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The Psychiatric Body
Published in Roger Cooter, John Pickstone, Medicine in the Twentieth Century, 2020
The second quarter of the nineteenth century was the heyday of European and American phrenology. Based on the theories of the Viennese anatomist Franz-Joseph Gall, phrenology was the belief that the conformation of the human skull indicates mental faculties and character traits. Gall further hypothesized that mental functions could be analyzed into a number of independent faculties, each faculty seated in a particular region of the brain. Gall’s adherents Johann Kaspar Spurzheim and George Combe popularized his ideas in Britain and North America, where during the 1830s and 1840s many asylum doctors and proprietors subscribed to phrenological principles. Phrenological psychiatry centered on the belief that insanity, especially ‘moral insanity’, stemmed from the derangement of a particular personality faculty, which could be treated by strengthening neighboring faculties and which after death could be traced to a lesion in that part of the brain. Gall’s system of correspondences between cerebral regions and mental faculties was wholly conjectural, and the related medical and popular beliefs in physiognomy and craniology are now judged to be pseudo-sciences. Nonetheless, phrenological psychiatry was a physiological psychology based on a belief in the brain as the organ of the mind. It pictured the brain not as an undifferentiated mass but as a congeries of functionally discrete parts. It encouraged physicalist methods of investigation. Later in the century, French and German laboratory neuropathologists returned to the idea of functional brain localization with results that proved scientifically more durable.
Biology and Crime
Published in Gail S. Anderson, Biological Influences on Criminal Behavior, 2019
Phrenology now seems absurd, and there were certainly many people who considered it absurd at the time. We tend to think that it was generally accepted, but Gall had many critics at the time who pointed out the obvious holes in his theory when it was first put forward. They argued that his theories were not based on any scientific evidence or clinical data. He leapt to conclusions based on observations seen in just one patient. For example, he stated that dangerousness could be predicted based on the presence of a lump close to the ear, as he had observed such a lump both in a student who tortured animals and in an executioner.10 This was the sum total of his so-called evidence. His “research,” such as it was, was no more accepted by intelligent people then than it would be now. Nevertheless, Gall attracted an international cult following.
History: treatment of mental illness
Published in Alan Weiss, The Electroconvulsive Therapy Workbook, 2018
A German physician, Franz Joseph Gall, pictured in Photo 2.1.8, developed phrenology in 1796 (van Wyhe, 2002). It had some influence through to the late 1800s throughout Britain and Europe. Gall's hypothesis was that the brain is an organ of the mind and has various functions that relate to
Phrenology’s frontal sinus problem: An insurmountable obstruction?
Published in Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 2022
What did change in a significant way was how the laity gravitated to phrenology during the second quartile of the nineteenth century. Still, historians can do no more than speculate on how the frontal sinus problem contributed to the shift from phrenology as a science, which is how Gall saw it, to the fad for head readings. The fact of the matter, as noted, is that ordinary people were not particularly interested in the scientific experiments supporting or refuting phrenology. Phrenology was being presented to them as a useful science—one that could help a person become happier and healthier, while providing ways for reforming social institutions, such as schools and jails, and even choosing the best leaders. Especially among people with limited educations not wanting to read more scholarly pieces or perhaps test the doctrine on their own, being told about phrenology’s utility or promises was good enough.
Le langage des crânes. Histoire de la phrénologie
Published in Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 2021
Renneville focuses primarily on “this new science”; that is, phrenology, rather than the life of its founder, Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828). He closely examines how Gall was received in Paris and his career there, following his tour of Europe. His historical analysis situates Gall’s presentation of this new explanation of brain function in Parisian salons as a scientific and high society event. He explores the socioeconomic and political context (the Empire and Napoleon) and the medical-philosophical knowledge at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the French capital, where the Enlightenment of the previous century had taken shape. Renneville thus raises several questions: Can the acceptance of phrenology be explained by a failure of reason? Did phrenology provide a new perspective in the study of human faculties that continues to influence our current scientific reasoning?
Stephanus Bisius (1724–1790) on mania and melancholy, and the disorder called plica polonica
Published in Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 2021
Eglė Sakalauskaitė-Juodeikienė, Paul Eling, Stanley Finger
Bisius’s distinction between the mortal, physical brain and the construct usually called soul was in line with many medical treatises since the time of Thomas Willis, if not earlier. Especially in religiously conservative countries, physicians and philosophers did not want to upset the powerful clergy or other authorities. Thus, they wrote about the physical body and how injuries and diseases (observable and imagined) affected the brain when accounting for cases of disordered or markedly erroneous thinking. Common beliefs about the immaterial soul and other elements of religious dogma would be mentioned in passing, before being politely pushed off to the side, and best left to the clerics.15Franz Joseph Gall would adopt this strategy during the 1790s, when he started to write about practical medicine, and also when he began to construct his organology (later called phrenology) in ultraconservative Vienna. He would continue to employ the same strategy, trying to sidestep religious dogma while dealing with the brain, after he moved to Paris (Finger and Eling 2019).