It’s impossible to talk about the history of the brain – about the history of medicine at large, actually – without also talking about religion and politics and philosophy. Mostly religion, as you might expect. This book tackles all of the above with admirable aplomb, starting off with one of my favorite childhood anecdotes about the ancient Egyptian burial custom of removing the brain through the nostrils because it was clearly a useless organ (how can you not love that; it’s totally disgusting!). We hop on through the first anatomists, sojourn a bit with alchemy, pause for natural philosophy, and then settle down in fifteenth-century England for the majority of the book. This is a bit too broad to be classified as a biography of
Thomas Willis (the father of neuroscience), but it’s a close thing. It’s a thorough, ranging but focused account of the history of the brain and how we conceive of our conscious minds, our souls, ourselves as animals. And a whole lot of familiar names keep popping up, like Hobbes and Locke (a doctor, which I had forgotten) and the two Roberts (Boyle and Hooke) who are better known for their work in physics and chemistry, but who actually made enormous contributions to the understanding of human respiration and blood oxygenation.
Well-researched, entirely lucid, a bit rambling but in the good way. There’s a whole hell of a lot of ground to cover when you start out before we even realized the brain was the seat of consciousness, not to mention the many theologians and anatomists alike who maintained the soul by its nature could not be physical. This book covers most of that very well, particularly in detailing the ebb and flow of experimentation through England’s revolution and restoration. I was unsatisfied by the sudden 350 year leap made in the last chapter, and the rushed treatment of modern nuropharmacology and the potential of MRI studies (what is the brain doing when confronted with some of those awful moral philosophy questions – in situation x you can save five people by killing one, what do you do?). I honestly would have been happier had the book simply maintained its historical focus and stopped in the fifteenth century. Which would have left the “and how it changed the world” part mostly to inference, but I almost would have preferred inference to the rushed and vague cap on an otherwise nuanced account. The writing here is also rather dry. It’s not bad by any stretch of the imagination – it’s more invisible than anything – and I’m spoiled by the
last nonfiction I read. Still, it’s a consideration.
On balance, this is definitely a book you will like if you like that sort of thing. Otherwise it will be deeply dull. Luckily, I like that sort of thing.
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