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Franz Joseph Gall: biography of the creator of phrenology

Franz Joseph Gall: biography of the creator of phrenology

March 28, 2024

Franz Joseph Gall was the creator of phrenology , a pseudoscientific discipline that related the behavior 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 hypothesis, Gall is a key figure in the history of the anatomical study of the brain.

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

  • Related article: "History of Psychology: authors and main theories"

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 sons, so they tried to make him a priest. However, 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 personalities of medicine of the eighteenth 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 job was in an insane asylum, where he carried out observations on hospitalized people. Soon after, he opened his own clinic, also in the city of Vienna, and began to gain fame thanks to his writings and lectures; this led to being offered the position of chief doctor of the Austrian court, which Gall rejected.

In 1796 Gall began to give talks around 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 neuroanatomy.


After working in Vienna, Gall also worked in Berlin and Paris; died in 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 claimed 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 other regions of the brain.

More particularly, Gall's method and his followers were to examine the irregularities, bumps, and crevices on the outside of the skull using their fingers, as well as instruments such as tape measures and the famous cranometer, a calibrator created specifically to evaluate the morphology of the skull.


Phrenology was popular during the first half of the 19th century . Gall's ideas spread through Europe from its nucleus in Edinburgh, and from the old continent came to America and Africa to coincide in time with the colonization and conquest of these territories by European countries.

However, despite the fact that Gall inspired a large number of disciples and theorists and continues to influence certain approaches in a timely manner, the strong opposition of the scientific community to phrenology made this pseudoscience discredited by some 40 years after Gall began to propagate his hypotheses.

  • Related article: "Phrenology: measuring the skull to study the mind"

The legacy of Franz Joseph Gall

While it is undeniable that certain areas of the brain are determinants in some mental processes, such as with the hippocampus and the consolidation of memories or with the amygdala and emotional learning, nowadays the approaches similar to those of Gall are seen as a general rule as reductionist and erroneous from the base.

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

At present the neuropsychological explanations of localizationist character have lost validity because of the increase of the knowledge about the real functioning of the brain pathways and of the boom of the neural networks perspective, both in the neuroanatomy and in the cognitivist psychology.

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

  • Maybe you're interested: "Morphopsychology: your facial features ... do they indicate your personality?"

What is Phrenology? (Intro Psych Tutorial #4) (March 2024).


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