PHRENOLOGY. — From 0°F/°F = mind and 10°F/°F = discourse. Theory due to F. J. Gall and his pupil and collaborator J. K. Spurz.
It held that the cerebral cortex could be topographically divided into well-determined areas of localization for the various psychic phenomena, more or less developed in relation to the varying predominance of these phenomena and capable of modifying the overlying bony surface, so that one could, by inspecting the cranium (cranioscopy) and noting the corresponding elevations and protuberances, diagnose the psychological characteristics of the subject and determine with precision particular intellectual aptitudes and moral tendencies.
Earlier, G. Caspar Lavater (1741-1801), leader of the “physiognomists,” had already posited a correlation between the external characteristics of an individual and his moral worth, in some way preparing the concept and development of phrenology. Gall arrived at the formulation of his theory after long observations of the actual shapes of the head and the predominance of this or that instinctive or intellectual faculty, even from his school days (he was a schoolmate with a robust memory who had prominent eyes set high on his forehead); later he completed the elements of his theory by collecting and studying a large number of human and animal skulls. Gall wished to determine and list on the surface of the skull 27 zones of localization and corresponding protuberances; Spurzheim refined the system, bringing the number to 35, classifying the faculties and inclinations into two orders: the first of affective faculties (1st genus: instincts; 2nd genus: sentiments), the second of intellectual faculties (1st genus: external senses; 2nd: intellectual faculties that perceive being; 3rd: intellectual faculties that perceive the relations of external objects; 4th: reflective faculties that compare, judge, and distinguish). The areas, progressively numbered, thus came to correspond, for example, to “amiability,” philogeniture, combativeness, self-esteem, circumspection, veneration, firmness, the various external senses, order, comparison, etc., according to one or another of the 35 possible external cranial accidents.
The theory and practical applications of phrenology aroused on one side fanatical enthusiasm, on the other criticism, ridicule, and opposition, particularly in France, where Gall, born in 1758 in Württemberg, had settled in 1807 after being forced to leave Vienna and wander for two years through northern Europe. He was accused, besides by contemporary scholars on scientific grounds, by moralists of holding an antisocial doctrine tending toward materialism; he defended himself against this accusation by writing with his pupil Spurzheim: *On the useless dispositions of the soul and of the spirits, or of materialism, fatalism, and moral freedom*.
At present, the inferences of phrenology must be regarded as fantastic, but one cannot deny to Gall and his pupil the merit of being founders of the doctrine of cerebral localization. In fact, phrenology was at first struck down by Flourens (1822), who, through his researches on the physiology of the nervous system by 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, with only a proportional decrease in intensity. But later experiments by G. B. Bouillaud (1824), P. Broca (1861), Hitzig and Fritsch (1870), Ferrier (1873-1875), L. Luciani (1878), H. Krause (1884), Beevor and Horsley (1890), Grünbaum and Sherrington (1901-1903), etc., using the method of clinical observation combined with anatomopathological examination in man or directly exciting various zones of the cerebral cortex in higher animals (dog, monkey) and even in man, demonstrated that not all parts of the brain proper have the same functions, that the complex of convolutions does not constitute a single organ but many organs or groups of organs, and that there are in the brain large distinct regions corresponding to the great regions of the mind (P. Broca, in L. Luciani, op. cit. in bibliography, p. 674).
In this way, within a little more than a century, having foundered in the ridicule of “craniomania” (a production held by the History of Medicine at the University of Rome), there arose an entirely new architecture of cerebral localization, so that today one speaks of various geographical maps of the cerebral cortex, subdivided into 100 cytoarchitectonic fields by von Economo and into 50 by Brodmann. Nor can it be said that these are merely motor localizations, as from the researches of the early experimenters, but of functions whose complexity of mechanism and finalism assumes a content and therefore a psychological pertinence (v. CEREBRAL AND CORTICAL LOCALIZATIONS).