Describe Gall’s cranioscopy method and the popular movement that derived from it. How were they discredited?
Fransz Josef Hall is credited for his finding of the gray matter in the brain and nerve fibers. Gall later shifted his attention towards the physical appearance of the human brain, analyzing the head for bumps and dents. When he started his investigation he found, those animals that had a large skull showed more intelligence. He developed the controversial branch of studycalled cranioscopy, which later was called phrenology.
This new branch proposed that the size and shape of the skull revealed information about the intellectual and emotional level of a person. In Gall’s opinion if someone had a bulge on the skull, it characterized benevolence and self-esteem.
Gall examined a total of 35 locations or dents that were characteristic to certain functions. This study of cranioscopy was taken forward by Spurzheim and Combe who did everything to popularize this movement. Two brothers Orsen and Lorenzo became interested in phrenology. They started a successful business enterprise, opening clinics in many states of America and examined peoples head.
This was an extremely successful enterprise. They also started a magazine American Phrenological Journal. Phrenological societies were formed, reading heads became an art. Some companies whenrecruiting held these head reading sessions to select their employees. Children were also subjected to head reading to ascertain their level of intelligence.
Charles Larve and his associate Frank White developed a machine that was able to read the bumps on the head.The device had 2000 parts and was designed to measure 32 parts of the skull.
After all this Success a research was done by Pierre Flourens who used extirpation to destroy parts of the brain. He found that the underlying tissue did not follow the same outline, as that of the skull. The brain tissue was too soft to give any kind of bumps or dents tothe skull. Later on, it was found out that the areas Gall had assigned for various attributes were also in error.