Phrenology was fi rst propounded by the Austrian anatomist Francis Joseph Gall around 1800. Gall and his followers claimed that you could read someone’s character/personality from the bumps on their...

Phrenology was fi rst propounded by the Austrian anatomist Francis Joseph Gall around 1800. Gall and his followers claimed that you could read someone’s character/personality from the bumps on their skull because particular character traits were localised in different parts of the brain, and the larger the size of a given region, the stronger the trait.