AbstractPhrenologists were the first social scientists to construct a view of human nature in which the inheritability of both physical and mental qualities played a major role. This paper shows that phrenologists addressed many of the same issues that were later to be addressed by social Darwinists and eugenicists. The context within which the phrenologists addressed these issues, however, was that of early‐nineteenth‐century health reform. Phrenological views of inheritance were intimately connected with the phrenological credo that humans are part of nature and therefore must live according to the laws of nat