Origins of phrenology

In the early 19th century a revolution in medical understanding swept across Europe. It was called phrenology and it claimed that a person's character could be read by a trained doctor feeling the bumps and dips on the patient's skull. The concept was developed by Franz Joseph Gall in 1796 during his time in Vienna, Austria. Gall promoted the idea that the brain was made up of 27 individual organs (some advocates claimed it comprised 42 sections), of which 19 could be found in other animals with the remaining eight located exclusively in the human brain. This concept was not founded in the fields of alternative medicine but was accepted as scientific fact within many branches of medicine and by some leading intellectuals of the time such as Charles Darwin. The theory was not, however, well received by certain religious communities, who accused the proponents of being atheists and of taking away the principle of freedom of choice from humanity.

Franz Gall eventually committed his ideas to print in 1809 when he published what many consider to be his masterpiece entitled The Anatomy …