The Cabinet included replicas of famous busts depicting such men as William Shakespeare, Napoleon Bonaparte, and George Washington, as well as casts of “persons of eminence in talent and virtue.” They advertised specimens from “pirates, murderers, robbers, thieves, forgers, gamblers, pickpockets,” and more. Stern wrote that the Cabinet combined “the attractions of Barnum’s American Museum, a freak show, and a scientific repository,” and by the 1840s, it “was fast becoming one of New York’s show places.” In 1844, the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal called it “one of the most curious museums in America.”

In her 1971 book Heads and Headlines, the independent scholar Madeleine B. Their popularity was due in large part to the Phrenological Cabinet, housed until the 1850s near the corner of New York’s Beekman and Nassau Streets. In the 19th-century United States, however, there was a fever for the field, and none spread it more zealously than Fowler & Wells. The idea that meaning of any kind could be assigned to cranial contours today seems like quackery, at best. Cornell University Library/Division of Rare and Manuscript Collectionsįounded in the 1830s, Fowler & Wells built a booming brand from books, pamphlets, public lectures, and “readings” of the heads of both living and dead. Fowler standing in the doorway of 753 Broadway, probably in the 1880s. Photograph of Samuel Robert Wells, Charlotte Fowler Wells, and Lorenzo N. Their collection was enshrined in the “Phrenological Cabinet,” a display of casts, busts, portraits, and skulls that eventually grew to nearly 2000 items. They eagerly acquired cranial “specimens” of infamous men like Robinson. The brothers Orson and Lorenzo Fowler, their sister Charlotte, and her husband Samuel Wells were phrenologists who believed the size and shape of the human skull contained secrets about human nature. The artist, meanwhile, delivered the cast of his head to the New York firm of Fowler & Wells. The authorities delivered his body to friends and family, as he had requested, hoping to evade the corpse-hungry medical school market.

Phrenology by Orson Squire Fowler