RONALD COASE AND PHRENOLOGY.

RONALD COASE AND PHRENOLOGY. Ronald Coase came from a humble background. He owed his academic career to phrenology. In the biography which he prepared for the Nobel Prize committee, he noted that: “Both my parents had left school at the age of 12 but were completely literate.” He wrote: “As a young boy I suffered from a weakness in my legs, which necessitated, or was thought to necessitate, the wearing of irons on my legs.” He did not take the entrance examinations for the local secondary school at the usual age of 11. However, at the age of 11 he was taken by his father to a phrenologist, who found that the boy had “considerable mental vigour”. Coase said that: “as the result of the efforts of my parents I was allowed to take the secondary school scholarship examination at the age of 12” and passed.

Since Coase was born in 1910, the visit to the phrenologist would have occurred in 1921 or 1922. This wikipedia article says that phrenology “was very popular in the 19th century, especially from about 1810 until 1840”. Writers who are said to have expressed interest in it include Balzac, Baudelaire, George Eliot, Comte, Alfred Russell Wallace, and George Henry Lewes. 1922 was very late for phrenology to be shaping a boy’s life.