noun
- Practitioners or believers in phrenology, the pseudoscientific study of skull shape and size to determine character and mental abilities.
Usage: plural of phrenologist; historical; phrenology is now discredited; often used in historical or critical contexts
Examples
- Nineteenth-century phrenologists believed they could read a person's personality from the bumps on their head.
- The museum exhibit examined how phrenologists misused their theories to justify racist pseudoscience.
- Many phrenologists traveled from town to town offering to analyze people's skulls for a fee.
- Modern neuroscientists reject the claims made by phrenologists of the past.
- Phrenologists attempted to map different mental faculties to specific regions of the brain based on skull shape.