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Brain, Mind and Medicine:Essays in Eighteenth-Century Neuroscience

Brain, Mind and Medicine:Essays in Eighteenth-Century Neuroscience

Edited by

Harry WhitakerNorthern Michigan University, Marquette, MI, USA

C.U.M. SmithAston University, Birmingham, UK

Stanley FingerWashington University, St. Louis, MO, USA

Harry WhitakerDepartment of PsychologyNorthern Michigan UniversityMarquette, MI 49855-5334USA

C.U.M. SmithVision SciencesAston UniversityAston TriangleBirmingham B4 7ETUK

Stanley FingerDepartment of PsychologyWashington UniversityPsychology BuildingSt. Louis, MO 63130USA

Library of Congress Control Number: 200792479

ISBN-13: 978-0-387-70966-6e-ISBN-13: 979-0-387-70967-3

Printed on acid-free paper.

© 2007 Springer Science+Business Media, LLCAll rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher(Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connectionwith 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, isnot to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights.

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‘There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge....observation of nature, reflection, andexperimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies theresult of that combination’

–Denis Diderot (1753)

‘For is it not reasonable to think that the electrical machine would add greatly to the efficacy of themateria medica?’

–Morris (1753)

‘People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors’–Edmund Burke (1790)

vii

Contents

Section A: Introduction

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3Harry Whitaker, C.U.M. Smith, and Stanley Finger

Chronology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5C.U.M. Smith

Section B: Background

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13The Editors

1: Brain and Mind in the ‘Long’ Eighteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15C.U.M. Smith

2: Enlightening Neuroscience: Microscopes and Microscopy in the Eighteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29Brian J. Ford

3: Corpus Curricula: Medical Education and the Voluntary Hospital Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43Jonathan Reinarz

4: Some Thoughts on the Medical Milieu in the Last Quarter of the Eighteenth Century as Reflected in the Life and Activities of James Parkinson (1755–1824) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53Christopher Gardner-Thorpe

Section C: The Nervous System


5: John Hunter’s Contributions to Neuroscience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67James L. Stone, James T. Goodrich, and George R. Cybulski

6: William Cullen (1710–1790) and Robert Whytt (1714–1766) on the Nervous System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85Julius Rocca

7: 1710: The Introduction of Experimental Nervous System Physiology and Anatomy by François Pourfour du Petit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99Lawrence Kruger and Larry W. Swanson

8: Irritable Glue: The Haller–Whytt Controversy on the Mechanism of Muscle Contraction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115Eugenio Frixione

9: The Taming of the Electric Ray: From a Wonderful and Dreadful “Art” to “Animal Electricity” and “Electric Battery” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125Marco Piccolino

10: Luigi Galvani, Physician, Surgeon, Physicist: From Animal Electricity to Electro-Physiology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145Miriam Focaccia and Raffaella Simili

Section D: Brain and Behaviour


11: The Vision of William Porterfield . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163Nicholas J. Wade

12: David Hartley’s Neural Vibrations and Psychological Associations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177Robert B. Glassman and Hugh W. Buckingham

13: Charles Bonnet’s Neurophilosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191Harry A. Whitaker and Yves Turgeon

14: Swedenborg and Localization Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201Ulf Norrsell

Section E: Medical Theories and Applications


15: Neuroscience in the Work of Boerhaave and Haller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213Peter J. Koehler

16: Apoplexy: Changing Concepts in the Eighteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233Catherine E. Storey

viii Contents

17: Benjamin Franklin and the Electrical Cure for Disorders of the Nervous System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245Stanley Finger

18: Gentleman’s Magazine, the Advent of Medical Electricity, and Disorders of the Nervous System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257Hannah Sypher Locke and Stanley Finger

19: Therapeutic Attractions: Early Applications of Electricity to the Art of Healing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271Paola Bertucci

20: John Wesley on the Estimation and Cure of Nervous Disorders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285James G. Donat

21: Franz Anton Mesmer and the Rise and Fall of Animal Magnetism: Dramatic Cures, Controversy, and Ultimately a Triumph for the Scientific Method . . . . . . 301Douglas J. Lanska and Joseph T. Lanska

22: Hysteria in the Eighteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321Diana Faber

Section F: Cultural Consequences


23: Technological Metaphors and the Anatomy of Representations in Eighteenth-Century French Materialism and Dualist Mechanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335Timo Kaitaro

