Johann Gaspar Sphurzheim: Quack or thomist?

Spurzheim, Gall's erstwhile student and colleague, was extremely active and influential in the UK, as the following paper points out [Kaufman, M. H. and Basden, N. Items relating to Dr Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776-1832) in the Henderson Trust Collection, formerly the museum collection of the Phrenological Society of Edinburgh: with an abbreviated iconography. Journal of Neurolinguistics 9, 301-325, 1996]. Currently, however, his reputation as a 'quack' phrenologist and scientific conartist is even greater than Gall's. In many circles, Gall himself is now taken seriously as a cognitive neuroscientist [1. Fodor, J. A. The Modularity of Mind. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1983; 2. Marshall, J. C. The new organology. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2, 472-473, 1980] but Spurzheim's prestige seems never to have recovered from the failure of 'bumpology'. As far as we know, the question 'Did Spurzheim make any rational contribution to the development of cerebral organology' has not been asked since Call was reinstated as one of the founding fathers of neuroscience. The present note does not answer that question, but we do observe that there are significant differences between the number, type, and organization of cerebral organs postulated by Gall and by Spurzheim. A detailed historical investigation of those differences would undoubtedly contribute to our understanding of how the faculties and functions shown in modern textbooks came into being. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd