Description
Book SynopsisAttractively illustrated with over a hundred halftones and drawings, this volume presents a series of vibrant profiles that trace the evolution of our knowledge about the brain.Beginning almost 5000 years ago, with the ancient Egyptian study of the marrow of the skull, Stanley Finger takes us on a fascinating journey from the classical world of Hippocrates, to the time of Descartes and the era of Broca and Ramon y Cajal, to modern researchers such as Sperry. Here is a truly remarkable cast of characters. We meet Galen, a man of titanic ego and abrasive disposition, whose teachings dominated medicine for a thousand years; Vesalius, a contemporary of Copernicus, who pushed our understanding of human anatomy to new heights; Otto Loewi, pioneer in neurotransmitters, who gave the Nazis his Nobel prize money and fled Austria for England; and Rita Levi-Montalcini, discoverer of nerve growth factor, who in war-torn Italy was forced to do her research in her bedroom. For each individual, Finger
Trade ReviewThis book is entertaining and informative with plenty of personal detail and insights into the working practices and conditions of some of the major contributors to what we now call neuroscience. * Advances in Clinical Neuroscience & Rehabilitation *
Table of Contents1. Introduction: a voyage across time ; 2. An ancient Egyptian physician: the dawn of neurology ; 3. Hippocrates: the brain as the organ of mind ; 4. Galen: The birth of experimentation ; 5. Andreas Vesalius: the new 'human' neuroanatomy ; 6. Rene Descartes: the mind-body problem ; 7. Thomas Willis: the functional organization of the brain ; 8. Luigi Galvani: electricity and the nerves ; 9. Franz Joseph Gall: the cerebral organs of the mind ; 10. Paul Broca: Cortical localization and cerebral dominance ; 11. David Ferrier and Eduard Hitzig: the experimentalists map the cerebral cortex ; 12. Jean-Martin Charcot: clinical neurology comes of age ; 13. Santiago Ramon y Cajal: from nerve nets to neuron doctrine ; 14. Charles Scott Sherrington: the integrated nervous system ; 15. Edgar D. Adrian: coding in the nervous s#stem ; 16. Otto Loewi and Henry Dale: the discovery of neurotransmitters ; 17. Roger W. Sperry and Rita Levi-Montalcini: from neural growth to 'Split Brains' ; 18. Pioneers and discoveries in the brain sciences
