As a boy, he was fascinated by the differences between himself, his siblings, and his classmates. Gall's scientific inquiry began in his youth.
His father was the mayor of Tiefenbronn and he was one of 12 children, only 7 of whom lived to adulthood. The Galls, originally a noble family from Lombardy, had been the leading family in the area for over a century. Gall was born in the village of Tiefenbronn to a wealthy Roman Catholic wool merchant. However, Gall's study of phrenology helped establish psychology, contributed to the emergence of the naturalistic approach to the study of man, and played an important part in the development of evolutionist theories, anthropology, and sociology. His contributions to the field of neuropsychology were controversial at the time and are now widely referred to as pseudoscience. This study became the cornerstone of phrenological character examination.Franz Josef Gall ( German: 9 March 1758 – 22 August 1828) was a German neuroanatomist, physiologist, and pioneer in the study of the localization of mental functions in the brain.Ĭlaimed as the founder of the pseudoscience of phrenology, Gall was an early and important researcher in his fields. (Gall did, in fact, place two faculties-memory of words and center of language-in their correct areas of the brain, although the others remain unverified.) Plaster casts of heads and skulls were used to support his ideas, and studies of living beings with pronounced faculties could be used as the basis for comparison. These faculties included the love of one's children, covetousness, pride, sense of place, poetic talent, and firmness of purpose.
Gall then associated each cerebral faculty with its relative position on the surface of the skull. Based on his studies in cerebral anatomy, he then went on to isolate twenty-seven innate human faculties, corresponding to areas or "organs" of the brain, and maintained that the size and development of the cerebral area would imply a greater or lesser disposition of each trait or faculty, and direct examination of the skull could provide information about the nature of the faculty in the brain below.
It and the successive volume were written in conjunction with his assistant, Johann Gaspar Spurzheim.įranz Joseph Gall came to believe that the anatomy and structure of the brain influenced and, indeed, molded the shape of the skull and, conversely, a study of the skull could reveal information about the size and structure of the brain. In 1810 the first volume of Anatomie et Physiologie du Système Nerveux appeared-one of the first and still impressive accounts of the structure and dissection of the human brain. After settling in Paris in 1807, he began his major work on cerebral function. Spurzheim, Gall embarked on a long lecture tour of Europe, visiting prisons and asylums as well. As early as the 1790s, Gall was developing theories on the anatomy and function of the parts of the brain. der Arzneykunst zu WienĪ controversial figure even in his own lifetime, Viennese physician Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) may properly be considered the father of phrenology, although Gall himself never used that term, and phrenology as we think of it was far removed from Gall's work on the brain and nervous system.
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