By Diane Batshaw Eisman, M.D. FAAP Doctor Eisman is in Family Practice in Aventura, Florida with her partner, Dr. Eugene Eisman, an internist/cardiologist
Once upon a time in Vienna, there dwelt a doctor by the name of Franz Joseph Gall.
As a youngster, he was intrigued by the distinctive personalities among his friends, family and himself. Gall observed that peoples’ skulls had different conformations from each other. Could these differing shapes be clues as to why people had disparate personality traits?
He couldn’t help but notice that one of his classmates had an oddly shaped head. This student had exceptional language abilities. To the young Gall, this observation proved that the shape of his friend’s head was connected with those superior skills.
Gall’s fascination with the differences in skull shapes led him to study medicine. From Wikipedia, “His first ideas about functional localization came from noticing that classmates who excelled at memory tasks had prominent facial features.”
And so he became the father of phrenology. Phrenologists did “skull readings.” It was the pseudo-science that connected bumps on your head to underlying bumps on the brain. And if you examined those scalp bumps, you learned a lot about someone’s personality traits. Phrenologists believed that the brain had muscles. And the more often you used one of these specific muscles, the bigger it grew and, therefore the associated skull bump became larger.
And so, Gall traipsed around examining heads of people in hospitals, asylums, and prisons. After palpating an untold number of skulls, he developed a map of traits and behaviors.
This map divided the brain into areas that corresponded to certain faculties, such as a talent for poetry, mechanical ability, or mathematical skills. He even located a section that corresponded with the instinct to commit murder.
Gall was confident that all those bumps on a skull were connected to bumps on the brain’s surface; that the skull’s shape and indentations were connected to character, skills, and personality.
In case anybody wants to try a skull reading, here’s what you do. Get hold of a phrenology bust that has all the specific areas mapped out for you. Then you grab a friend and feel their head, carefully making note of their bumps. Once you’ve done that, you can compare it to the phrenology chart. Voila!!! You now know a lot about him or her.
Gall received a lot of criticism but he ignored anything that was contradictory to phrenology. Having your head read remained popular in Victorian circles until the early 1900s.
Gall was the father of a pseudo-science, but he was also a physiologist and neuroanatomist. While “…phrenology was incorrect it did help inspire research on the localization of brain function, which played an important part in the development of neurology,” writes Kendra Cherry in Verywell Mind.
Dr. Curmudgeon suggests “Bitter Medicine”, Dr. Eugene Eisman’s story of his experiences–from the humorous to the intense—as a young army doctor serving in the Vietnam War.
Bitter Medicine by Eugene H. Eisman, M.D. –on Amazon
Doctor Curmudgeon® is Diane Batshaw Eisman, M.D., a physician-satirist. This column originally appeared on SERMO, the leading global social network for doctors.
SERMO www.sermo.com
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