Phrenology first originated in India But the Word Phrenology was taken from greeks. (from Greek: f???, phren, "mind"; and ?????, logos, "knowledge") is a sceince Through which one is able to determine character, personality traits, and criminality on the basis of the shape of the head (reading "bumps"). In The west it was Developed by German physician Franz Joseph Gall around 1800, and very popular in the 19th century. Phrenology has however received credit as a protoscience for having contributed to medical science the ideas that the brain is the organ of the mind and that certain brain areas have localized, specific functions.Its principles were that the brain is the organ of the mind, and that mind has a set of different mental faculties, each particular faculty being represented in a different part or organ of the brain. These areas were said to be proportional to a given individual's propensities and importance of a mental faculty, and the overlying skull bone to reflect these differences.
Phrenology, which focuses on personality and character, is to be distinguished from craniometry, which is the study of skull size, weight and shape
In the introduction to his main work The Anatomy and Physiology of the Nervous System in General, and of the Brain in Particular, Gall makes the following statement in regard to the principles on which he based his doctrine:
That moral and intellectual faculties are innate That their exercise or manifestation depends on organisation That the brain is the organ of all the propensities, sentiments and faculties That the brain is composed of many particular organs as there are propensities, sentiments and faculties which differ essentially from each other.That the form of the head or cranium represents the form of the brain, and thus reflects the relative development of the brain organs.These statements can be considered as the basic laws on which phrenology was built. Through careful observation and extensive experimental measurements, Gall believed he had linked aspects of character, called faculties, to precise organs in the brain
In the early 20th century however, phrenology benefited of a new interest, particularly in the viewpoint of evolutionism on one hand and of criminology and anthropology (as studied by Cesare Lombroso) on the other hand. The most important British phrenologist of this century was the famous London psychiatrist Bernard Hollander (1864-1934). His main works, The Mental Function of the Brain (1901) and Scientific Phrenology (1902) are an appraisal of the teachings of Gall. Hollander also introduced a quantitative approach to the phrenological diagnosis, defining a methodology for measuring the skull and comparing the measurements with statistical averages.