24: Explorations of the Brain, Mind and Medicine in the Writings of Jonathan Swift . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345Marjorie Perlman Lorch

25: Temperament and the Long Shadow of Nerves in the Eighteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353George Rousseau

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371

Contents ix

Contributors list

xi

Paola BertucciCIS, Dipartimento di Filosofia, Università di BolognaVia Zamboni 38, 40126 Bologna, Italy

Hugh W. BuckinghamDepartment of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803

George R. CybulskiDepartment of Neurosurgery, Northwestern University and Division of Neurosurgery, Cook CountyStroger Hospital, Chicago, IL

James G. DonatP.O. Box 268529, Chicago, IL 60626-8529

Diana FaberSchool of Psychology, Eleanor Rathbone Building, Bedford Street South, Liverpool L69 7ZA, UK

Stanley FingerDepartment of Psychology, Campus Box 1125, Washington University, Saint Louis, MO 63130-4899

Miriam FocacciaDepartment of Philosophy, University of Bologna, Via Zamboni 38-40126 Bologna, Italy

Brian J. FordGonville and Caius College, Cambridge University, Cambridge CB2 1TA, UK

Eugenio FrixioneSección de Metodología y Teoría de la Ciencia, Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados IPN,Apartado Postal 14-740, México, D.F. 07000, Mexico

Christopher Gardner-ThorpeConsultant Neurologist, The Coach House, 1a College Road, Exeter EX1 1TE, UK

Robert B. GlassmanDepartment of Psychology, Lake Forest College, 555 N Sheridan Road, Lake Forest, IL 60045

James T. GoodrichDivision of Pediatric Neurological Surgery, Montefiore Children’s Hospital, and Albert Einstein Collegeof Medicine, New York, NY

Timo KaitaroDepartment of Philosophy, University of Helsinki, P. O. Box 9, SF-0014 Finland

Peter J. KoehlerDepartment of Neurology, Atrium Medical Centre, P.O. Box 4446, 6401 CX Heerlen, The Netherlands

Lawrence KrugerDepartment of Neurobiology, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA 90095

Douglas J. Lanska500 E Veterans Street, Tomah, WI 54600Staff Neurologist, Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Tomah, WIProfessor of Neurology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI

Joseph T. Lanska500 E Veterans Street, Tomah, WI 54600

Marjorie Perlman LorchSchool of Languages, Linguistics and Culture, Birkbeck College, University of London, 43 GordonSquare, London WCIH OPD England

Ulf NorrsellPhysiology Section, Institute of Neuroscience and Physiology, Sahlgren Academy, Göteborg University,P.O. Box 432, SE40530 Göteborg, Sweden

Marco PiccolinoDipartimento di Biologia, Università di Ferrara, Via Borsari 46, 44100 Ferrara

Jonathan ReinarzCentre for the History of Medicine, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 3TT, UK

Julius RoccaTorsvikssvangen 14, 181, Lidingo, Sweden

George RousseauModern History Research Unit (MHRU), Block 11-2, Radcliffe Infirmary, University of Oxford, Oxford OX2 6HE, UK

Raffaella SimiliDepartment of Philosophy, University of Bologna, Via Zamboni 38-40126 Bologna, Italy

xii Contributors list

C.U.M. SmithVision Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK

James L. StoneDepartments of Neurosurgery and Neurology, University of Illinois at Chicago, 912 S. Wood St., 4th Floor, Chicago, IL 60612

Catherine E. StoreyClinical Associate Professor, Northern Clinical School, University of SydneyDepartment of Neurology, Royal North Shore Hospital, St Leonards, NSW, Australia

Larry W. SwansonDepartment of Biological Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089

Hannah Sypher LockeDepartment of Psychology, Campus Box 1125, Washington University, Saint Louis, MO 63130-4899

Yves TurgeonChef – programme Vieillissement en santé, Restigouche Health Authority, 189, chemin Lily Lake Road,C.P./P.O. Box 910, Campbellton, New Brunswick, Canada E3N 3H3

Nicholas J. WadeDepartment of Psychology, University of Dundee, Dundee DD1 4HN, Scotland

Harry A. WhitakerDepartment of Psychology, Northern Michigan University, Marquette, MI 49855

Contributors list xiii

Section AIntroduction

IntroductionHarry Whitaker, C.U.M. Smith, and Stanley Finger

3

The idea for a volume on eighteenth-century stud-ies of brain and behavior originated during a jointInternational Society for the History of theNeurosciences (ISHN) and Theoretical andExperimental Neuropsychology/NeuropsychologieExpérimentale et Théorique (TENNET) sympo-sium held in Montreal in June 2004. We believethat these essays provide unique contemporaryinsights into the science and medicine of the nerv-ous system, hence “neuroscience,” during the“long” eighteenth century – a century too oftengiven short shrift in textbooks as well as in histori-cal reviews of the nervous system.

