An Emerging Theory

Gall built a successful practice after obtaining his medical degree in 1785. He lived in a fashionable part of Vienna and in 1790 married Katharina Leisler, who he knew from Strasbourg. He published his first book in 1791, a philosophical work on the mind and the art of healing, in which he dispensed with metaphysics and loosely presented some ideas (e.g., innate faculties, individual differences) but not others (e.g., localizing faculties) that he would develop in his later “organology.” Shortly after, he met a young musical prodigy named Bianchi, who was ordinary in other ways. Although this convinced him that music had to be an innate faculty of mind, he did not correlate this trait with a distinctive cranial bump at this time. Nonetheless, her case seemed to have reminded him of the good memorizers of his youth, who had bulging eyes, also leading him to his new theory of mind. By 1796, he was lecturing from his home about many independent faculties of mind, the parts of the brain associated with them, and skull markers as a means to correlate behavioral functions with underlying brain structures. Two years later, he published a letter to Joseph Friedrich Freiherr Retzer, the Viennese censor, laying out his doctrine and methods with humans and animals. In it, he presented himself as a physiognomist.

John Tyndall, the rhetorician of molecularity. Part one. Crossing the boundary towards the invisible

This paper highlights the way in which Tyndall achieved his broad understanding of the molecular character of physical nature through an examination of the various molecular explanations he put forward in his papers and lectures, and argues that, in Tyndall's writings, one can find a most articulate version of nineteenth-century British molecular discourse. The exploration of those molecular conditions which underlay physical phenomena was central to his research throughout the years, and for this exploration he utilized his imagination, which he believed to be an innate faculty of the human mind. According to Tyndall, the imaginative dimension of science consisted of the creation of mental images of the unseen which enabled scientists to cross the boundary that separated the realm of phenomena from those of causal mechanisms. In his writings he expressed these mental images of the unseen in the distinctive molecular language of his age.