Graeme Donald - When the Earth was flat

For Rhona, as ever, and with very special thanks to Kath Kay-Dee Davies, who selflessly moved heaven and earth to give me the time to bring the manuscript in on time.

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by
Michael OMara Books Limited
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Tremadoc Road
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Copyright Michael OMara Books Limited 2012

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-84317-868-2 in hardback print format
ISBN: 978-1-84317-925-2 in EPub format
ISBN: 978-1-84317-926-9 in Mobipocket format

Cover design by Ana Bjezancevic
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Picture research by Judith Palmer
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F ROM ANCIENT TIMES to the modern day, science has strayed many times from the truth.

Often these discoveries have been dictated by the constraints of contemporary thought. Limited by their lack of knowledge of the human anatomy, the Ancient Greeks developed the theory that the body is made up of four humours, an idea that held sway until the march of scientific medicine in the nineteenth century.

Other times these ideas were the result of pure folly, such as the seemingly innocuous development of phrenology a concept used to justify genocide in Rwanda in the late twentieth century. Sometimes scientific facts have been explored in an effort to lend false support to a hidden agendum, including the appropriation of the entirely spurious notion of subliminal messaging by politicians and the Christian Right. Despite the questionable nature of these ideas, When the Earth Was Flat will highlight how man has been and perhaps always will be at the mercy of science.

Thankfully not all the bits of science we got wrong have had such a devastating impact; some of the examples in this book will raise a smile. Whether its the alchemists search for the philosophers stone the vehicle through which all base metals could be turned into gold the somewhat surprising history of the vibrator, or the many proponents of the hollow earth theory, the annals of science are littered with strange people and their even stranger ideas.

What is perhaps most surprising is that some of sciences most spurious ideas have only recently been relinquished. No matter how advanced todays medical and scientific thinking might be, who is to say that in one hundred years time a book similar to this one will be ridiculing todays received wisdom.

The physical measurements of the skull correlate to a persons personality

T HE MAJORITY OF the scientific frivolities of previous centuries inflicted little or no real harm during their reign, and evaporated without much trace in the light of new discoveries. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the pseudoscience of phrenology, which caused wide-ranging injustices and misery in its time and, most damaging of all, reached out from its own grave to promote genocide at the close of the twentieth century.

THE GALL OF IT

The father of phrenology was the German physician Franz Josef Gall (17581828), a product of the University of Vienna, an institution that served as a breeding ground for several other spurious notions about the human race (see individual responsibility for certain functions, characteristics and pre-dispositions.

The phrenological bust

LESSONS IN IDIOCY

By 1925 the University of Vienna had become an intellectual hotbed of racist ideology. The most notorious and far-reaching of such notions was Rassenpflege the quest for racial hygiene. Professor Otto Reche, director of the universitys Department of Anthropology, was the most vocal proponent of such ideas, proclaiming, Rassenpflege must be the basis for all domestic policy and at least a part of foreign policy as well.

The more an individual used one of the zones, or allowed themselves to be driven by the emotional or physical urges dictated by it, the larger that zone would become similar to an overused muscle. In Galls defence, his findings were not completely off the mark: it is now known that certain areas of the brain are linked to specific functions or temperament, and that some of these areas can become enlarged with mental exercise.

Had Franz Gall finalized his research at this point, no harm would have resulted. His error was in expanding the basic premise into the foundation stone of a sizeable edifice of speculation and assumption. By 1805 Gall had decided that the twenty-seven zones must be responsible for the lumps and bumps on the anterior of the skull, which they pressed against as they swelled with exertion.

Someone having their bumps felt

BRAIN TRAINING

In March 2000, Professor Eleanor Maguire of University College London published the results of an extensive study she had conducted into the pattern of growth of the hippocampi in the brains of London taxi drivers. They were chosen because they are required to take the knowledge, the formidable exam that demonstrates their ability to work out the best route between any two nominated points in the city. Professor Maguire deduced that the longer the driver had been working, the more pronounced the enlargement of the hippocampus.

LUNACY

Gall conducted exhaustive fingertip exploration on the skulls of murderers, burglars and other categories of criminals and decided that there were sufficient significant similarities between them to establish a pattern. He also conducted similar explorations on the skulls of the insane and decided that their individual conditions were attributable to specific zonal malfunction. Again, in defence of Gall, some good did come of this thinking, as the insane were previously thought to be wilfully so or possessed by the Devil, and thus were beaten regularly. Such was the standing of phrenology that, almost overnight, the insane were for the first time regarded as genuinely ill and treated accordingly.