I recently read Carl Zimmer’s book, Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain - and How It Changed the World, and I found it fascinating. (It has only added to my intellectual crush on the thinkers of the early Enlightenment. *sigh*) It is, essentially, the story of how the study of neurology came into being. But it is also the tale of how the brain came to light, because before neurology could come into existence, the brain had to be “discovered” as more than just a useless tapioca-like substance. And so, it is a book about the history of the brain, as humans have understood it over time.
One of the interesting things is just how much of the book is also about medical and philosophical understandings of the heart. The title of “Soul Made Flesh” is very descriptive, (as one might expect,) because the whole journey of understanding started in an attempt to understand the soul. Where was it located? How did it work? What was it that made humans so special, above the other animals? What drove our moral actions? Naturally, it started out as a philosophical quest.
As you might imagine, the philosophical descriptions of the soul, its location, and how it worked were nicely explained, logically argued, and based on very little in the way of fact. In trying to localize the soul, the philosophers were trying to base their arguments on human anatomy, and so they also made up what today seem like extremely fanciful interpretations of how the imagined bodily systems all worked together. There were lots of descriptions of little spirits and humors running around to different locations of the body to influence different human functions. Eventually, the heart was settled upon as the home of the soul, as well as the home of thought.
Fortunately for us, in the 1600s, people, particularly young intellectuals, early natural philosophers, if you will, began to find fault with their Greek-based anatomy classes, and started to notice that what was actually being revealed of the human body in the dissection theater didn’t always tally with what was in the books. And so the revolution began, and the real story started.
Posted by Dana
