their writings to the relation of soul to body naturally adopted the teaching of Galen which they accommodated to their theology, thereby conferring on it an importance which rendered correction difficult. Tertullian[1] in a sense expresses his belief in a theory of localization as also at a later period does Thomas Aquinas.[2]
Early in the 13th century Albertus Magnus[3] gave a detailed description of the distribution of mental and psychical faculties in the head. The anterior region he assigned to judgment, the middle to imagination, and the posterior to memory. A somewhat similar allocation was made by Gordon, professor of medicine in Montpellier (1296),[4] who assigned common sensation and the reception of impressions to the anterior cornua of the lateral ventricles, phantasia to the posterior, this power being two-fold (imaginativa and cogitativa), judgment or aestimativa to the third ventricle, and memory to the fourth.[5] Figures of a similar division were given by Petrus Montagnana[6] and Lodovico Dolce[7] still later by Ghiradelli of Bologna[8] and by Theodore Gall of Antwerp.[9] That the “vital spirits” resided in the ventricles was doubted by many, and denied by a few of the anatomists of the 17th century. G. Bauhin in 1621[10] attacked the old view, and Hoffmann of Altorf showed that, as the ventricles were closed cavities, they could not transmit any material fluid. That these spirits existed at all was doubted by Alexander Benedictus,[11] Plater,[12] and a few others; but they were believed in by the great majority of 17th and even of 18th century medical writers, many of whom conceived that the ventricles were semper pleni spiritibus animalibus flammulis similibus, quorum beneficiis intelligimus, sentimus, et movemus,[13] and the opponents of this view were strongly assailed by J. Riolan and others as revolutionary. Columbus[14] ridiculed the idea that the convoluted surface can have anything to do with intellect, as the ass, a proverbially stupid animal, has a convoluted cerebrum. According to his view, the convolutions are for the purpose of lightening the brain and facilitating its movements. The grey matter of the surface of the cerebrum was recognized as the true dynamic element by M. Malpighi[15] and T. Willis.[16] The latter regarded the convoluted surface of the cerebrum as the seat of the memory and the will, the convolutions being intended to retain the animal spirits for the various acts of imagination and memory. Imagination he described as seated in the corpus callosum, sense-perception in the corpus striatum, and impetus et perturbatio in the basal parts of the cerebrum above the crura. The thalami he regarded as the centres of sight and the cerebellum of involuntary acts. Succeeding anatomists simply varied these localizations according to their respective fancies. G. M. Lancisi placed sense-perception in the corpus callosum, R. Vieussens in the centrum ovale majus. R. Descartes supposed the soul to be seated in the pineal gland, others in the brain-commissures especially the pons Varolii.[17] Meyer considered abstract ideas to arise in the cerebellum, and memory to have its seat at the roots of the nerves.[18]
Of later writers three deserve special notice, as having largely prepared the way for the more modern school of phrenology. J. A. Unzer, of Halle, in his work on physiology extended the pre-existing theories of localization. Metzger,[19] twenty years before the publication of Prochaska's work, had proposed to make a series of observations on the anatomical characters of the brains of persons of marked intellectual peculiarity, but apparently he did not carry this into effect. In a more special manner Prochaska of Vienna may be looked upon as the father of phrenology, as in his work on the nervous system, published in Vienna in 1784, are to be found the germs of the later views which were propounded in that city twelve years later.[20]
The system formulated by Gall (q.v.) is thus a modern expansion of an old empirical philosophy, and its immediate parentage is easily traced, although, according to Gall's account, it was with him the result of independent observations. These, he tells us, he began to make at an early age, by learning to correlate the outward appearances and mental qualities of his school-fellows. Gall's first published paper was a letter in the Deutscher Merkur of December 1798, but his principal expositions were oral, and attracted much popular attention, which increased when, in 1802, he was commanded by the Austrian government, at the instance of the ecclesiastical authorities, to discontinue his public lectures. In 1804 he obtained the co-operation of Spurzheim (1776-1832), a native of Longwich, near Treves, who became his pupil in 1800, and proved a powerful ally in promulgating the system. Master and pupil at first taught in harmony, but they found it advisable to separate in 1813; and we find Spurzheim, several years after their parting, declaring that Gall had not introduced any improvements into his system since their separation (notes to Chenevix, p. 99). “My philosophical views,” he also says, “widely differ from those of Gall.”
