GALL, FRANZ-JOSEPH. - German physician, born at Tiefenbronn on 9 March 1758, died at Paris on 22 Aug. 1828. He studied at Vienna and devoted himself with particular diligence to the study of the anatomy of the skull. Leaving Vienna in 1805 with his pupil Spurzheim, he gave public demonstrations on the brain in 1806 and 1807, staying for this purpose in Berlin and in many other European cities, and finally in Paris, where, with Spurzheim, he presented to the Institute in 1808 the work on the nervous system and the brain, in which he emphasized the importance of the gray matter of the cerebral cortex and of the ganglia of the nervous system, and devised an entire psychological system in which human intelligence, or psychic personality, is divided into a sum of heterogeneous faculties, independent of one another, each of which would be represented by a special province of the cerebral cortex.
“Phrenology” or “cerebral organology” was demolished by Fiourens (1822), and, in G.’s sense, there was no further talk of “cerebral localizations,” which later acquired an altogether different meaning. G. was not a materialist: for him the brain is a “condition,” a “means” of which the soul makes use.