The brain takes shape : an early history
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Bibliographic Information
The brain takes shape : an early history
Oxford University Press, 2004
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Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Using historical and anthropological perspectives to examine mind-body relationships in western thought, this book interweaves topics that are usually disconnected to tell a big, important story in the histories of medicine, science, philosophy, religion, and political rhetoric. Beginning with early debates during the Scientific Revolution about representation and reality, Martensen demonstrates how investigators such as Vesalius and Harvey sought to transform
long-standing notions of the body as dominated by spirit-like humors into portrayals that emphasized its solid tissues. Subsequently, Descartes and Willis and their followers amended this 'new' philosophy to argue for the primacy of the cerebral hemispheres and cranial nerves as they downplayed the role
of the spirit, passion, and the heart in human thought and behaviour. None of this occurred in a social vacuum, and the book places these medical and philosophical innovations in the context of the religious and political crises of the Reformation and English Civil War and its aftermath. Patrons and their interests are part of the story, as are patients and new formulations of gender. John Locke's psychology and the emergence in England of a constitutional monarchy figure prominently, as do
opponents of the new doctrines of brain and nerves and the emergent social order. The book's concluding chapter discusses how debates over investigative methods and models of body order that first raged over 300 years ago continue to influence biomedicine and the broader culture today. No other
book on western mind-body relationships has attempted this.
Table of Contents
- Selected events and historical actors
- 1. Bodies, words, and images
- 2. Matter, spirit, and the heart
- 3. The human mind and "Gland H": Cartesian models of mind, brain, and nerves
- 4. When the brain came out of the skull
- 5. Body of witnesses
- 6. Toward a new physiology of human conduct
- 7. The transformation of Eve
- 8. Mind without brain: John Locke, Thomas Syndenham, and the constitutional body of the British enlightenment
- 9. On the persistence of the cerebral body and its alternatives
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