281On July 1, 1859, Oliver Wendell Holmes, a fi fty- year- old Harvard Medical
School professor and littérateur, submitted to being “phrenologized” by
a visiting head- reader, who claimed the ability to identify the strength
of character traits—amativeness, acquisitiveness, conscientiousness, and
so forth—by examining the corresponding bumps on the head. Holmes
found himself among a group of women “looking so credulous, that, if
any Second Advent Miller or Joe Smith should come along, he could string
the whole lot of them on his cheapest lie.” The astute operator, perhaps
suspecting the identity of his guest, offered a fl attering assessment of
Holmes’s proclivities, concluding with the observation that his subject
“would succeed best in some literary pursuit; in teaching some branch or
branches of natural science, or as a navigator or explorer.” Holmes found
the event so revealing of contemporary gullibility that shortly thereafter
he drew on his experience in writing his Atlantic Monthly feature “The
Professor at the Breakfast- Table.”^1 He began by offering a “defi nition of a
Pseudo- science,” the earliest explication of the term that we have found:
A Pseudo- science consists of a nomenclature, with a self- adjusting arrange-
ment, by which all positive evidence, or such as favors its doctrines, is
admitted, and all negative evidence, or such as tells against it, is excluded. It
is invariably connected with some lucrative practical application. Its pro-
fessors and practitioners are usually shrewd people; they are very serious
with the public, but wink and laugh a good deal among themselves.... ACHAPTER 11Science, Pseudoscience, and Science Falsely So- Called
Daniel P. Thurs and Ronald L. Numbers