Franz Joseph Gall: biography of the creator of phrenology

Franz Joseph Gall was the creator of phrenology, a pseudoscientific discipline that related behavior and personality of individuals with the morphology of the different areas of their brain, and consequently also of the skull. Despite the lack of solidity of his hypothesis, 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.

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Biography of Franz Joseph Gall

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

Gall moved to Vienna, Austria to finish his studies. There he was a student of two eighteenth-century medical personalities: 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 job was in an asylum, where he carried out observations on interned people. Shortly after he opened his own clinic, also in the city of Vienna, and began to gain fame thanks to his writings and his lectures; this led to his being offered the position of chief physician of the Austrian court, which Gall rejected.

In 1796 Gall began giving talks on his hypothesis that the size and shape of different areas of the brain can be determined by inspecting the skull, and that this information reveals personality and intellectual abilities. 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 at Montrouge, near the French capital, in 1828. The two fundamental works of Gall are entitled "The functions of the brain and each of its parts" and "Anatomy and physiology of the nervous system in general and the brain in particular."

What was phrenology?

Broadly speaking, Franz Joseph Gall stated that each brain area corresponds to a certain mental function, and that the association between anatomy and behavior can be studied through the analysis of the shape of the part of the skull that covers one or the other brain regions.

More particularly, the method of Gall and his followers consisted in examining the irregularities, bumps, and indentations on the outside of the skull using your fingers, as well as instruments such as tape measures and the famous craniometer, a caliper specifically created to assess the morphology of the skull.

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

However, and despite the fact that Gall inspired a large number of disciples and theorists and that he continues to influence certain approaches in a specific way today, The strong opposition of the scientific community to phrenology caused this pseudoscience to be discredited some 40 years after Gall began to propagate his hypothesis.

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The legacy of Franz Joseph Gall

Although it is undeniable that certain areas of the brain are decisive in some mental processes, such as the hippocampus and the consolidation of memories or with amygdala and emotional learning, today the approaches similar to those of Gall are generally seen as reductionist and erroneous from the base.

Nevertheless, Gall's phrenology was 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 about the brain regions associated with language roughly followed Gall's line of research.

At present, neuropsychological explanations of a localization nature have lost their validity due to the increase in knowledge about the real functioning of the cerebral pathways and the rise of the perspective of neural networks, both in neuroanatomy and in court psychology cognitivist.

On the other hand, the neuroanatomical work of Gall favored the progress of dissection techniques because he contributed to the popularization of the method of separating the brain fibers one by one instead of cutting pieces of tissue arbitrarily. He also inspired Cesare Lombroso's disturbing hypotheses about the influence of anatomy on crime.

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