Controversial Final Years

Gall remained a controversial figure throughout his life, which ended in Paris in 1828. In his later years, he continued to fight with Georges Cuvier, who had overseen the rejection of his and Spurzheim’s Mémoire to the Institut National in 1808, and with Cuvier’s protégé, physiologist Pierre Flourens. Flourens initially looked favorably on Gall’s doctrine, but during the 1820s his brain lesion experiments on birds and other animals were heralded by the French élite as strong evidence against cortical localization of function. Despite this formidable opposition, Gall did find a supporter of localization of function in physician Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud, who started reporting in 1825 that lesions of the anterior part of the brain are more likely to affect speech than posterior brain damage. Gall’s health began to fail a year later, when he was 68 and began to have strokes. After he succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage in 1828, his body was buried in Paris’ Cimetiére du Pére-Lachaise, but not his skull, which was examined by his followers and added to his collection. Gall’s organologie, now regarded as phrénologie, now began an even steeper decline in France and throughout the Continent, although “popular phrenology,” with less emphasis on the underlying science, continued to be influential on British and American landscapes.

The Long-Awaited Volumes

Gall was already starting to write a book about organology while in Vienna. It had been approved by the censor and he had a subscription to back it. But he did not complete it there or during his lecture-demonstration tour prior to entering France. He did, however, continue to collect more case studies and feedback along the way and in Paris, where he was helped with his French. Gall knew this book was important for his legitimacy as a serious scientist and for his legacy, and he spent a small fortune on the four volumes and magnificent accompanying atlas. Titled Anatomie et Physiologie du Système Nerveux en Général, et du Cerveau en Particulier, it came out between 1810 and 1819, with Spurzheim (who left him in the interim) as his co-author on the first two volumes and the atlas. To his dismay, Gall discovered that the set was too expensive for most of his readers to afford. This revelation led him to publish a less expensive “small edition” without the detailed neuroanatomy and the costly atlas, his Sur les Fonctions du Cerveau et sur Celles de Chacune de ses Parties, which left his organologie virtually unchanged and was completed in 1825. The latter was translated into English a decade later, seven years after his death, and it allowed a broader audience to follow his logic and see his evidence for multiple, independent organs of mind associated with discrete cortical territories.

A Detour to Holland, Switzerland, and Back to Germany

Gall’s scientific travels took him from the German states to the Netherlands in 1806, where his ideas were already known to many people, having been covered in periodicals and books, as well as through word of mouth. But although the Dutch had been intrigued by physiognomy, they were less than enthusiastic about Gall, who did not help his cause by how he reacted to small audiences and some fellow scientists. This part of his journey included stops in Utrecht, Amsterdam, the Hague, and Leiden. Tepid receptions made him anxious to return to the German states, starting with Cologne, where he also experienced a lack of interest. Things improved when he made his way to Frankfurt and then to some smaller German cities, and he was able to see his parents in Tiefenbronn. Gall had previously made a short stop in Heidelberg, returning there early in 1807 and entering into a vitriolic debate with Jakob Fidelis Ackermann, who criticized virtually everything Gall did in a book. He then went to Munich, where he met with anatomist Samuel Thomas Soemmerring, who was polite but felt Gall was a poor listener and not always right. Zurich, Bern, and some other Swiss cities followed, and once again Weimar. By the fall of 1807, he dropped his plans to go to Russia and instead turned to Paris, not expecting to spend the rest of his life there.

Scientific Journey through Germany and Denmark

Berlin was the first stop on Gall’s scientific journey, which began in March 1805, during the Napoleonic Wars that led to the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire. He arrived there with Spurzheim, a wax modeler, and at last one servant, and gave a series of lectures and anatomical demonstrations, while also examining prisoners and psychiatric patients in local institutions. His lectures attracted large audiences that were mostly positive toward him, though he did battle with Professor of Anatomy Johann Gottlieb Walter, whose turf he invaded. After Berlin he headed to nearby Potsdam, where he had been invited to lecture by royalty. Leipzig, Dresden, and Halle followed, and then Weimar and Jena, again with considerable support but also some critics. Next was Göttingen, where he spent time with fellow skull collector and anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who was less than impressed. He continued on to Hamburg and Kiel, and into Denmark, where he lectured to a mixed audience of 200 men and women. Returning to the German states, he met with an appreciative King Gustav IV Adolf of Sweden, who, like many others, rewarded him for his stop. Bremen and Münster were next on his agenda, ending this largely successful part of his scientific journey and positioning him to cross over to the Netherlands.

The Arts, and Faculties in Concert

Gall was more interested in nature than the arts, but how he approached the various arts shows how he organized his thoughts and that he was also pondering how his faculties must work in harmony. He had a special faculty for tune or music in his system and made it very clear that this faculty is involved with tonal relationships, not simpler functions, and must be a brain function. He also presented what led him to this faculty; showed why he considered music an innate talent; described how his studies of musical geniuses and birds led him to the cranial bump above the eye; and explained different kinds of music as reflecting the tune faculty working with others. In contrast to music, Gall listed a number of faculties that can figure into the fine arts: distinguishing the relation of colors, constructiveness, locality, distinguishing persons, and imitation. Here, too, he emphasized how faculties must work together and how other faculties figure into the choice of subject matter (e.g., flowers, battle scenes). He also had a faculty for poetry, which he defined broadly. He mentioned that great poets are born, not made; described its bump in the “superior part of the head”; and again alluded to how other faculties working with it would help determine what a poet would write about.

