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Article ID: CBB827397197

Cranial Compatibility: Phrenology, Measurement, and Marriage Assessment (2021)

Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 112
Issue: 4
Pages: 795-803

DOI: 10.1086/716881

URI: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/716881

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Sexual selection Sexual behavior Medicine and society Personality; character Craniometry Marriage Advertising Phrenology 19th century United States

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.

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Article 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). unapi

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