Gall had a flamboyant personality and was something of a showman. His doctrines were rejected by the Institut de France in 1808 and in 1821 he failed to gain admission to the Academy, although his candidacy was supported by Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. His lectures at Vienna were proscribed by Emperor Francis I, and Napoleon took steps to restrict his influence in Paris. On the other hand, he never held an academic post and his relations with authority and orthodoxy were almost uniformly bad. When he moved to Paris he was equally successful and numbered Stendhal, Saint-Simon, and Metternich, along with the staffs of twelve embassies, among his patients. In Vienna he carried on an active and successful medical practice which included many eminent patients.
In 1781 he moved to Vienna, where he received the M.D. He began to study medicine at Strasbourg in 1777 and married while he was there. Gall received his early education from his uncle, who was a priest, and in schools at Baden and Bruchsal. In 1826 signs of cerebral and coronary sclerosis appeared, and he died of an apoplectic stroke two years later. After his wife died at Vienna in 1825, Gall married Marie Anne Barbe, with whom he had had a long-standing relationship. They had no children, but his wife’s niece and nephews lived with them at various times. Gall married a young Alsatian girl surnamed Lieser, who had cared for him when he had typhus the marriage was an unhappy one. Gall’s books were placed on the Index and he was denied a religious burial, even though he claimed that the existence of the “organ of religion” was a new proof for the existence of God. He had many mistresses and once mentioned an illegitimate son. His passions for science and gardening were complemented by strong appetites for money and women. They intended Franz for the church but although he remained nominally religious and even included an organ for religion in his theory of cerebral structure, it cannot be said that he was devout, that he led a morally conventional life, or that his work was well received by the church.
He was of Italian extraction (the original name was Gallo) and both he and his wife, Anna Maria Billingerin, were devout Roman Catholics. Gall’s father, Joseph Anthony Gall, was a modest merchant and sometime mayor of the village of Tiefenbronn. Tiefenbronn, near Pforzheim, Germany, 9 March 1758 d.