Franz Joseph Gall: biography of the creator of phrenology

Gall promoted phrenology, a pseudoscience that related the shape of the skull and personality.

Franz Joseph Gall was the creator of phrenology, a pseudosciencea pseudoscientific discipline that related the behavior and personality of individuals to the morphology of the different areas of their brain, and consequently also of the skull. Despite the lack of solidity of his hypotheses, Gall is a key figure in the history of the anatomical study of the brain.

In this article we will review Gall's biography, work and contributions. We will focus on the most relevant aspects of phrenology, a term that Gall himself opposed, considering that it distanced his proposals from the fields of anatomy and physiology.

Biography of Franz Joseph Gall

Franz Joseph Gall was born in Tiefenbronn, Germany in 1758. His parents were noblemen of Lombard origin and fervent Catholics; Gall was the second of their twelve children, so they sought to have him become a priest. However, he was more interested in behavior and he was more interested in human behavior and anatomy than in religion. religion, so he studied medicine in Strasbourg.

Gall moved to Vienna, Austria to finish his studies. There he was a student of two leading medical figures of the 18th century: Maximilian Stoll and Johann Hermann. He specialized in neuroanatomy, although he paid more attention to the brain than to the rest of the nervous system.

His first work was in an insane asylum, where he carried out observations on the inmates. Shortly thereafter he opened his own clinic, also in the city of Vienna, and began to gain fame through his writings and lectures; this led to his being offered the position of chief physician to the Austrian court, which Gall declined.

In 1796 Gall began to give lectures on his hypothesis that the size and shape of the various areas of the brain can be determined by inspecting the skull, and that this information reveals personality and intellectual aptitudes. His collaborator Johann Gaspar Spurzheim gave the discipline the name "phrenology", although Gall considered it neuroanatomy.

After working in Vienna, Gall also practiced in Berlin and Paris; he died in Montrouge, near the French capital, in 1828. Gall's two fundamental works are entitled "The functions of the brain and of each of its parts" and "Anatomy and physiology of the nervous system in general and of the brain in particular".

What did phrenology consist of?

Broadly speaking, Franz Joseph Gall stated that each brain area corresponds to a certain each brain area corresponds to a certain mental functionand that the association between anatomy and behavior can be studied by analyzing the shape of the part of the skull that covers one or another brain region.

More specifically, the method of Gall and his followers consisted of examining the irregularities, protuberances and indentations of the external part of the skull using their fingers, as well as instruments such as tape measures and the famous craniometer, a caliper created specifically to evaluate the morphology of the skull.

Phrenology was popular during the first half of the 19th century.. Gall's ideas spread throughout Europe from his nucleus in Edinburgh, and from the old continent they reached America and Africa, coinciding in time with the colonization and conquest of these territories by European countries.

Nevertheless, and despite the fact that Gall inspired a large number of disciples and theoreticians and that he continues to influence certain approaches today, the strong opposition of the scientific community to phrenology meant that this pseudoscience was discredited some 40 years after Gall began to propagate his hypotheses.

The legacy of Franz Joseph Gall

Although it is undeniable that certain areas of the brain are determinant in some mental processes, as is the case with the hippocampus and the consolidation of memories or with the amygdala and emotional learning, today approaches similar to Gall's are generally viewed as reductionist and erroneous from the ground up.

Nevertheless, Gall's phrenology constituted an important step in the development of neuroanatomy because it solidified the idea of the localization of mental functions in specific areas of the brain. Discoveries such as those of Broca and Wernicke on the brain regions associated with language roughly followed Gall's line of research.

Nowadays, localizationist neuropsychological explanations have lost their relevance due to the increase in knowledge about the real functioning of brain pathways and the rise of the neural network perspective, both in neuroanatomy and in cognitivist psychology.

On the other hand, the neuroanatomical work of Gall favored the progress of dissection techniques, since it contributed to the because it contributed to the popularization of the method of separating brain fibers one by one instead of cutting portions of tissue arbitrarily. It also inspired Cesare Lombroso's disturbing hypotheses on the influence of anatomy on criminality.