Bittel, Carla (Author)
Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 112
Issue: 4
Pages: 795-803
This essay examines phrenological tools as instruments of matchmaking and focuses on the personal ad as a site for producing and exchanging knowledge about individuals. It shows how cranial measurement produced character profiles for the purpose of judging suitable marriage partners and how users integrated those profiles into personal advertisements published in the Water-Cure Journal. A popular but contested science of the mind, phrenology maintained that one could truly know others and oneself through measuring “organs” of the mind via protrusions on the skull. While much has been written about phrenology, less attention has been paid to its focus on marriage and mating and to how users enrolled phrenology to find and judge the viability of a mate. Focused on the American context in the 1850s, this essay will show that notions of race and gender, heredity, and marital “relations” were embedded in the shorthand of phrenological measurements and personal ads.
...MoreArticle Hansun Hsiung; Elena Serrano (2021) Introduction: Epistemologies of the Match. Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 760-765).
Similar Citations
Thesis
Courtney Elizabeth Thompson;
(2015)
Criminal Minds: Medicine, Law, and the Phrenological Impulse in America, 1830-1890
Book
Heather Stanley;
(2022)
Sex and the Married Girl: Heterosexual Marriage and the Body in Postwar Canada
Book
Rachel Hynson;
(2020)
Laboring for the State: Women, Family, and Work in Revolutionary Cuba, 1959–1971
Article
Peter Cryle;
Elizabeth Stephens;
(2021)
Normality: A Collection of Essays
Article
Peter Cryle;
(2021)
Hat Sizes and Craniometry: Professional Know-How and Scientific Knowledge
Article
Alberto Zanatta;
Giuliano Scattolin;
Gaetano Thiene;
Fabio Zampieri;
(2016)
Phrenology between anthropology and neurology in a nineteenth-century collection of skulls
Article
Stanley Finger;
Paul Eling;
(2022)
Phrenology’s frontal sinus problem: An insurmountable obstruction?
Article
Trevor Engel;
(2024)
A “Most Remarkable Trait”: “Flathead” Skulls, Indigenous Pathologization, and Transinstitutionalization
Article
Courtney E Thompson;
(2019)
A Propensity to Murder: Phrenology in Antebellum Medico-Legal Theory and Practice
Article
Widmer, Alexandra;
(2014)
The Imbalanced Sex Ratio and the High Bride Price: Watermarks of Race in Demography, Census, and the Colonial Regulation of Reproduction
Chapter
Marie Walin;
Alain Giami;
Sharman Levinson;
(2021)
“Lack of Clarity” and “False Premises”: Partnership and Translations in Impotence-Related Petitions for Marriage Annulment in Nineteenth-Century Spain
Article
Tomes, Nancy;
(2005)
The Great American Medicine Show Revisited
Thesis
Kibbe, Tina M.;
(2012)
In “Fitness” and in Health: Eugenics, Public Health, and Marriage in the United States
Chapter
Milam, Erika Lorraine;
(2010)
Beauty and the Beast? Conceptualizing Sex in Evolutionary Narratives
Book
Shah, Nayan;
(2001)
Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown
Book
Timm, Annette;
(2010)
The Politics of Fertility in Twentieth-Century Berlin
Article
Robinson, Ken;
(2013)
A Portrait of the Psychoanalyst as a Bohemian: Ernest Jones and the “Lady from Styria”
Article
Laura Doan;
(2017)
Marie Stopes’s Wonderful Rhythm Charts: Normalizing the Natural
Article
Grumsen, Stine;
(2009)
The Era of Whiter Teeth: Advertising in American Dentistry, 1910--1950
Article
Smith, Mickey;
(2004)
The Rexall Family Druggist
Be the first to comment!