Franz Joseph Gall

Franz Joseph Gall ( born March 9, 1758 in Tiefenbronn near Pforzheim, Baden, † August 22 1828 in Montrouge near Paris, today the department of Hauts -de -Seine ) was a German physician and anatomist.

Life and Teaching

Gall studied in Strasbourg, then from 1781 in Vienna, where he completed his studies and settled as a practitioner in the sequence. With the phrenology he founded in the years that followed the doctrine that the brain is the center for all mental functions. He also contributed authoritative work on physiognomy. This lesson illustrates how personal traits or characteristics in the face over the facial expressions can be read. He also discovered the fiber structure of the brain. He also worked on the craniometry ( skull measurement ) through which Gall conclusions about the brain form hoped. However, he failed in this theory due to three causes:

His studies collected Gall in Vienna a large number of skulls, " most of madmen or criminals ", and many shaped by the nature of plaster busts of famous people or people " with special skull formations ".

Tour and successes

1801 showed Emperor Franz II to one of his ministers, who held by Gall in his apartment private lectures, which " to proceed " against the principles of morality and religion seemed to stop immediately. Gall was expelled in 1805 from Austria and thereby broke out on a European tour that took him over Munich by Augsburg and Frankfurt am Main. In 1808 he reached Paris, where he sought to spread his teaching, to:

After initial enthusiasm of the male and female audience, these began to take to public contempt in his new teaching theory by which he divided the known world of science:

Effects

This hype yet attracted many desires after skulls of eminent personalities by themselves: many tombs were plundered - so disappeared the skulls of eg Joseph Haydn, Betty Roose and René Descartes, or items such as the skull plate of the composer Gaetano Donizetti. After Gall in France attracted the attention of the Regent Napoleon Bonaparte, he retired in 1820 to his country seat in Montrouge near Paris, where he ordained to end of his life as a practitioner.

In Gall's departure to Paris his skull and bust collection remained in Vienna. 1824 Gall wrote to his friend with him Dr. Anton Rollett in Baden near Vienna and left him in this way promoting the now famous collection for his museum, in which after his death and his own Skull " incorporated " was.

Varia

From Gall are two portrait medals:

• Medalist Abraham Abramson, Silver, 1805, 40 mm, dedicated by the Berlin audience. ( Literature: Brettauer No. 375, fig panel 7 Tassilo Hoffmann No. 208, Plate 22 )

Skull collection in Rollettmuseum in Baden near Vienna

Skull analysis on the title of an American magazine (1848 )

Representation of Gall's phrenology in a monograph (1894 )

Development of brain research (1894 )

Plastic model of phrenological zones