GALL, FRANZ-JOSEPH. - German physician, b. at Tiefenbronn on 9 March 1788, d. in Paris on 22 Aug. 1828. He studied in Vienna and devoted particular assiduity to the study of the anatomy of the skull. Having left Vienna in 1805 with his pupil Spurzheim, he gave public demonstrations on the brain in 1806 and 1807, remaining in Berlin and many other European cities, and finally in Paris, where, together with Spurzheim, he presented to the Institute in 1808 a work on the nervous system and the brain. In this work he emphasized the importance of the grey 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.
The term "phrenology" or "cerebral organology" was coined by Flourens (1822), and in the sense of G[all], no more was spoken of "cerebral localizations," which later took on quite another meaning. G[all] was not a materialist: for him the brain is a "condition," a "means" by which the soul makes use.