Orson Squire Fowler

• Orson Squire Fowler
• Born: October 11, 1809
• Died: August 18, 1887

Phrenologist and book publisher, was born in Cohocton, New York, the oldest of three children, two sons and a daughter, of Horace Fowler, a Congregationalist deacon, and Martha (Howe) Fowler, a devout church woman and writer of religious essays. One of Fowler’s paternal ancestors, William Fowler, had emigrated from Lincoln, England, in 1678, and settled in Bradford, Vermont. Horace Fowler was a native of Guilford, Connecticut, who had migrated to upstate New York in 1806; he was a man of limited education, but he encouraged his children to pursue educational interests, and the Fowler home was a center of theological discussions, readings, and church meetings.

Orson Fowler grew up on a farm and acquired a lifelong love for the outdoors and fishing. His mother died of consumption in August 1819, and his father was married the next year to Mary Taylor, a well-educated New England schoolteacher with a strong missionary zeal. Three children were added to the household. Orson Fowler attended the local district school, and by the time he was an adolescent had made the decision to enter the ministry. He began his preparatory studies with Congregational minister, Moses Miller, in Heath, Massachusetts. Afterward, he studied with the Reverend Benjamin F. Clarke in Buckland, Massachusetts, and then attended Ashfield Academy. He entered Amherst College in 1829, financing his education by part-time work as a salesman for temperance tracts.

At Amherst Fowler met Henry Ward Beecher and was introduced by his new classmate to phrenology. The notion of phrenology originated in Vienna and had been brought to America by Dr. Johan Spurzheim. The brain, Spurzheim taught, was composed of independent organs and different aptitudes (combativeness, benevolence, language, and so forth) were localized in different organs or regions of the brain. The development of these organs, thirty-seven in all, affected the size and the shape of the skull. An individual’s character, according to phrenologists, could be determined by the shape of his or her skull and could be improved by exercise of various mental functions. Thus, by studying a person’s head in connection with his temperament, one could accurately analyze character. Fowler was quickly converted to this “science,” and he and Beecher were soon lecturing on the subject to the local Society of Natural History. Fowler also began character readings of his fellow classmates, based on examinations of their heads, to earn extra money.

When Fowler was graduated from Amherst in August 1834, he still planned to enter Lane Theological Seminary and to pursue a ministerial career. However, during the summer he began lecturing on phrenology, making his first speech in Brattleboro, Vermont, and then toured New England and upstate New York. He was joined by his younger brother Lorenzo, another convert to phrenology, and the two became practicing phrenologists. They extended their speaking circuit into Maryland and the Midwest, and Fowler abandoned his ministerial career, becoming instead a phrenological missionary.

On June 10, 1835, Fowler married Eliza Chevalier, daughter of a merchant and a young widow from Fishkill, New York. The couple had two daughters. The Fowler brothers opened an office in Washington, D.C., and then in 1838 moved it to Philadelphia. There in October of that year they began publishing The American Phrenological Journal (it lasted until 1911), with Nathan Allen as editor. They worked to obtain converts to phrenology, and their adherents included educators Horace Mann and Samuel Gridley Howe; one of America’s leading nurses, Clara Barton; and the noted abolitionist and women’s rights leader Sarah Grimke. Many prominent Americans sat for a Fowler phrenological reading, including Walt Whitman. The pseudoscience also enjoyed a considerable vogue among reformers because of its millenarial implications.

Orson Fowler took over the editorship of the Journal in 1842 and moved its operations to New York City. There the Fowlers established the firm of O. S. and L. V. Fowler on Nassau Street in lower Manhattan. The office served as a publishing house, museum, and information center. In addition to lecturing and conducting examinations of clients’ heads, the brothers wrote numerous books, including Phrenology Proved, Illustrated and Applied (1836) and Fowler on Memory; or Phrenology Applied to the Cultivation of Memory (1842).

