The Brain Takes Shape: An Early History

About this book

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 behavior. 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 Lockes 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 books 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.