The functions of the brain.

  • Althaus, Julius.
Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The functions of the brain. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

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    We have already seen that Gall was the first to occupy himself with the localisation of mental faculties in the hemispheres; but he unfortunately soon left the only true road to knowledge, viz., careful examination of the brain after death, and substituted for this an examination of the skull in the living. Phrenology, which at the hands of a great anatomist like Gall, contained a considerable sprinkling of truth in addition to many errors, was soon afterwards taken up by charlatans—per- sons who had never even seen a brain properly dissected, and who went about the country with casts of skulls of some eminent statesmen, poets, and criminals, and were ready to tell anybody's character from tapping his skull-bones. Such pro- ceedings naturally disgusted scientific men, and the very name of phrenology soon became a byword amongst them. Moreover the minute anatomy of the convolutions of the hemispheres remained in an unsatisfactory state ; for progress in this direction was impossible as long as enquirers limited them- selves to a study of the adult human brain. It was only when the structure of the brain of monkeys, and the development of the human brain in the various stages of embryonic life was investigated, that a flood of light was thrown on this important subject, and we were taught to distinguish that which is essential from what is accidental. c2
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