The long eighteenth century, which in thematicways is often perceived as stretching from the1660s into the opening decades of the 1800s, wasan age of transition in the neurosciences. It saw theclassic and time-honored ideas of neurophysiology– animal spirits moving in hollow nerve conduits toand from the ventricles of the brain – being gradu-ally replaced by ideas more in accord with anatom-ical reality. It also saw an enormous increase ininterest in the nervous system as the source ofmany of the ills of both body and mind, along withnew therapies. It even saw, at least in the upperstrata of polite society, a new and at times even“neurotic” concern for the health and proper func-tioning of the nervous system. The chapters in thisbook tell these fascinating stories, and more.

The volume is divided into six sections. Afterthis brief introductory section and chronologicaltable, the second section deals with the backgroundagainst which work on the nervous system tookplace. After an overview of the development ofideas about brain and mind during the “long cen-

tury,” Brian Ford discusses the most revealing ofeighteenth-century instruments – so far as anatomyis concerned – the microscope. Next, JonathanReinarz reviews the way in which medical educa-tion developed in association with the voluntaryhospitals movement. Finally, Christopher Gardner-Thorpe uses the life and work of James Parkinsonas a lens through which to examine medicine andits milieu during the last quarter of the eighteenthcentury.

The next section comprises six chapters that dis-cuss eighteenth-century investigations of theanatomy and physiology of the nervous system.The section starts with an account of the neuro-science of one of the most important eighteenth-century anatomists, and anatomical teachers, JohnHunter. James Stone, James Goodrich, and GeorgeCybulski review Hunter’s many contributions toneurology and neuroscience and by includingmany quotations from his own work allow him, forthe most part, to speak for himself. Next, LarryKruger and Larry Swanson discuss the importantbut rather little known work of Pourfour du Petit onthe functional anatomy of the brain and nervoussystem. After this, Julius Rocca describes the workof William Cullen and Robert Whytt who helpedestablish the preeminence of Edinburgh’s medicalschool and were among that epoch’s most influen-tial investigators of the nervous system. The impor-tant controversy between Haller and Robert Whytton the nature of muscular contraction forms thesubject of the next chapter, contributed by EugenioFrixione. The final two chapters examine the originand growth of what we now call electrophysiology.Marco Piccolino provides a detailed review of

eighteenth-century research into electric fish,whilst Rafaella Simili and Miriam Focaccia pro-vide a similarly scholarly account of LuigiGalvani’s career and discoveries.

The fourth section of the book is devoted tolong-standing complex issues of brain and behav-ior. Nick Wade opens with a fascinating chapter onthe somewhat obscure late eighteenth-centuryScottish physician and anatomist, WilliamPorterfield, whose investigations ranged from theanatomy and physiology of the visual system to thenature of the sensations generated by phantomlimbs. Robert Glassman and Hugh Buckinghamreview the influential mid-century physiologicalpsychology of David Hartley, and Harry Whitakerand Yves Turgeon examine the work of CharlesBonnet on memory and hallucinations. In the nextchapter of this section, Ulf Norsell shows thatSwedenborg was not merely a religious thinker andmystic, but also a very perceptive student of thenervous system who collected evidence for, andcorrectly envisioned, cortical localization of func-tion well before this “nineteenth-century” doctrinecame into vogue.

