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The Edinburgh Phrenological Society was founded in 1820 by lawyer George Combe and his physician brother Andrew. The Edinburgh Society was the first and foremost phrenological grouping in the Great Britain; more than forty phrenological societies followed in other parts of the British Isles. The Society's influence was greatest over the next two decades but declined in the 1840s; the final meeting was recorded in 1870. The central concept of phrenology is that the brain is the organ of the mind and that human behaviour can be usefully understood in neuropsychological rather than philosophical or religious terms. Phrenologists rejected supernatural explanations and stressed the modularity of mind. The Edinburgh phrenologists acted as midwives to evolutionary theory and also inspired a renewed interest in psychiatric disorder and its moral treatment. Phrenology claimed to be scientific but is now regarded as a pseudoscience as its formal procedures did not conform to the usual standards of scientific method.〔(【引用サイトリンク】 The Fall of Phrenology in Edinburgh )〕 Edinburgh phrenologists included asylum doctor and reformer William A.F. Browne; Robert Chambers, author of the 1844 proto-Darwinian book ''Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation''; William Ballantyne Hodgson, educational reformer and pioneer of women's education; astronomer John Pringle Nichol; and botanist and evolutionary thinker Hewett Cottrell Watson. Charles Darwin, a medical student in Edinburgh in 1825–7, was much engaged in phrenological discussions at the Plinian Society and returned to Edinburgh in 1838 when formulating his concepts concerning natural selection. ==Background== Phrenology emerged from the views of the medical doctor and scientific researcher Franz Joseph Gall in 18th-century Vienna. Gall suggested that facets of the mind corresponded to regions of the brain, and that it was possible to determine character traits by examining the shape of a person's skull. This "craniological" aspect was greatly expanded by his one-time disciple, Johann Spurzheim, who coined the term ''phrenology'' and saw it as a means of advancing society by social reform (improving the material conditions of human life). In 1815, the ''Edinburgh Review'' published a hostile article by anatomist John Gordon, who called phrenology a "mixture of gross errors" and "extravagant absurdities". In response, Spurzheim went to Edinburgh to take part in public debates and to perform brain dissections in public. Whilst he was received politely by the scientific and medical community there, many had anxieties about the philosophical materialism inherent in phrenology.〔Kaufman (2005), p. 2.〕 George Combe, a lawyer who had previously been skeptical, became a convert to phrenology after listening to Spurzheim's commentary as he dissected a human brain. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Edinburgh Phrenological Society」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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