In Paris, where he settled in 1807, Gall made many influential converts to his system. F. J. V. Broussais, H. M. D. de Blainville, H. Cloquet, G. Andral, E. Geoffroy St-Hilaire, Vimont and others adopted it and countenanced its progress. Gall visited Great Britain, but the diffusion of phrenology here was chiefly due to Spurzheim, who lectured through the country and through America, and with the aid of his pupil, George Combe, attracted a large popular following. His most influential disciples were J. Elliotson, Andrew Combe, Sir G. S. Mackenzie, R. Macnish, T. Laycock and Archbishop R. Whately, and in America Caldwell and J. Godman. On the opposite side many influential men took up a strongly antagonistic position, prominent among whom were J. Barclay the anatomist, P. M. Roget, Sir Charles Bell, Sir W. Hamilton, F. Jeffrey, H. P. Brougham, T. Brown and Sir B. Brodie. The nature of the system rendered it eminently fitted to catch public attention, and it rapidly attained to so great a
- ↑ De anima, cxiv. (ed. Franeker, 1597), p. 268.
- ↑ Summa theologiae, ed. Migne, i. 1094, 1106-7. Prochaska and his translator, Laycock (Mind and Brain, ii. 163), charge Duns Scotus with holding this view; probably he did, but he does not express it, as he simply specifies the cerebrum and its root, the spinal cord, as the source of the nerves along which sensory impulses travel. Comment. de anima, i. 515 (Leiden, 1637).
- ↑ Opera, iii. 124, vi. 20 (Leiden, 1651).
- ↑ Lilium medicinae, 101 (Venice, 1494).
- ↑ Avicenna's fifth region is interposed between imaginativa and aestimativa (De naturalibus, c. vi.). Thomas Aquinas combines the last two, which he says are possessed by the same eminence. On the other hand, he says of ratio particularis, “medici assignant determinatum organam, scilicet mediam partem capitis ” (i. 1106).
- ↑ Physiognomia (Padua, 1491).
- ↑ Dialogo nel quale si ragione del modo di accrescere e conservar la memoria, 27 (Venice, 1562).
- ↑ Physiognomia, 1670.
- ↑ Tabulae element. scientiae (Rome, 1632).
- ↑ Theatr. anat. (Basel, 1621, iii. 314); Caspar Hoffmann, De usu cerebri (Leipzig, 1619). See also Spigelius, De corp. humani fabrica, 296 (Amsterdam, 1645); Varolius (1591), p. 6; Wepfer, Historiarum apoplecticarum potissimum anatomiae subjectorum auctarium (Amsterdam, 1681). See also many of the anatomical works of this age, such as those of Fernel, Cabrol, Argenterius, Rolfinck, &c.
- ↑ Alexander Benedictus, Anatomica, vol. iii. (Basel, 1527). Quercetanus is said by Laycock (following Prochaska)to have assailed this doctrine of spirits; on what ground is not apparent, as he certainly expresses himself as a believer in the old view; see Tetras graviss. totius capitis affect. x. 89 (Marburg, 1606). Possibly Prochaska may allude to an obscure passage in the work of the other Quercetanus (Eustachius), Acroamaton in librum Hippocratis, p. 14 (Basel, 1549), not to the better-known Josephus Armeniacus; but he gives no reference.
- ↑ Opera, col. 22, 89 (Basel, 1625).
- ↑ Joelis opera medica, 22 (Amsterdam, 1663).
- ↑ De re anatomica, p. 350 (Frankfort, 1593).
- ↑ “Epist. de cerebro et cort. cereb. ad Fracassatum,” in Opp., vol. ii. Geneva, 1685.
- ↑ De anima brutorum, p. 71 (Oxford, 1677), “hae particulae subtilissimae, spiritus animales dictae, partium istarum substantias corticales primo subeuntes, exinde in utriusque meditullia,” &c.; also p. 76 seq.
- ↑ Fechner, Elemente der Psychophysik, ii. 396.
- ↑ Some of the medieval views were very fanciful, thus Shabbethai b. Abraham, the earliest Jewish writer on medicine (d. A.D. 959), thought that the spirit of life has its seat in the brain-membrane, expanded over the brain and subarachnoid fluid, as the Shekinah in the heavens arched over the earth and waters. See Der Mensch als Gottes Ebenbild, ed. Jellinek (Leipzig, 1854), and Castelli, Commento (Florence, 1880).
- ↑ Vermischte medicinische Schriften (1764), i. 58.
- ↑ See Laycock's trans., in Sydenh. Society's Pub. (1851).
