The Tragedy of the Popular Professor Galbraith

In 1888, the Wingham Times called Professor Archibald Galbraith, ‘a man possessed of brilliant parts, high scholastic attainments, widely and deeply read, thoroughly cultured and possesses great magnetic power, impressiveness and ability to entertain and instruct’.

Undoubtedly, Galbraith was a gifted orator and charismatic man, but although a man of many talents, he chose a career in a science that quickly diminished in credibility, leading to his tragic demise.

Other that the fact he was born around 1820, not much else is known about Galbraith.

He impressed all who knew him as highly intelligent and well-cultured, but details of his early formal education and upbringing are unknown.

At age 45, he became fascinated with the developing field of Phrenology.

Based on the belief that one could determine one’s personality traits by reading the bumps on one’s head, Phrenology was a Victorian fad that masqueraded as a science for a few decades before being exposed as quackery practiced only by hucksters, conmen, carnies and quacks.

Galbraith made his first appearance in Huron County around 1865.

The Huron Expositor in February 1870 wrote that, ‘Galbraith, the popular Phenologist, entertained our citizens with able and instructive lectures’.

The paper noted that Galbraith brought home the truths of the heads that he read. The paper claimed he had few equals as a practical Phrenologist.

Condemned to a nomadic life, Galbraith lived out of a suitcase travelling from hotel to hotel throughout midwestern Ontario, giving readers at any venue he could rent.

Presumably, Galbraith had given readings in larger centres before coming to Huron County. Perhaps accurately, the Brussels Post claimed that Galbraith’s reputation was more than provincial. It claimed he had lectured through Europe, the United States and several other provinces.

In 1870, the Expositor reported that Professor Galbraith had been, ‘disseminating the truths of phrenology to large audiences’, often lecturing for six nights straight with audiences constantly increasing.

His subject matter drifted significantly from Phrenology as he gave lectures on English Literature, and on poets Byron, Burns and Moore.

With his familiarity with literature, Galbraith may have been a stage actor before becoming a Phrenologist.

By 1872, the Expositor, the same paper that lionized Galbraith, now referred to him as the ‘Last of the Mohicans’ due to his devotion to the dying science of Phrenology, but reported that he was still delivering to crowded rooms.

In Shakespeare, near Stratford, it was said that during the day his rooms are besieged by parties desiring to have their lumps felt.

After 1872, Galbraith disappeared from the area.

Did he move on to practice his trade in other parts of the province? Did he take up another profession?

No record of his existence has been found for this period.

By 1886, Galbraith was back in the county practicing Phrenology. The Expositor alluded to his long absence when it announced that ‘old Archie Galbraith, the well-known veteran phrenologist, is still in the land of the living, as his many friends in this county will be pleased to learn’.

For the next eight years, Galbraith travelling midwestern Ontario delivering lectures and ‘bumping heads’ to the amusement of area audiences.

There were other travelling Phrenologists in the county holding forth on the pseudo-science, but it was Galbraith who retained a modicum of respect.

The Clinton New Era welcomed his return in 1886 by reporting on a Kinburn lecture that he gave at Temperance Hall.

The New Era advised that ‘anyone wishing to hear a good lecture on phrenology would be wise to attend’.

Concerned mothers took troublesome children to Professor Galbraith to have their heads read.

Galbraith gave reassuring advice to both child and distraught parent.

Another item in the Expositor said that in Grey Township’s school section number one, Galbraith ‘read a number of heads, which he said were pretty level’, and that he gave some useful hints to young men and women.

At one poorly attended Hullett lecture, Galbraith read the bumps on a couple of boys’ heads for free and told them they had great heads.

Galbraith mixed flattery, humour and good life advice under the guise of Phrenology. Local papers reported that in Tuckersmith, after examining the heads of young people, Galbraith declared that the neighbourhood was a very intelligent class.

On one visit to Clinton in 1887, the New Era wrote that Galbraith found, ‘one of the most highly esteemed ladies in attendance’, and that she was ‘equal to that of Florence Nighingale’.

Another girl, Hattie Ritchie, was told she was ‘one of the smartest girls in town’.

There was a sincerity and kindness about Galbraith that endeared him to audiences.

In 1888, the Wingham Times described Galbraith as ‘one of the few’ phrenologists in America whose phrenological delineations are given with almost unerring accuracy.

Despite the acclaim, Galbraith was fighting with his own demons – alcohol abuse - which increasingly destroyed his faculties.

In November 1886, the Expositor reported that Galbraith was but a wreck of his former self and affords a sad illustration of the deadly influence of intoxicating liquors.

A New Era correspondent reported that the professor ‘seems to have more delight in taking an extra drop of the craythur, than feeling bumps at present’.

The Brussels Post hailed his grand reputation but also lamented that for such a well-read and intelligent man, Galbraith was too fond of the glass that cheers and inebriates.

The Post reported that Galbraith had ‘handled a vast amount of money, and if he had taken proper care of it, he would now have been one of the wealthiest men in the country’.

The Huron Signal recalled an incident in Forest where Galbraith was so drunk he fell from his hotel balcony onto the street and had to have the ‘bumps on his head read’, but a doctor.

Did such an intelligent man turn to drink because he squandered his considerable talents on the bogus science of bumping heads?

Was it shame and frustration about the loss of status as one of the country’s leading Phrenologists who was reduced to eking out a nomadic living reading bumps in one-room schoolhouses?

On May 24, 1894, Galbraith was found dead in a cheap hotel in Alvinston. One obituary gave his age as 74.

He must have died in poverty because no known grave exists.

No obituary notice mentions family.

The Expositor eulogized Galbraith as one who ‘might and no doubt be one of the foremost men of the land, as few men possessed greater ability or a more genial, whole souled disposition’, had drink not proved his undoing.

Few travelling hucksters, conmen or quacks ever received an obituary let alone as sympathetic as the one for Professor Galbraith.