Jan 22 2011
∞
The Book Bench has a beautiful slideshow of images from the book Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century. Most of the other images are of modern microscopic views, but this one caught my eye.
“Anonymous (19th century). Photograph by Eszter Blahak/Semmelweis Museum. Human skull inscribed by a nineteenth-century practitioner of phrenology. According to this now discredited theory, bumps on the skull betray the volume of the brain areas beneath each one, granting insight into a subject’s cognitive or moral strengths and weaknesses.”
