Auguste-Henri Forel (French pronunciation: [oɡyst ɑ̃ʁi fɔʁɛl]; 1 September 1848 – 27 July 1931) was a Swiss myrmecologist, neuroanatomist, psychiatrist and eugenicist,[1] notable for his investigations into the structure of the human brain and that of ants.

Born in 1848 in a villa La Gracieuse, at Morges, on Lake Geneva, Switzerland, to Victor Forel a pious Swiss Calvinist and Pauline Morin, a French Huguenot he was brought up in a protective household.

While at medical school he continued to collect colonies of ants in order to study their physiology, biology, anatomy, systematic and even posology, as he experimented with the effect of some biochemical agents on them.

Waldeyer synthesized ideas without actually conducting any research himself and published it in Deutsche medizinische Wochenschrift a widely read journal which made him popular.

Forel was very bitter about Waldeyer's achievement of fame that it is thought to have contributed to the decline in his interest in neuroanatomy and neurology.

He was also assigned to the position of temporary director of the Psychiatric University Hospital Zürich asylum—the Burghölzli asylum, where he worked with only two other physicians treating 300 patients.

[citation needed] Following a field trip to southern Switzerland in his early twenties, Forel wrote a 450-page essay, Les Fourmis de la Suisse, which was first published in a three part series in a Swiss scientific journal, beginning in 1874.

[16] In 1919, Forel hired the well-known animal painter Erich W. Heinrich to work with him on his five volume myrmecological magnum opus treatise, Le Monde social des fourmis du Globe comparé à celui de L'homme.

[17][18][13] In his 1924 Nature review of Forel's Le Monde social des fourmis, compareé à celui de l'homme in Nature, Malinowski said taking the analogy between society and organism literally by comparing human society to that of animals, "has misled and wrecked most of the earlier attempts at systematic sociology.

"[19] He said that comparisons between "relations between human individuals in society" and that of other living organism" has limited value—[a]s a method of sociological research and exposition this simile is worse than useless.

"[19] In 1914, Forel was a good friend of the well-known British entomologist Horace Donisthorpe, with whom he stayed in Switzerland;[20] his ardent socialist views frequently caused political arguments between the two.

[24] The founder of the Institute of Brain Research in Zürich, Konrad Akert, described Forel as a "role model" and his contributions as a "social reformer" and scientist, "monumental".

[25] In his 2008 History of Psychiatry journal article citing the 1980s exhibitions, Zurich-based psychiatrist, Bernhard Kuechenhoff, said that from the perspective of the twenty first century, Akert's "judgement would have to be modified.

After hearing of the religion from his son in law Dr. Arthur Brauns (married to his daughter Martha),[28] in 1920 he became a member of the Baháʼí Faith,[29] abandoning his former racist and socialist views, writing in his will and testament: This is the true religion of human social good, without dogmas or priests, uniting all men on this small terrestrial globe of ours.

May this religion live and prosper for the good of mankind; this is my most ardent wish.In 1922 he started a Baháʼí group in Lausanne expounding his own agnostic and leftist ideas in addition to defending the Faith.

[31] He received a letter from ʻAbdu'l-Bahá known as the Tablet to Dr. Auguste Forel expounding on the differences between the mineral, vegetable, animal and human worlds, the spiritual nature of man and proofs of the existence of God.