L
aura Rose studied under both the Whitesides and with Genevieve Thomas, an exacting teacher, and was certified as a professional Personologist in 1971 after more than three intense years of study.
In the ensuing years she has used this skill with jury selection, teaching sales courses, working with families, and consulting with management and human resource staff.
Robert L. Whiteside, with a college degree in psychology and a specialization in statistics, statistically validated 68 traits that demonstrated a direct relationship between body build and personality.
Elizabeth Whiteside, with her training in biochemistry and long experience with problem children, jointly opened the Interstate College of Personology in San Francisco in 1957. It’s doors closed in the early 90’s.
Judge Edward V. Jones correlated the work of all who had previously contributed, from Aristotle to Gall and from Freud to the father of the science of genetics, Gregor Johann Mendel. He also studied courtroom participants, correlating behavior with physical characteristics.
Jones named this new science Personology and took it to the Los Angeles Police Dept., hospitals, San Quentin prison, and developed tests for the USAF. Jones turned his work over to his pupils, the Whitesides, in 1954.
Dr. Katherine M.H. Blackford, in the early 1900’s, compiled all the available information on physiognomy and phrenology. She developed the amassed educational course for employers that included character reading. She and her husband, Arthur Newcombe, published Character Reading at Sight around 1922.
Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828), a neuroanatomist and physiologist, was a pioneer in the study of the localization of mental functions in the brain.
Gall developed “cranioscopy,” a method to divine the personality and the development of mental and moral faculties on the basis of the external shape of the skull.
In 1810 the first volume of Anatomie et Physiologie du Systeme Nerveux appeared.
Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801), German Pastor, teacher and poet, classified facial features, mental abilities and predispositions. His Essays in Physiognomy became a major resource for better than a century, and he became known as the discoverer of a new science.
His books were translated into several languages, and published in a total of 151 editions, the last as recently as 1940. He rejected astrology, divination, animal likenesses and undertook the simple, painstaking process of observation, description, and classification.