Presenting Organologie

In his Sur les Fonctions du Cerveau, Gall dispensed with his extensive neuroanatomy and focused exclusively on his organologie. He began with a discussion about the brain becoming more complex as one ascended the ladder to humans, showing where we fit into the animal kingdom. He then turned to the faculties being innate, while recognizing that learning might teach us how to control some inborn propensities. He also explained why he dismissed metaphysics from his formulation, yet why his doctrine should not be regarded as materialist, fatalistic, or destructive of free will. In his second volume, he made the case for multiple organs of mind and dispensed with earlier notions. His next volume presented his various methods, showed his awareness of the power of converging operations, and laid out his reasons for making cranioscopy his primary method for determining the faculties of mind and the parts of the brain associated with them. The importance of dealing with exceptional people and animals is also made clear here. At the end of his third volume, he presented his evidence for the most primitive of his 27 faculties, continuing on to his eight distinctly human faculties in his fifth volume. New works on the brain by other authors are covered in his sixth volume, with commentary about each.

Settling in Paris

Gall and Spurzheim arrived in Paris during October 1807, while the Napoleonic Wars were still raging and where Napoleon Bonaparte was reshaping every aspect of society. Napoleon despised foreigners and considered Gall’s doctrine absurd. He urged Georges Cuvier, one of his appointed guardians of French science, to reject it. Nonetheless, Gall made inroads, giving public lectures and demonstrations on his organologie that were well received, while seeing patients to support himself. Encouraged by these ventures, he and Spurzheim wrote a Mémoire and submitted it to the Institut National in 1808. Cuvier, who headed the evaluating committee and was being guided by Napoleon, rejected it as unoriginal and unsuitable for the division for Sciences Mathématiques et Physiques, even though the subject matter was basic anatomy and not more controversial organologie. Gall was furious and sent letters expressing his disappointment to Cuvier, but to no avail. Consequently, he published a book covering the submission, the rejection, and his retorts. And rather than leaving France, he opted to continue his lecturing and medical practice in the city with many amenities, and he continued to work on a series of volumes he was already calling his “great work.”

A Man of Skulls, and More

Gall used various methods when studying people and animals, including dissecting brains, studying individuals with brain damage and diseases, and correlating brain development with the advent of specific behaviors. His primary method, however, was examining the heads and skulls of groups of people either very strong or unusually weak in a behavioral trait, or interviewing people with unusual cranial features, and correlating his craniological observations (e.g., bumps, depressions) with specific mental functions. As shown in this chapter, he had to rely heavily on skulls because he did not have access to adequate numbers of brains of exceptional people, other than lunatics and criminals, and because he did not have good ways of preserving the brains he could get. He also collected skulls showing age-related changes, and amassed a large number of head casts of living or deceased exceptional men, women, and children.

A Rightful Place in History

Gall’s craniology would not withstand the test of time, and how he accepted confirmatory cases and dismissed contradictory evidence would increasingly be regarded as poor science. As a consequence, his cranium-based doctrine began to be branded as a “pseudoscience” in 1834 by physiologist Pierre Magendie, with others following suit. Nonetheless, many of Gall’s ideas have endured, even though he is rarely remembered today for many changes he elicited or helped to elicit. His concepts of numerous independent organs of mind, different kinds of memories, and cortical localization of function are now widely accepted in the neurosciences. He was also extremely influential in drawing attention to individual differences, and he played a major role in making psychiatry a brain-based science and introducing brain pathology into the courtroom. He also deserves to be remembered for purging the soul from the life sciences and positioning us with other animals. And he made significant discoveries in neuroanatomy. In retrospect, Gall was neither a charlatan nor a fraud, though he had too much faith in cranioscopy. His ideas merit a fresh look and, without question, he deserves more credit than he has been given for his insights and how they have changed many fields.

“Cranioscopy” in the British Press

What Gall proposed in Vienna, while traveling through various German cities, and after he arrived in France in 1807 was transmitted by word of mouth and by the press to other countries. In particular, his travels and doctrine were covered in British periodicals and books even before Spurzheim went to Britain in 1814. Some of these publications were translations from German and French articles, while others came directly from foreign correspondents. Further, some included commentary, whereas others did not. Those with opinions varied, with some authors coming out for or against the doctrine, while cooler heads called for more evidence and verification before it could be judged. The British press dutifully covered Gall and Spurzheim’s 1808 Mémoire to the Institut de France, and readers across the British Isles were treated to reviews of the first few volumes of their Anatomie et Physiologie du Système Nerveux, which first began to appear in 1810. Although Thomas Brown published a strongly worded attack against Gall, the British seemed to take what they read in stride. No societies were formed, no journals launched, and no leader rose up to champion the new science prior to Spurzheim’s visits.