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.

When Holmes returned to America in December 1835, he quickly completed the requirements for his Harvard medical degree and began practicing medicine. Soon after, he began teaching at Dartmouth and then Harvard. He was now using his pulpit and pen to rail against superstitions, quackery, and unsubstantiated beliefs and therapies in medicine, while making seminal contributions to his profession. He gave a lecture on phrenology in 1850, but it is not clear what he communicated. We also know that he had several phrenology books in his personal collection and used the university’s libraries, also meeting with other New England writers interested in the subject. Wanting to learn more, he had Lorenzo Fowler evaluate his head in 1859, twelve years before Mark Twain used the same phrenologist for his “little test.” What Fowler reported was preserved and is presented. Importantly, Holmes was now prepared to state what he thought about phrenology and the head readers in public.

Clemens must have continued to have his doubts about the head readers into the 1870s, because he decided to conduct an experiment of his own on a leading head reader in 1872. Having discovered some of the tricks mediums were using, he made two trips to Lorenzo Fowler’s phrenological emporium in London. He dressed and acted like a nobody during the first trip. Then, after some weeks had passed, he returned and presented himself as the famous American humorist and author Mark Twain. He would later describe his great awakening in a short but serious published letter, and with humor and artistic liberties in an autobiographical dictation and his posthumous but never-completed novel Eddypus. The letter and phrenological parts of his dictation and Eddypus are presented in this chapter. Being told on his first visit that his head had a cavity above the organ for a sense of humor and on his second that he had a Mount Everest in the same spot would change how he would depict the head readers in his most famous novels. Writing as Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens would now set forth to educate the gullible public.