Judge — February 24, 1900 — page 5: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This satirizes **phrenology**, the pseudoscience claiming skull shape revealed character and mental abilities. The joke: Maud plans visiting a phrenologist, but her friend Geraldine suggests she needs someone to bash her head first—implying Maud has no natural "bumps" (skull protrusions) for the phrenologist to analyze, so they'd need to *create* some. The cartoon mocks both phrenology's absurdity and insults Maud's intelligence. Though phrenology was already debunked by the early 1900s when *Judge* published, it persisted in popular culture, making it ripe for ridicule. The female characters and petty insult humor reflect the magazine's typical approach to women's topics.