

Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776 to 1832) was a German medical doctor who became one of the chief proponents of phrenology, the system of reading character from the shape of the skull that Franz Joseph Gall had developed around 1800. Born near Trier, he studied medicine at the University of Vienna, met Gall in 1800 and was hired as his assistant, and Gall meant him to be his successor, adding his name as co-author to books and publications. The two fell out in 1812, after which Spurzheim built a separate career lecturing and writing on what he called the physiognomical system of Gall and Spurzheim. He changed Gall's scheme by increasing the number of supposed organs of the brain, arranging them in a hierarchy, and illustrating the method with images and busts. He travelled widely in Europe and was especially successful in England and France; in 1816 he went to Edinburgh to answer John Gordon's review that had ridiculed phrenology. He died of typhoid in Boston in 1832 during his first American tour, after which his brain, skull and heart were preserved and shown to the public, and Bostonians held a large public funeral and raised a monument in Mount Auburn Cemetery. Phrenology is now regarded as a discredited pseudoscience.