Americans first learned about Gall’s doctrine from reviews in British periodicals and physicians returning from France, where Gall and Spurzheim had settled. After Spurzheim split from Gall in 1813 and began lecturing throughout Britain and publishing books in English, they learned more. Spurzheim made some modifications and began to call the doctrine “phrenology,” while still retaining craniological correlations as the primary method. He attracted many people to it, as did his Scottish disciple, George Combe, who started the first phrenological society and journal, emphasizing how it could be used to lead to happier, healthier lives and promote institutional reforms. In 1832, Spurzheim came to America but died in Boston that year, drawing more attention to phrenology. Soon after, Orson and Lorenzo Fowler formed a business reading heads and selling all things phrenological, including books, journals, charts, and specimens. The Fowlers were masterful at promoting phrenology. Although Gall had focused on phrenology as a science, phrenology now became synonymous with head readings, thanks in part to the Fowlers and their associates. In this era with little in the way of new research to support phrenological assertions, head readings became faddish among the laity.

During the 1790s, Franz Joseph Gall, a German now practicing medicine in Vienna, came forth with a new way of thinking about the mind and brain. He envisioned the mind having many specialized functions, each dependent on a different part of the brain for its expression. He had a variety of methods for determining these function–structure relationships but relied most heavily on skull features. Bumps and depressions on specific parts of the skull, he reasoned, reflected the growth of the underlying parts. Hence, by studying the heads and crania of humans and animals, one could find separate organs for music, mathematics, and even color perception. Stated differently, a skilled observer could use craniology for probing the mysteries of the mind and understanding the functional organization of the brain. In 1805, Gall left Vienna with his new assistant, Johan Spurzheim, to present his “organology” in various European centers of learning. He never returned. He settled in Paris in 1807, where he lectured and published his books on his ideas. He died there in 1828, still believing in his new science of man, yet knowing that his skull-based assertions were still the most controversial features of his doctrine.