Essay Review: Origins of Neuroscience: Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts,Medicine,Mind and the Double Brain: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought

Swazey J. P. , Reflexes and motor integration: Sherrington's concept of integrative action (Cambridge, Mass., 1969); Dewhurst K. E. , Thomas Willis's Oxford lectures (Oxford, 1980); Temkin O. , The falling sickness: A history of epilepsy from the Greeks to the beginnings of modern neurology (2nd edn, Baltimore, 1971); Young R. M. , Mind, brain and adaptation in the nineteenth century: Cerebral localization and its biological context from Gall to Ferrier (Oxford, 1970).

Clarke E. and O'Malley C. D. , The human brain and spinal cord: A historical study illustrated by writings from Antiquity to the twentieth century (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968); Clarke E. and Dewhurst K. E. , An illustrated history of brain function (Oxford, 1972); Neuburger M. , The historical development of experimental brain and spinal cord physiology before Flourens, trans. and ed. by Clarke E. (Baltimore and London, 1981; originally published in German, 1897).

This stress on the overthrow of old ideas rests somewhat discordantly with repeated reference to Willis's research as a sort of historical base-line for modern neuroscience. There would appear to be need for research into Willis's historical significance for the eighteenth century.

Verwey G. , Psychiatry in an anthropological and biomedical context: Philosophical presuppositions and implications of German psychiatry, 1820–1870 (Dordrecht, 1984). I must confess to a particular difficulty here. Reference to my own paper (which others as well as myself would doubtless now correct in many ways), “The background of physiological psychology in natural philosophy”, History of science, xi (1973), 75–123, which would appear pertinent in this context, is absent from a listing of secondary sources, large and small, good and bad.

Neuburger , ed. by Clarke , op. cit., 151.