Phrenology - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

• In Bram Stoker's Dracula, several characters make phrenological observations in describing other characters, as does Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective Sherlock Holmes.
• Charlotte Brontë, as well as her sister Anne Brontë, display a belief in phrenology in their works.
• The comedy-musical play Heid (pronounced 'Heed', a Scottish inflection of the word 'Head') by Forbes Masson alluded to the phrenology work of George Combe, citing the pseudoscience's influence on a young Charles Darwin as an inspiration for writers.
• Several literary critics have noted the influence of phrenology (and physiognomy) in Edgar Allan Poe's fiction.
• In the novel The War of the End of the World from Latin American writer Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the main characters is Galileo Gall, a phrenologist whose name refers to Galileo Galilei and Franz Joseph Gall, founder of the science of phrenology.
• In the novel Moby-Dick by Herman Melville many references are made to phrenology and the narrator identifies himself as an amateur phrenologist.
• In HBO's Bored to Death series, Louis Green (played by John Hodgman) claims phrenology is one of his hobbies.
• In the Discworld series of novels by Terry Pratchett, the practice of retrophrenology is mentioned. This is where people pay a retrophrenologist to hit them on the head with hammers of various sizes in order to change the shape of their skull, thus retrospectively giving them the mental attributes they desire. There is an element of pseudoscience to this even in the Discworld universe.
• In the House M.D. episode "Baggage", House has a phrenology model standing in his office. His friend Alvie studies it, saying "I didn't know there was a section of the brain just for hope." House responds with "It's very, very tiny."
• In the 1990 film Men At Work, Charlie Sheen's character, Carl Taylor, claims to be a Phrenologist in an attempt to both impress and deceive Leslie Hope's character, Susan Wilkins.
• Phrenology (album) is the fifth studio album by American hip hop band The Roots, released November 26, 2002, on Geffen Records and MCA Records. Recording sessions for the album took place during June 2000 to September 2002.
• In the animated sitcom The Simpsons episode "Mother Simpson", Mr. Burns uses a phrenology head model and a caliper to establish odd diagnoses despite his personal aide Waylon Smithers's remark that phrenology was dismissed as quackery 160 years ago.