Orson Fowler believed that phrenology could be used to help improve or even remedy many social conditions and problems. He particularly felt that it should be used for child, vocational, and marriage counseling. It was his view that a child’s head should be examined several times in the growing-up process to help determine the best type and form of education for it. Later the same techniques would be applied to decide on the proper career for an individual. Fowler devised a list of desired brain facilities or organs necessary for a person to be suited for a specific occupation. The list ranged from seamstress and mechanic to lawyer and doctor, and clients were advised, on basis of the shapes of their heads, to pursue a given field. Fowler was probably one of America’s pioneers in marriage counseling and sex education.

Fowler advocated a form of planned parenthood and specifically made recommendations that would allow people to select compatible partners by means of skull readings. He wrote several books on these subjects, including Matrimony (1841), Love and Parentage Applied to the Improvements of Offspring (1844), and Amativeness: Or Evils and Remedies and Perverted Sexuality (1857).

In order to understand defects in human beings, and to find a means of redress, Fowler visited prisons, asylums, retreats for the mentally disturbed, and almshouses—always measuring heads. Fowler thought that crime could be eliminated through applied phrenology and that the organ of destructiveness could be detected in an individual before it erupted into criminal behavior. From his examination of criminals’ skulls, he drew up a list of prison reforms and exercises aimed at changing convicted men’s brain facilities. He considered insanity a disease of the mind that could be treated and cured and called for therapeutic, rather than custodial, treatment of the mentally ill, a position that allied him to the most progressive ideas on insanity of his era.

Since the health of the brain was related to the state of the body, Fowler was also an advocate of a number of health reforms. He opposed the use of tobacco, tea, coffee, and alcohol, feeling they all weakened moral and intellectual powers. He believed in the curative powers of water and fresh air and favored a vegetarian diet. He thought that tight lacing, or corsets, for women adversely affected their minds, and in the 1850s worked for dress reform and the acceptance of the Bloomer costume. He supported the women’s rights movement, especially in the areas of equality of employment opportunities and wages, and the right to vote.

In the 1840s Fowler developed an interest in architecture. Without any previous experience, he planned, designed, and built a sixty-room octagonal house in Dutchess County, New York. It was an extraordinary building, constructed of gravel, a substance rarely used as a building material. The house provided more room then conventional structures, admitted sunlight to more internal areas, and faciliated communication more freely between rooms. It also contained an indoor toilet, which was advanced for its time. In 1848 Fowler published his architectural concepts and ideas in A Home for All: Or a New, Cheap, Convenient, and Superior Mode of Building. By 1857 over 1,000 homes were built according to Fowler’s octagonal model.

In the 1850s and the 1860s Fowler made extensive lecture tours in the United States and Canada. In 1860 the Fowler brothers dissolved their business partnership. Lorenzo sailed for England, and Orson Fowler moved to Boston, and later on to Manchester, Massachusetts. His first wife died in 1863, and he subsequently married Mary Poole, a widow and the daughter of William Aiken of Glouster, Massachusetts. In 1882, after her death, Fowler married Abbie L. Ayres, a Wisconsin publisher and phrenologist. They had three children. The last years of his life were largely consumed by writing, and he was often plagued by debt. Fowler died in Sharon Staton, Connecticut, at the age of seventy-seven and was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York City, in an unmarked grave.

Orson Fowler’s papers are on deposit at Cornell University in the Collection of Regional History. Fowler’s writings include The Illustrated Self-Instructor in Phrenology and Physiology (1840); Fowler on Matrimony: Or, Phrenology and Physiology Applied to the Selection of Congenial Companions for Life (1842); The Christian Phrenologist (1843); Hereditary Descent: Its Laws and Facts (1843); Memory and Intellectual Improvement, Applied to Self Education and Juvenile Instruction (1846); Physiology, Animal and Mental (1847); Sexual Science (1870); and Creative and Sexual Science (1875). The best account of Orson Fowler’s life and career can be found in M. B. Stern, Heads and Headlines: The Phrenology Fowlers (1971). See also J. D. Davies, Phrenology: Fad and Science; A Nineteenth Century American Crusade (1955); C. Carmer, “That Was New York: The Fowlers, Practical Phrenologists,” New Yorker, February 13, 1937; and The Dictionary of American Biography (1933).