The popular science of phrenology is known for its preoccupation with geniuses and criminals, but this article shows that phrenologists also introduced ideas about the ‘average’ person. Popular phrenologists in the US and the UK examined the heads of their clients to give an indication of their character. Based on the publications of phrenologists and on a large collection of standardized charts with clients’ scores, this article analyses their definition of what they considered to be the ‘average’. It can be (...) concluded that phrenologists were some of the first to teach individuals to see their identity in relation to an imagined statistical community. (shrink)

In spite of the fact that the term ‘sexology’ was popularized in the United States by Elizabeth Osgood Goodrich Willard and that the term ‘sexual science’—which is usually attributed to Iwan Bloch as ‘Sexualwissenschaft’—was actually coined by the American phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler in 1852, the archives of American sexology have received scant attention in the period prior to Alfred Kinsey. In my article, I explore the role of Transcendentalism and phrenology in the production and development of American sexology and (...) sexual science. In particular, I argue that shifting the origins of sexology and sexual science away from Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Karl-Maria Kertbeny and the more familiar narratives of the German invention of sexuality furnishes a radically different account of early sexology and sexual science. Rather than the unevenly homophilic sympathies of early German activists, their American counterparts promote marital, reproductive, loving sex and vilify prostitution, polygamy, masturbation, contraception, sex for pleasure, and, if they think to mention it, sodomy. In addition to this less progressive story, however, I argue that early American sexologists provide the first theories of gender and help to provide a fuller description of the politics of sexology and sexual science. (shrink)