Phrenology

PHRENOLOGY. - From φρήν = mind and λόγος = discourse. A theory due to F. J. Gall and his pupil and collaborator J. K. Spurzheim (1808-1809), which maintained that the cerebral cortex is topographically divisible into well-defined areas of localization of the various psychic phenomena, more or less developed in relation to the varying predominance of these and capable of molding the overlying bony surface, so that one could, from cranial inspection (cranioscopy) of the corresponding bumps and protuberances, diagnose the psychological characteristics of the subject and determine with precision his particular intellectual aptitudes and moral tendencies.

(by courtesy of 1870). G. de Nixon
PHRENOLOGY. - Gall's cerebral localizations. Model of a skull in which the bumps for the inclination to music are developed. The bumps correspond to the temporal lobes. From Gall and Spurzheim.

Even earlier, G. Gaspare Lavater (1741-1801), head of the "physiognomists," by admitting a relation of correlation between the external characteristics of the individual and his moral worth, had in some manner prepared the concept and the development of phrenology. Gall arrived at the formulation of his theory following long observations conducted on the various shapes of the head and on the prevalence of this or that instinctive or intellectual faculty, ever since his school years (schoolmates with robust memory, who had prominent eyes set high on the head); later he completed the elements of construction, collecting and studying a large number of human and animal skulls. Gall sought to determine and list on the surface of the skull 27 zones of localization and corresponding bumps; Spurzheim perfected the system, bringing the number to 35, classifying the faculties and inclinations into two orders, the first of the affective faculties (1st kind: instincts; 2nd kind: sentiments), the second of the intellectual faculties (1st kind: external senses; 2nd: intellectual faculties that perceive the entity; 3rd: intellectual faculties that perceive the relations of external objects; 4th: reflective faculties that compare, judge and distinguish). The areas, progressively numbered, thus came each to correspond, for example, to amativeness, to philoprogenitiveness, to combativeness, to self-esteem, to circumspection, to veneration, to firmness, to the various external senses, to order, to comparison, etc., according to one or another of the 35 possible external accidental features of the skull.

The theory and the practical applications of phrenology raised fanatical enthusiasms on the one hand, and on the other criticisms, ridicule, struggles, particularly in France, where Gall, born in 1758 in Württemberg, had moved in 1807, after having been forced to leave Vienna, to wander for two years through northern Europe. He was accused, besides by the scholars of the time on scientific grounds, by moralists of upholding an antisocial doctrine tending toward materialism; he defended himself against this accusation by writing with his pupil Spurzheim: On the innate dispositions of the soul and of the spirit, that is, on materialism, fatalism and moral freedom.

Today, the inferences of phrenology must be considered fanciful, but the merit of founders of the doctrine of cerebral localizations cannot be denied to Gall and his pupil. Indeed, at first phrenology fell under the blows of Flourens (1823), who, with his research on the physiology of the nervous system and with the method of progressive experimental ablation of the cerebral hemispheres, seemed to demonstrate that the action of the brain is uniform, maintained in the entire complexity of its functions even by only a small portion of the organ, only its intensity being proportionally diminished as a result. But the later experiments of G. B. Bouillaud (1825), P. Broca (1861), Hitzig and Fritsch (1870), Ferrier (1873-1875), L. Luciani (1878), H. Krause (1884), Beavor and Horsley (1890), Grünbaum and Sherrington (1901-1903), etc., using the method of clinical observation joined to the anatomopathological one in man or directly exciting the various zones of the cerebral cortex in higher animals (dog, monkey) and even in man, demonstrated "that all the parts of the brain properly so called do not have the same functions, that the complex of the convolutions does not constitute a single organ, but many organs or groups of organs, and there are in the brain large distinct regions, corresponding to the large regions of the spirit" (P. Broca, in L. Luciani, op. cit. in bibl., p. 674).

In this way, in the space of a little more than a century, with the cranial topography of phrenology shipwrecked in the ridicule of "Craniomania" (a satirical theatrical production by Kotzebue in Berlin), a whole new architecture of cerebral localizations is seen to rise again, so that today one speaks of "maps" of the cerebral cortex, subdivided into 109 cytoarchitectonic fields by Von Economo, into 50 by Brodmann. Nor can it be said that these are only motor localizations, as in the research of the first experimenters, but functions that, by their complexity of mechanism and finality, take on a psychological content and import (v. LOCALIZZAZIONI CEREBRALI E CORTICALI).

Giuseppe de Ninan