GALL, FRANZ JOSEPH

GALL, FRANZ JOSEPH (1758–1828), inventor of phrenology.

Franz Joseph Gall was born in the Swabian village of Tiefenbronn, in the German grand duchy of Baden, where his father, a wealthy Roman Catholic wool merchant, was mayor. Gall's parents intended him for the church, but in 1777, the same year he married a young Alsatian girl, he began medical studies at Strasbourg. In 1781 he moved to Vienna, where he received his medical degree in 1785. Thereafter, until his death in Paris in August 1828, he carried on a highly successful conventional medical practice.

Gall's first publication, Philosophisch-Medicinische (1791), was largely a diatribe against metaphysics and idealist and romantic speculations. Gall regarded himself as an empiricist revealing "Nature's truths" and took as his particular mission the integration of scientific problems of mind and brain with those of life and society. From the mid-1790s he began collecting and studying human and animal skulls, as well as conducting extensive anatomical dissections of the brain. He developed his ideas in public lectures and demonstrations in Vienna from 1796 until 1801, when the emperor of Austria forbade them on grounds of being conducive to materialism, immorality, and atheism. In 1805, with his assistant, the medical student Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776–1832), he undertook a lecture tour of Germany, Denmark, The Netherlands, Switzerland, and France, which lasted until October 1807 when he settled in Paris. The tour was a huge success, earning him fame and fortune, but at the same time raising considerable controversy, especially from fellow medical professionals.

Gall's skull doctrine (Schädellehre) or "Organologie" as he preferred to call what others were to denominate craniology and (after 1815) phrenology, was based on six propositions, none of which was strictly original. The first was that humans and animals were born with innate faculties or aptitudes. Although this was a commonsensical observation, it flew in the face of the French idéologues who emphasized the importance of environment and learning over innate endowment. Gall's second proposition was that the brain was the organ of the mind, that is, in opposition to the mind-body dualism posited by René Descartes, that the mind (as brain) was part of the organization of the body as a whole, rather than something separate from it. Third, Gall proposed that the brain was not a homogeneous unity, but an aggregate of cerebral organs ("faculties") with discrete functions. Hitherto, within philosophies of mind, "mental faculties" indicated nonspecific functional parameters; in Gall's system, however, they were physical operational vectors in self-contained compartments of brain-matter. From the point of view of the history of psychology, this assignment of specific mental functions to specific anatomical organs was the most revolutionary aspect of Gall's system. Fourth, he maintained that these cerebral organs were topographically localized, and, fifth, that, other factors being equal, the relative size of any one of them could be taken as an index to its power of manifestation. Finally, Gall proposed that since the skull ossified over the brain during infant development, external craniological means could be used to diagnose the internal state of the mental faculties. Here Gall's theory intersected with contemporary interest in physiognomy, especially as rekindled in the late eighteenth century by the Reverend Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801). Significantly, the first full account of Gall's doctrine (which was written by Spurzheim) was not entitled a craniological system or brain organology, but rather, The Physiognomical System of Drs. Gall and Spurzheim (1815). Gall's physiognomy was profoundly different from that delineated by Lavater, however. Not only did it give no scope to immaterial and occult forces, but, crucially, it related external signs of character to internal neurophysiological functions. Although Gall saw himself simply as recasting psychology from a branch of philosophy to one of biology, his physiognomy also fitted with a broader and more fundamental contemporary European project: the perception of the self in terms of psychological interiority.

Since the turn of the twentieth century the mention of phrenology has conjured only the craniological aspect of Gall's doctrine. For most of the nineteenth century, however, Gall's ideas were perceived as pivotal to reconceptualizing psychology, neuroanatomy, and philosophy. Opponents and advocates alike appreciated that his reduction of questions of mind and brain to the single domain of dynamic physiology was a grandiose means to sweep away centuries of metaphysical speculations and reflections. Later pioneers in brain function acknowledged and built upon Gall's researches, while positivist social scientists, such as Auguste Comte, regarded Gall as crucial to a major shift in the conceptualization and analysis of man's place in nature.

See alsoComte, Auguste; Phrenology; Psychology.

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Primary Sources

Gall, F. J. Anatomie et physiologie du système nerveux en général, et du Cerveau en particular. 4 vols. Paris, 1810–1819. Includes an atlas of one thousand plates. The first 2 volumes were coauthored by J. G. Spurzheim.

——. Sur les functions du cerveau et sur celles de chacune de ses parties. 6 vols. Paris, 1822–1825. English translation by W. Lewis, Jr. Boston, 1835.

Spurzheim, J. G. The Physiognomical System of Drs. Gall and Spurzheim. London, 1815.

Secondary Sources

Heintel, Helmut. Leben und Werk von Franz Joseph Gall: Eine Chronik. Würzburg, Germany, 1986.

Wyhe, John van. "The Authority of Human Nature: The Schädellehre of Franz Joseph Gall." British Journal for the History of Science 35 (2002): 17–42.

Young, Robert M. "Gall." In Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 5, edited by Charles Coulston Gillespie, 250–256. New York, 1972.

Roger Cooter