La Revanche de Gall

Discusses a poem by Thomas Hood (1799-1845), "Craniology," which is a paradigmatic example of parodying psychological faculties for being material things. Franz Joseph Gall's (1758 -1828) term for organology was schädellehre, a German compound from schädel (skull, cranium, or pate) and lehre (teaching or doctrine). Craniology was used by some of Gall's followers, but mostly his critics; phrenology was coined in 1815 by Thomas Forster. In "Craniology," his Horatian-exemplar poem, Hood ridicules Gall's materialism. The present author notes Gall's idea that there were both intellectual and emotional faculties, which resonates well with contemporary cognitive neuroscience models of the mind. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).