Review of Franz Joseph Gall: Naturalist of the mind, visionary of the brain.

Abstract

Reviews the book, Franz Joseph Gall: Naturalist of the Mind, Visionary of the Brain by Stanley Finger and Paul Eling (2019). In this book, Finger and Eling describe the rise and fall of phrenology, or organology, the brainchild of Gall. The authors examine the science of mind and brain in the late-18th and early-19th centuries and contextualize his work as the most advanced scientific approach to the study of brain function of his time. Contrary to the way that he is depicted today, Gall is not presented as a charlatan, a quack, or a fraud. He was a physician with a medical degree, a voracious reader, a man familiar with the developments in science and medicine who wanted to develop a science of mankind based on hard facts that others could confirm (p. 122). This book is a reevaluation of Gall's contributions to the science of mind and brain, psychology, and neuroscience, with a focus on the issue of the cerebral localization of function. It also examines Gall's contributions to psychiatry, criminology, and social reform. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).