The Brain and the Unconscious Soul in Eighteenth-Century Nervous Physiology: Robert Whytt's Sensorium Commune (original) (raw)
Related papers
Brain, Mind and Medicine: Essays in Eighteenth-Century Neuroscience
Brain, Mind and Medicine: Essays in Eighteenth-Century Neuroscience, 2007
, except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights.
Our Master & Father at the Head of Physick": The Learned Medicine of William Cullen
2016
This is a study of Dr. William Cullen (1710-1790), the Scottish chemist, physician, and professor of medicine, who played a significant role in the Scottish Enlightenment. I argue that Cullen was both a more unorthodox figure in Scottish medicine than he is generally depicted, as well as a more ambitious one. Despite his controversial doctrines, he skillfully managed the hierarchy of his profession and reached the pinnacle of success as a learned physician in the Scottish Enlightenment. I explore Cullen’s life and thought from different angles. I explicate his pedagogical persona and philosophy of medicine, both of which shaped the experiences of his pupils. I show how his neurophysiology was rooted in his contentious interpretation of the nature of the nervous fluid. And I provide a detailed look at Cullen’s understanding of hygiene, or the art of health—a rarely-studied component of his practice of medicine.
Following a recent trend in the field of the history of philosophy and medicine, this paper stresses the necessity of recognizing empiricism's patent indebtedness to the sciences of the body. While the tribute paid to the Hippocratic method of observation in the work of Thomas Sydenham is well known, it seems necessary to take into account a trend more critical of ancient medicine developed by followers of chemical medicine who considered the doctrine of elements and humours to be a typical example of the idols that hinder the improvement of medical knowledge and defend the necessity of experimentation (comparative anatomy, dissection, autopsy, chemical analysis of bodies). In light of the fact that modern discoveries (blood circulation, the lymphatic system, theory of fevers) resulted in a "new frame of human nature," they developed a critical reading of ancient empiricism. As a consequence, we can distinguish between two distinct anti-speculative traditions in the genesis of philosophical empiricism. The first (which includes Bacon, Boyle and Willis) recommends an active investigation into nature and refers to the figure of Democritus, the ancient philosopher who devoted himself to the dissection of beasts. Defenders of this first tradition refuse point-blank to be called 'empiricists' , a label which had a very negative meaning during the seventeenth century, when it was used to dismiss charlatans and quacks. The other tradition (including Sydenham and Locke), stressing as it does the role of description and observation, is more sceptical of the ability of dissection or anatomy to give us access to causes of diseases. This later tradition comes closer to the definition of ancient empiricism and to the figure of Hippocrates. ). I would like to thank Thomas Swan for his reading and corrections of the English version of this text and Philippe Hamou for his critical observations on this paper.
The emergence of Nervennahrung: Nerves, mind and metabolism in the long eighteenth century
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2012
Morphological assumptions concerning the form, structure and internal life of the brain and nervous system profoundly influenced contemporary physiological concepts about nerve actions throughout the 'long eighteenth century'. This article investigates some early theories of mind and metabolism. In a bottom-up fashion, it asks how eighteenth-century theories regarding the physiological actions of the body organs shaped the conceptions of the structure of the brain and nervous tissue themselves. These proposed that a healthy Nervennahrung (the German word for 'nerve nutrition', which might be rendered as brain food in modern English), not only guaranteed the integrity and stability of neuronal structures in the body, but also explained the complex texture of the brain and spinal cord in physiological terms. Eighteenth-century nerve theories already embodied a Leitmotiv of neurology and brain psychiatry from the later nineteenth century: 'Without phosphorus there is no thought!'
Medical History, 1981
Book Reviews strictly clinical or strictly scientific. They were often a happy combination of the two as Holmes brought his knowledge of basic anatomy, microscopy, physiology, and pathology to bear on the problems presented by clinical neurology. Like its predecessor, this volume reproduces Holmes's papers in facsimile, so the individual papers display a profusion of typefaces and layouts, although the original journal paginations have not been retained. The book is handsomely bound; photographs and drawings all are reproduced with little loss of detail. Readers without specialized knowledge of neurology would have benefited from a fuller assessment of Holmes's specific contribution to the neurosciences; but it is useful to have these papers collected into one stout volume.
Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 2014
The volume edited by L. Stephen Jacyna and Stephen T. Casper, "The Neurological Patient in History," is a long-needed book on the social history perspective of the patient-doctor relationship and of patients’ experiences in the development of modern neurology in Europe and Northern America. As the editors adequately describe in their introduction to this volume, the patient perspective had long been neglected in modern medical historiography before London-based social historian Roy Porter (1946–2002) brought it back onto the map of many scholars in the history of medicine and health care field (Porter, 1985). “In what quickly became a classic article in the history of medicine, Roy Porter drew attention to patient agency and called for a realignment of the history of medicine around the patient’s perspective. At first glance, Porter appeared to be writing in 1985 from a vaguely leftist perspective. His paper could be read as an attempt to give a voice to a constituency that had been effectively silenced through the tyranny of medical power. The concept of the ‘patient’ was thus configured as akin to other repressed groups, such as women and the working classes, that had been effectively marginalized in conventional historiogra- phy” (p. 3).
Torn Asunder: Tracing the Split Between Medicine and Philosophy in Romantic Brain Science
A recent BBC radio program about the history of the brain noted that ancient Greeks “dissected the brains of live criminals” (Bell). One listener registered surprise that these “fathers of experimental physiology ... were philosophers” (Monasterio). Despite “the growing field of medical ethics,” philosophy and medicine are widely considered separate disciplines (Casarett 125). Even practitioners fail to recognize “that medicine has a moral dimension” (Casarett 127). This division, however, did not always exist. In fact, modern neuroscience grew from eighteenth-century British Romantic philosophical explorations of the brain (Richardson 182). Brain science was reborn in 1749 when David Hartley asserted that “all ... Ideas, and intellectual affections, must reside in the Brain” (Hartley 81). This novel proclamation intrigued his colleagues, who began experimenting with and theorising about the central nervous system. A medical doctor, Hartley addressed his treatise to “all Physicians and Philosophers” (87). For the amalgamated projects of medicine and philosophy, the possibility of a material mind had both physiological and metaphysical implications. Yet, the nascent state of separation is present in the discourse this debate produced. I argue this split occurred as practitioners began bracketing philosophical issues in favour of pragmatic concerns. By examining texts by eighteenth-century doctor-philosophers, including Hartley, Erasmus Darwin and Thomas Brown, I trace the rupture of medicine and philosophy. I also show how practical matters, like diagnostics and treatment, displaced philosophical debates about the status of mind as material or “essentially different from matter” (Brown 25). This historical perspective contextualises current debates regarding “the future ... philosophy of medicine” (Casarett 137).
Nevertheless, no easy connection between Descartes and Santorio emerges even in Regius’ work. Subsequently, more than just finding evidences of Santorio in Descartes or Regius, I try to investigate how much their medical theories could integrate, as Leibniz suggested. A more promising field of investigation is the passions of the soul.2 In this case, while Regius opposed Descartes’ theory of the mind, which I explore in Sect. 2, he especially advanced a theory of soul pertinent to Paduan Averroism and consistent with his medical pragmatism. Their contrast ultimately results in the publication of two treatises on the passions of the soul, whose differences and proximities are significant. These are Descartes’ Traité sur les passions de l’âme (1649), the wellknown attempt to mechanize passions I summarize in Sect. 3, and Regius’ Dissertatio de animi affectibus (1650), a less-known text.3 Both treatises propose a medical interpretation of the mind-body composite4 and deal with the role of temperaments, animal spirits, and humours as bodily causes for passions, which develop as a subject of medical and natural philosophical investigation.5 A main difference however arises from the metaphysical ground Descartes claims necessary for this study, while Regius rejects it altogether and unearths an utterly medical approach to passions. As I show in Sect. 4 devoted to Regius’ treatise on passions, the latter combines Descartes’ mechanization of the body with a few aspects derived from his medical training at Padua, and especially from Santorio’s medical knowledge. Still, Regius does not quantify passions as Santorio suggests in Section VII of Medicina statica (1614), entitled De animi affectibus (“The affections of the mind”), which I analyse in Sect. 5. In this text, Santorio indeed provides a medical framework for the passions which is consistent with his theory of insensible perspiration and his attempt to quantify the main bodily processes. In sum, although no clear connection develops between Descartes and Santorio, as not even Regius could account for a clear connecting point, their innovative mechanization and quantification of passions ultimately reveal two complementary methodologies that shaped a modern medical understanding of the nature of the human being, as Leibniz claimed. In exploring their study of passions, Descartes’ mechanization grounded in metaphysics, Regius’ mechanization embedded within a medical study of temperaments, and Santorio’s quantification of passions, in this chapter I aim to outline a significant, though complex (and non-linear) path in the history of medicine.