Physiognomy

Sir Alexander Morison

Physiognomy is the practice of evaluating a person’s character from their facial features and general outward appearance. While discredited as pseudoscience today, the idea became popular in the 1800’s, especially in relation to assessing mental health and criminology.

Sir Alexander Morison was a Scottish forensic psychologist who helped popularize the idea of pysiognomy in 19th century medicine with the 1840 publication The Psysiognomy of Mental Diseases, which included drawings of patients he met during his time at lunatic asylums in the UK. In the book's introduction he states,

"There is no class of diseases in which the study of Physiognomy is so necessary as that of Mental diseases. It not only enables us to distinguish the characteristic features of different varieties, but it gies us warning of the approach of the disease in those in whom there is a pre-disposition to it, as well as confirms our opinion of convalescence in those in whom it is subsiding.

The appearance of the face is intimately connected with and dependant [sic] upon the state of the mind; the mind; the repetition of the same ideas and emotions, and the consequent repetition of the same movements of the muscles of the eyes and the face give a peculiar expression, which, in the insane state, is a combination of wildness, abstraction, or vacancy, and of those ideas and emotions characterising [sic] different varieties of mental disorder, as pride, anger, suspicion, mirth, love, fear, grief, &c.[sic]”

Physiognomy gained more traction as the theories of Charles Darwin spread through the scientific community in the 1850's and 1860's, eventually getting to the point where Darwin himself collaborated with physiognomists. 

Sir James Crichton-Browne was a noted Scottish psychiatrist who spent ten years (1866-1875) at the UK's West Riding Lunatic Asylum, where he worked to find the biological causes of insanity.

He was a close collaborator with Charles Darwin on Darwin's 1872 book The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. Crichton-Browne sent collections of patient photographs to Darwin to aid in identifying insanity by facial features.