Edinburgh Phrenological Society

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 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.

Edinburgh phrenologists included George and Andrew Combe; asylum doctor and reformer William A.F. Browne, father of James Crichton-Browne; Robert Chambers, author of the 1844 proto-Darwinian book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation; William Ballantyne Hodgson, economist 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.

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