Woddat?

Flea remover?
Brain detector?

Phrenology gauge

Measuring the depth of his curly locks….or the phrenology thingy.

Phrenology tool?

Brain-o-scope.

I don’t know what it is. I’m assuming it’s most likely some kind of phrenology measurement tool, but the lady is a qualified MD.

Here are the 3 comments so far posted in the Shorpy thread:

Phrenology
Submitted by rhhardin on Wed, 09/05/2012 – 7:39pm.
The only thing she could be measuring is skull radius (at the point she’s measuring).

Grading on the Curve
Submitted by dwig on Wed, 09/05/2012 – 7:10pm.
The device she’s using is for measuring curvature. The outer two pins are rigid and the center is spring loaded. The little indicator shows how much the pin is depressed. These are often calibrated to indicate the radius of a circular curve that would fit the three points.

The big question is why she’s measuring the curvature of the boy’s skull.

My Guess
Submitted by JohnB on Wed, 09/05/2012 – 6:55pm.
My guess is, she’s practicing the pseudoscience of phrenology, which is odd for a “doctor” of her time since the practice had been pretty much discredited well before the end of the 19th century. Of course, she might also be a schoolmarm making sure the subject’s hair fell within accepted limits.

Maybe she’s measuring for a hat.

As for why a doctor would be doing phrenology, there are doktards today who recommend chiro, homeopathy and other quack practices.

BTW the date for this photo is 1914.

We know nothing of the context of the photo, so for all we know she could be an admirably modern doctor of 1914, indignantly demonstrating the pseudoscientific nonsense of the previous century.

I just lost a post into the ether somehow.

The device looks similar to our front and back lens surface curve measurers. Like someone mentioned, two fixed pins and a middle one the moves longer or shorter to give you a curvature. Could it be something to do with measuring skull curvature as part of recording normal childhood growth?

I have no idea how or why this would work though.

Looks like people have been recently measuring skull curvatures with more modern methods, anyway:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18216661

Here you go….a lens clock:

http://www.bibonline.co.uk/products/radian-lens-clock-tl-38c

Bubble Car said:

We know nothing of the context of the photo, so for all we know she could be an admirably modern doctor of 1914, indignantly demonstrating the pseudoscientific nonsense of the previous century.

How do we know she is a qualified doctor?

Hmm, some more light shed on the matter:

Making the Grade
Submitted by jsmakbkr on Wed, 09/05/2012 – 11:43pm.

In her home state of Iowa, Dr. Clark and Mrs. Mary T. Watts achieved notoriety by coming up with a supposedly objective formula for grading children based on certain physical attributes. According to a 1913 article in the Woman’s Home Companion, her formula included a “cephalic index,” measured this way: “multiply width of head by 100 and divide by length. . . . 80 to 85 cephalic heads are preferable.” I wonder if her formula gave women extra credit if they took on the appearance of a founding father.

The device doesn’t look like it would be useful for measuring the length or width of the head.

bumps

It is a shortnin’ bread indicator.