Franz Joseph Gall was the creator of phrenology , a pseudoscientific discipline that related the behaviour and personality of individuals with the morphology of the different areas of their brain, and consequently also of the skull. In spite of 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 moved his proposals away 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 his twelve children, so they sought to make him a priest. However, he was more interested in human behaviour and anatomy than in religion, so he studied medicine in Strasbourg.

Gall moved to Vienna, Austria to finish her studies. There, he was a student of two leading figures in 18th century medicine: 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 a mental hospital, where he carried out observations on the people who were interned. Shortly afterwards he opened his own clinic, also in the city of Vienna, and began to make a name for himself through his writings and lectures; this led to an offer of the position of chief physician at the Austrian court, which Gall declined.

In 1796 Gall began to give 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 to be 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 Each of its Parts” and “Anatomy and Physiology of the Nervous System in General and of 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 behaviour can be studied by analysing the shape of the part of the skull that covers one or other regions of the brain.

More specifically, the method of Gall and his followers consisted of examining irregularities, protrusions and indentations on the outside of the skull using their fingers, in addition to 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 nineteenth century . Gall’s ideas spread throughout Europe from its centre in Edinburgh, and from the old continent they reached America and Africa as the time coincided with the colonisation and conquest of these territories by European countries.

However, despite the fact that Gall inspired a large number of disciples and theorists and still influences certain approaches today, the strong opposition of the scientific community to Phrenology led to the discrediting of this pseudoscience 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, such as the hippocampus and the consolidation of memories or the amygdala and emotional learning, today approaches similar to those of Gall are generally seen as reductionist and wrong from the bottom up.

However, 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 by Broca and Wernicke on the brain regions associated with language roughly followed Gall’s line of research.

Currently, neuropsychological explanations of a localizationist nature have lost their validity due to the increase in knowledge about the real functioning of the brain’s pathways and the rise in the perspective of neural networks, both in neuroanatomy and in cognitive psychology.

On the other hand, Gall’s neuroanatomical work favoured the progress of dissection techniques because it contributed to the popularisation of the method of separating brain fibres one by one instead of cutting portions of tissue arbitrarily. It also inspired Cesare Lombroso’s disturbing hypothesis about the influence of anatomy on criminality.