Lectures on Tap - "The Troubling Psuedoscience of Phrenology Explored"

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🧠 Lecture: The Troubling Psuedoscience of Phrenology Explored

🎤 Speaker: James Henry

In the 19th century, phrenology was the ultimate personality test—a self-help craze that claimed to reveal your ideal spouse, perfect career, or hidden criminal tendencies by “reading” the bumps on your skull. Now largely dismissed as junk science, it once captivated the public imagination and became a wildly profitable industry, with New York City as its commercial epicenter.

In this talk, NYC tour guide James Henry uncovers how an eccentric European theory fused with American entrepreneurship to shape art, literature, and everyday life, while masking a far more disturbing reality. The booming demand for skulls fueled a gruesome global trade in human remains, and phrenology’s seemingly harmless parlor tricks were ultimately weaponized by social reformers, helping lay the pseudoscientific foundations of the American eugenics movement.

Along the way, you’ll meet the characters who transformed phrenology into a global phenomenon and examine its chilling legacy in science, medicine, and popular culture.

James Henry specializes in the cemeteries and burial spaces of New York City, guiding for Green-Wood Cemetery and Bowery Boys Walks. He is currently working on a graphic novel about the global history of body snatching.

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