An Emerging Theory

Abstract

Gall built a successful practice after obtaining his medical degree in 1785. He lived in a fashionable part of Vienna and in 1790 married Katharina Leisler, who he knew from Strasbourg. He published his first book in 1791, a philosophical work on the mind and the art of healing, in which he dispensed with metaphysics and loosely presented some ideas (e.g., innate faculties, individual differences) but not others (e.g., localizing faculties) that he would develop in his later “organology.” Shortly after, he met a young musical prodigy named Bianchi, who was ordinary in other ways. Although this convinced him that music had to be an innate faculty of mind, he did not correlate this trait with a distinctive cranial bump at this time. Nonetheless, her case seemed to have reminded him of the good memorizers of his youth, who had bulging eyes, also leading him to his new theory of mind. By 1796, he was lecturing from his home about many independent faculties of mind, the parts of the brain associated with them, and skull markers as a means to correlate behavioral functions with underlying brain structures. Two years later, he published a letter to Joseph Friedrich Freiherr Retzer, the Viennese censor, laying out his doctrine and methods with humans and animals. In it, he presented himself as a physiognomist.