Vaught’s Practical Character Reader

Phrenology — the pseudoscientific field of study premised on the theory that a person’s intellect, personality and character can be determined by the shape of his or her skull — was responsible for a host of ills during its heyday in the 19th century and gave a sheen of “scientific” and “biological” truth to racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination.

It was also responsible for the comically absurd illustrations and assertions found in Vaught’s Practical Character Reader, a 1902 volume that aimed to teach the public how to apply the principles of phrenology in judging people’s worth.

While the author expounds with conviction on “cruel eyes,” “selfish ears” and “gross, sensual chins,” the illustrator provides diagrams and pictures which have cemented the book as a classic in the genre of unintentional humor.

Louis Allan Vaught was born on August 13, 1859, in Jackson, Missouri, the second youngest of a farming family of eight children. Interested in phrenology from an early age, he began teaching school in Kansas and learning everything he could on the subject. Vaught started delivering lectures and after one of them, met Mary “May” Ellen Reid who began managing and promoting his lecture circuits, soon becoming his wife. Two years after May’s death in 1900, Vaught married his young stenographer, Nettie McDowell, and that same year he published his only book, Vaught’s Practical Character Reader, a handbook for determining a person’s personality traits by examining their heads. Plagued from childhood by disease, Vaught died six months later at age 44 on May 5, 1903.