Lectures on man: being a series of discourses on phrenology and physiology / Delivered by Professor L.N. Fowler in Great Britain.
- Lorenzo N. Fowler
- Date:
- 1886
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Lectures on man: being a series of discourses on phrenology and physiology / Delivered by Professor L.N. Fowler in Great Britain. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
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![99 to question Mm : How have you succeeded? Ah, he replied, 1 have taken out thirty-three patents, and each one does just what I intend it shall. The last is to make india-rubber springs for rail- way carriages, and these are now introduced all over the world. I have now 500 men to work for me, and have to thank Phrenology for calling my attention to the idea that I could be something besides a day-labourer. My Self-esteem was so small that I should not have imagmed that I could have risen if you had not assured me of the fact. In 1835, I examined the head of a woman in Virginia, and said to her, '-Your brain is inflamed in the region of Conscientiousness, Cautiousness, and Self-esteem. The moral organs are so active that they are liable to produce a morbid state of the mind in relation to rehgious subjects : is there anything peculiar in your experience in this respect ? She replied, Not that I am aware of, only that I kno^w I'm the wickedest creature out of perdition, and deserve eternal banishment from the good in this life and the next.' She then con- tinued in a strain of mingled self-condemnation and abhorrence of herself till I was obliged to turn her attention to another subject; I afterwards learned that this was her monomania, and that her friends were apprehensive of insanity on this one subject. Some of the most hopeless cases of insanity have arisen from a mor])id action of the moral organs, but this form can generally be diagnosed from the Phrenology of the individual, and many on the verge of insanity could be benefited by directing their attention to more cheerful subjects of thought before their disease became permanent. I had in my cabinet the skull of Diana Waters, a coloured woman of Philadelphia. She had heard the passage Pray without ceasing read from the Bible, and she began to exercise her Veneration : she prayed incessantly fron^ morning till night. At last her brain became morbid, and she continued her prayers in such a loud voice that the whole neighbourhood were annoyed. _ She finally became insane on the point, and for twenty years her insanity took this praying form. After her death, her brain was found to be diseased in the region where Veneration is located, and the skull over that part was spongy and porous like a honeycomb. A skull was sent to me from Kingston, Canada, for an examination. By placing a light in the skull, I found that the region where Destruc- tiveness and Acquisitiveness are located was exceedingly thin and transparent. I judged the man must have been under the special exer- cise of these faculties in an abnormal manner, as the coronal brain was not well developed. I afterwards learned from the gentleman—a professor in a medical college in Kingston, Canada—who had sent the skull to me, that it was the skull of a man who had killed three persons for a small sum of money. He was tried for the murder, but, as there were evidences of insanity, he was not convicted, but sent to an insane asylum for life. After he had been there a short time, without any provocation, he killed a woman, who was scrubbing the floor, with a billet of wood; and before they could prevent it, killed himself. He had frequently](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21053029_0035.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
