Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Program in History of Medicine, Washington University , Saint Louis, Missouri, USA.
J Hist Neurosci. 2020 Oct-Dec;29(4):385-398. doi: 10.1080/0964704X.2020.1733909. Epub 2020 Mar 16.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894) was a Boston physician, a professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School, and a writer of prose and poetry for general audiences. He was also one of the most famous American wits of the nineteenth century and a celebrity not bashful about exposing costly, absurd, and potentially harmful medical fads. One of his targets was phrenology, and the current article examines how he learned about phrenology during the 1830s as a medical student in Boston and Paris, and his head-reading with Lorenzo Fowler in 1858. It then turns to what he told readers of the (in 1859) and Harvard medical students (in 1861) about phrenology being a pseudoscience and how phrenologists were duping clients. By looking at what Holmes was stating about cranioscopy and practitioners of phrenology in both humorous and more serious ways, historians can more fully appreciate the "bumpy" trajectory of one of the most significant medical and scientific fads of the nineteenth century.
老奥利弗·温德尔·霍姆斯（Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.）（1809-1894 年）是一位波士顿医生，哈佛医学院的医学教授，也是为普通读者创作散文和诗歌的作家。他也是 19 世纪美国最著名的诙谐作家之一，毫不掩饰地揭露昂贵、荒谬且可能有害的医疗时尚。颅相学就是他的抨击目标之一，本文研究了他在 19 世纪 30 年代作为波士顿和巴黎的医学生时是如何了解颅相学的，以及他在 1858 年与洛伦佐·福勒（Lorenzo Fowler）进行的头部阅读。然后，本文转向他在 1859 年向《北美评论》（North American Review）的读者和 1861 年向哈佛医学生讲述的颅相学是伪科学，以及颅相学家如何欺骗客户。通过以幽默和更严肃的方式研究霍姆斯对颅相学和颅相学家实践者的描述，历史学家可以更全面地了解 19 世纪最重要的医学和科学时尚之一的“坎坷”轨迹。
