Franz Joseph Gall

Franz Joseph Gall was a German neuroanatomist and physiologist, born in Tiefenbronn in 1758, who pioneered the study of how mental functions are localized in the brain. He studied medicine at Strasbourg and finished his degree in Vienna, then worked with patients in an asylum and kept a successful private practice. He developed the theory of organology and the method of cranioscopy, which his collaborator Johann Spurzheim later named phrenology, holding that the brain is made of separate faculties whose development shows in the shape of the skull. Phrenology is now regarded as a pseudoscience, though Gall also improved brain dissection by tracing fibers slowly through the whole organ. He died in 1828.