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and hence equally capable of being studied and treated clinically. 109
    Galileo Gall thus operates from a simple precept: “Revolution will free society of its afflictions, while science will free the individual of his.”
    Something very similar was at work in the mind of Struve: a desire for a violent overthrow of oppressive regimes, which could in turn allow the democratic and progressive principles of phrenology to flourish. He was not alone in his democratic zeal: In 1848 democratic revolutions broke out all over Europe, starting in France and quickly engulfing the entire continent. The year Marx and Engels published
The Communist Manifesto
, all of Europewas ready for change, and men like Struve saw their chance. On March 31 of that year, German reformers gathered in a “Pre-Parliament” to discuss the establishment of a free, united German republic. During the discussion Struve read his fifteen-point plan to end the “subjugation, stultification, and bleeding dry of the people,” which included the abolition of the standing army, all aristocratic privileges, and any connection between church and state and their replacement with laws that were based on “the spirit of our age,” including phrenology.
    The Pre-Parliament rejected Struve and his radical coalition in favor of a more moderate approach, and so the radicals decided to bring about emancipation by force. They raised a small army to march on the capital of Baden, but when they met the government’s forces in the Black Forest they were severely routed, and Struve and the others were imprisoned. Freed the following year, the undaunted phrenologist once again joined another failed uprising against the government—one in which, it should be noted, his “passionless” wife fought with unmatched tenacity.
    In Baden and elsewhere, these popular uprisings were brutally suppressed. In Vienna, for example, when dissidents took control of the center of the city, the royal response was swift and bloody, and the army savagely bombed the entire city. Among the casualties was the imperial zoological collection, which was hit by an errant cannonball, caught fire, and burned to the ground. Lost in the fire was the stuffed body of Angelo Soliman, who finally found his rest in the tumult of such an extraordinary time.

C HAPTER E IGHT

S KULDUGGERY
    In such a climate, rare or significant skulls continued to be quite valuable. The “New York Golgotha” that was the Fowlers’ storefront was filled with a wide variety of skulls, representing “saint . . . savage, and . . . sage,” and (the
Phrenological Journal
reported) all “are represented in the mute eloquence of a thousand crania arranged and labeled among the walls of the building.” The Fowlers were always looking to increase their collection: Any time a hanging was announced, they dispatched an agent to “attend the execution and take a cast of his head.” They took anything, including alligator and deer skulls. But despite this plethora of crania, the skulls of the famous and the highly intelligent continued to elude the Fowlers. In 1854 the
Phrenological Journal
complained, “We have a very large collection of the skulls of murderers, who have been executed, and of soldiers killed on battle-fields, also of Indians, Africans, Egyptians, Chinese, and Cannibals, but we have only a few from the higher class of minds, such as Reformers, Statesmen,Scholars, & c. Of these we have hundreds of casts, and busts from living heads, but not their skulls.” In an era of hands-on, empirical science, busts and casts were simply not enough. “What a treasure it would be,” the editorial concluded, “if some plan could be devised, by which these leading ‘types’ could be preserved as specimens, for scientific purposes.” 110
    The phrenologists were not alone in this desire. As anatomical study came to be recognized as