GALL, FRANZ-JOSEPH. - German physician, b. at Tiefenbronn on 9 March 1758, d. in Paris on 22 Aug. 1828. He studied in Vienna and devoted himself with particular assiduity to the study of the anatomy of the skull. Having left Vienna in 1805 with his pupil Spurzheim, in 1806 and 1807 he gave public demonstrations on the brain, staying for that purpose in Berlin and in many other European cities, and finally in Paris, where, together 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 imagined an entire psychological system in which the intelligence or psychic personality of man 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 Flourens (1822), and, in Gall's sense, there was no longer any talk of "cerebral localizations," which, later, took on an entirely different meaning. Gall was not a materialist: for him the brain is a "condition," a "means" of which the soul avails itself.
Bibliography2 worksWorks: F. J. Gall et G. Spurzheim, Anatomie et Physiologie du système nerveux en général et du cerveau en particulier, 2 vols., Paris 1810-1
BIBL.: Works: F. J. Gall et G. Spurzheim, Anatomie et Physiologie du système nerveux en général et du cerveau en particulier, 2 vols., Paris 1810-19. Studies: J. Boury, Système nerveux central, I, Paris 1890, pp. 497-516; A. Eymieu, La part des croyants dans les progrès de la science, II, ibid. 1934, pp. 172-73.
Scremin, Luigi. “Gall, franz-joseph.” In Enciclopedia Cattolica, vol. V, col. 1882. Città del Vaticano: Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico, 1950. https://azioneromana.com/article/gall-franz-joseph.
MLA
Scremin, Luigi. “Gall, franz-joseph.” Enciclopedia Cattolica, vol. V, Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico, 1950, col. 1882. Azione Romana, https://azioneromana.com/article/gall-franz-joseph.
BibTeX
@incollection{ec5_gall_franz_joseph,
author = {Scremin, Luigi},
title = {Gall, franz-joseph},
booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica},
volume = {V},
pages = {1882},
note = {Cited by column},
publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico},
address = {Città del Vaticano},
year = {1950},
url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/gall-franz-joseph}
}
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