Soul Made Flesh: Thomas Willis, the English civil war and the mapping of the mind
Carl Zimmer William Heinemann, 367pp, £17.99
ISBN 0434010464
Even some world-famous philosophers get off to an unpromising start. When John Locke was at Oxford, he sat "prating and troublesome" while his fellow students diligently took notes. But this "turbulent spirit" was so impressed by the lectures of the physician Thomas Willis that he wrote hundreds of pages describing the anatomy of brains and nerves. Unlike many of his predecessors, Willis believed that the soul lies not in the heart or the liver, but in the brain. He managed to reconcile this potentially heretical idea with orthodox Christianity by distinguishing an immortal rational soul, buried deep within the brain beyond his scalpel's reach, from a sensitive soul, a material entity subject to diseases like other parts of the body.
Despite his early enthusiasm, Locke soon turned against his former master and took up with his rival, Thomas Sydenham. Declaring Willis's practice of dissecting corpses to be a waste of time, the pair insisted that progress lay in gathering information from patients who were alive. Locke's conviction that the causes of disease and the nature of the mind were ultimately unknowable did much to set back Willis's reputation.
Now the science writer Carl Zimmer has set out to establish Willis as the founder of "the Neurocentric Age". He begins with a wonderfully gory description of Oxford's anatomical pioneers cracking open an aristocrat's head. But he also sets Willis's achievements within a larger context, surveying debates about the brain, soul and mind from the ancient Egyptians through to current experiments investigating how brains behave while their owners grapple with moral dilemmas.
Willis is an unlikely hero. A short, stammering doctor with hair "like a dark red pigge", he had a remarkable gift for making people feel ill at ease. This may not have been unconnected to the nature of his work. "I addicted myself to the cutting open of heads," he once wrote. As a servant boy who became an Oxford professor and turned down a knighthood, Willis would have been an easy figure to mythologise, but commendably Zimmer resists this temptation and concentrates on his subject's intellectual achievements.
Zimmer also avoids converting his Paracelsian physician into a prophet of modernity. Willis was, he tells us, "a backward-looking revolutionary: he preserved the old medicine within the new science". Although Willis did challenge beliefs going back to Aristotle and Galen, he continued to prescribe conventional remedies such as ground-up millipedes and wolf livers. However, his special concoction of steel syrup can be seen as the precursor of Prozac, given that he aimed to cure melancholy through chemistry rather than prayer or astrology.
In Willis's historical sweep, brains remain curiously unsexed. Yet this was a time when Aristotle's ideas still prevailed and women were regarded as inferior versions of men, permanently beneath them on the great chain of being and cursed with cold, moist constitutions that rendered them intrinsically less capable of thinking rationally. Even after Willis had helped to overturn these models, researchers used anatomical differences in brains to place women below men in the intellectual hierarchy.
The latest neurological maps are far more detailed than Willis's drawings, but scientists are little closer to understanding how brains and minds come together. Soul Made Flesh tells the story of their search up to the present, but in Zimmer's concluding words, we still need "to make sense of the soul".
Patricia Fara's latest book is Pandora's Breeches: women, science and power in the Enlightenment (Pimlico)
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