Description
Book SynopsisTells the story of how long-standing notions about the body as dominated by spirit-like humors were transformed into scientific descriptions of its solid tissues. This book shows how debates over investigative methods and models of body order influence biomedicine and the broader culture.
Trade ReviewAdvance Praise for The Brain Takes Shape:
Scholars often pay lip service to the important roles of theological and philosophical concepts in the making of modern science and medicine. Robert Martensen has taken the platitude seriously, and his book powerfully demonstrates how our modern beliefs about mind and body were first elaborated in the seventeenth century, when philosophy, theology and science were intertwined. The result is a cultural history of biomedicine at its very best. * W.F. Bynum, Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College London *
Table of ContentsSelected events and historical actors ; 1. Bodies, words, and images ; 2. Matter, spirit, and the heart ; 3. The human mind and "Gland H": Cartesian models of mind, brain, and nerves ; 4. When the brain came out of the skull ; 5. Body of witnesses ; 6. Toward a new physiology of human conduct ; 7. The transformation of Eve ; 8. Mind without brain: John Locke, Thomas Syndenham, and the constitutional body of the British enlightenment ; 9. On the persistence of the cerebral body and its alternatives
