THE INVENTOR OF PHRENOLOGY

Otago Witness, Issue 3889, 25 September 1928, Page 73

THE INVENTOR OF PHRENOLOGY

One hundred years ago—on August 22, 1828 —there died at Montrouge, near Paris, a man whose theories had excited the wildest controversy throughout Europe and aroused the anger of the Church of Rome. Himself originally intended for the Church, the man chose to die unshriven, refusing the services of any priest on account of Rome’s attitude towards his literary works. Of Italian descent, born in Germany, it was as a naturalised Frenchman that Gall received burial in Pere Lachaise, but it is in his international guise as the founder of modern phrenology that he is known to posterity. Franz Joseph Gall was born at Tiefenbrunn in Baden in 1758, the sixth of 10 children of a local tradesman who was also mayor of the little town. Scorning his • parents’" choice of the Church, he decided upon a medical career, and, after graduating through Strassburg and Vienna, he settled down to research work in the latter city. At this time there was little in Gall’s manner or appearance to suggest potential fame; he was almost a dwarf, being only sft in height, and his absentmindedness was so marked that on rising from the dinner table he could never recognise the person by whose side he had been sitting throughout the meal.

In one way Gall was an admirable example of Moore’s witty lines:— Boobies have looked as wise and bright As Plato or the Stagyrite; And many a sage and learned skull Has peeped through windows dark and dull. In another way Gall was to disprove their truth by showing that the outward appearance of the skull is indeed the reflection of character as determined by the inner formation of the brain. His powers of observation, trained during his boyhood among the flora and fauna of the Baden forests, were extraordinary. He soon observed that persons who were gifted with a marked degree of memory were distinguishable by a certain protuberance of the eyes. This set him thinking. “ Proceeding from reflection to reflection,” he wrote, “ and from observation to observation, it occurred to me that if memory were made evident by external signs, it might be so with other talents or intellectual faculties. From this time, all the individuals who were distinguished by any quality or faculty became the object of my personal attention and of systematic study as to the form of the head.” The theory that the brain is split up into separate compartments for the localisation of different functions was not new; Erasistratus, Galen, and Terr tullian had put forward that view centuries before; but Gall proceeded to elaborate it. He soon decided that the form and shape of each individual skull was determined by, and conformed to, the form and shape of the individual brain beneath it. He thereupon proceeded to examine the skulls and brains of many, after death, whom he had known during life. As physician to a lunatic asylum he had ample scope for examining the cranial phenomena of the insane, and his field was further extended by permission to undertake similar research

in the prisons and medical schools. He soon established to his satisfaction that on the removal of the skull the brain presented a form corresponding to the appearance of the skull during life. As he described it, “ the cranium is only a faithful cast of the external surface of the brain.” And with a ‘previous knowledge of the character and propensities of each person, he noted the corresponding idiosyncrasies of the skull. Gall thereupon commenced to catalogue his conclusions. In many cases the recorded , origin of his discoveries makes somewhat comical reading. Thus: the bump of cruelty, he discovered by examining the heads of a student fond of torturing animals and an apothecary who elected to desert that calling for that of a public executioner; the bump of acquisitiveness, from the heads of pickpockets of his acquaintance; the

bump of love of approbation, from the head of a lunatic who fancied herself Queen of France; the bump of veneration, from the heads of persons found praying in churches; the bump of combative ness, from the heads of acquaintances who invariably waxed pugnacious when drunk; and the bump of amativeness, from the head of an hysterical widow who presumably set her cap at him. In 1796 Gall announced in Vienna his discovery of the functions of the brain, and huge audiences crowded to the lectures, which he delivered in popular vein. Enemies soon sprang up. “ You know,” he wrote, “ how everyone fears for his own head. Men, unhappily, have such an opinion of themselves that each 'one believes that I am watching for his head as one of the most important objects of my collection of skulls! ” The Church was also aroused by what it regarded as atheistic propaganda, and induced the emperor to forbid all further lectures within the empire. Napoleon also being antagonistic, France was taboo, and a project of lecturing in England had to be abandoned, but in Germany Gall obtained enthusiastic hearing, and his books soon spread throughout Europe. After Napoleon’s exile lie was welcomed in France, and as a naturalised Frenchman he was delivering a lecture in Paris on April 3, 1828, when he was seized with an apoplectic fit and died four months later. Romance was not excluded even from his busy life. As a student in Strass-

burg he had been nursed through an illness by a young girl who was also studying there, and whom he afterwards married. History does not relate, however, which, if any, of the phrenological bumps were identified by Gall's examination of his loved one’s head!—John o’ London’s Weekly.