The fifth and longest section deals with medicaltheory and practice arising from eighteenth-centuryneuroscience. First, Peter Koehler provides a schol-arly account of the neuroscience and attendantmedicine of Herman Boerhaave and his mostfamous pupil, Albrecht von Haller. CatherineStorey shows how the concept of apoplexy (stroke)altered during the eighteenth century. The nextthree chapters review the origin and application ofone of the eighteenth century’s greatest enthusi-asms – electricity – for treating medical conditions.Stanley Finger discusses the work of perhaps thegreatest “electrician” of them all – BenjaminFranklin – who personally assessed the use of elec-tric shocks in treating various common disorders,including stroke-induced paralysis and the seizuresassociated with hysteria. In the next chapter,Hannah Locke and Stanley Finger discuss whatpeople learned about medical electricity fromGentleman’s Magazine, the first widely dissemi-

nated periodical in Great Britain. Paola Bertuccitakes up this theme in the next chapter where sheexamines in detail the many attempts to use elec-tricity in medicine in the latter part of the eigh-teenth century. John Wesley, in addition to hisbetter known religious convictions and desire tosave souls, was also involved in medical electricityas an inexpensive way to heal sick bodies, andJames Donat examines this and his long-standinginterest in nervous disorders in the next chapter.Next, Douglas and Joseph Lanska discussMesmer’s related, but ultimately fraudulent, pseu-doscience of animal magnetism and show how itwas ultimately refuted by the careful use of scien-tific methodology. Finally, Diana Faber takes upthe topic of hysteria and shows how it was trans-formed from an organic to more of a psychologicaldisease during the eighteenth century.

The final section considers the cultural conse-quences of this developing interest in the nervoussystem. Timo Kaitaro examines the consequencesfor the mind–brain argument in French thought ofthe period, and Marjorie Lorch brings out the waythat Jonathan Swift used eighteenth-century under-standings of the brain and nervous system in someof his satirical writings. Finally, George Rousseauexamines the work of a well-known twentieth-cen-tury psychologist, Jerome Kagan, and shows howone of his central concepts, that of temperament,was first defined in the eighteenth century.

The essays in this book provide a wide perspec-tive on the development of neuroscience and itsapplication in medicine during the “long” eigh-teenth century. They also show the impact of thisinterest on the general culture of the time not onlyon philosophical ideas but also on literature andsocial life. The developments in neuroscience dur-ing the “long” eighteenth century form the basisupon which the great advances of the nineteenthand then the twentieth centuries were made. Wehope these essays will be of interest not only topracticing neuroscientists and neurologists, butalso to others in the many disciplines which studyeighteenth-century life and thought.

4 Harry Whitaker, C.U.M. Smith, and Stanley Finger

5

ChronologyC.U.M. SmithVision Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK

Science (Neuroscience in bold) Cultural context

1660 Foundation of Royal Society 1660 Restoration of British Monarchy1660 Mariotte discovers eye’s blind spot1660 Boyle: New experiments physico-mechanical

touching the spring of the air1661 Malpighi: De pulmonibus observationes

anatomicae1661 Boyle: Skeptical Chymist1662/4 Descartes: L’Homme 1662 Spinoza: De Ethica

1663 Ottomans defeated at Vienna1664 Willis: Cerebri Anatome1664 Swammerdam: frog nerve-muscle

preparation1665 Hooke: Micrographia 1665 Great plague in London1665 Malpighi: De cerebro1666 Foundation of Académie Royale 1666 Molière: Le Misanthrope

des Sciences 1666 Great fire of London1667 Steno: Elementorum myologiae specimen 1667 Milton: Paradise Lost

1668 Dryden named Poet Laureate1670 Pascal: Pensées1670 Louis XIV founds Les Invalides

1671/76 Perrault: Histoire Naturelle

In this chronological table of the ‘long’ eighteenthcentury I have sought to place scientific publica-tions in the context of their cultural milieu. I havepurposefully omitted birth and death dates of thegreat figures of the eighteenth century in prefer-ence for the dates when their most significantpublications and/or other contributions appeared.I have also, rightly or wrongly, sought to keep thingsas simple as possible by omitting the coronationdates of Kings and Queens in favour of the publica-tion dates of novels and plays, the first performances

of music or display of painting and sculpture.My hope is to have caught most of the importantevents mentioned in the chapters of this book.Finally, in the science column I have attempted todifferentiate between primarily neuroscientificworks and those pertaining to the other sciences.This is sometimes a matter of opinion and I hopethat I shall not have to endure too much censure ifin some cases my opinion does not coincide withthat of the reader.

6 C.U.M. Smith


1672 Glisson: Tractatus de Natura Substantiae energetica

1672 Willis: De Anima Brutorum1674 Van Leeuwenhoek’s microscopical

sections of optic nerve1676 Sydenham: Observationes Medicae1677 Glisson: Tractatus de ventriculo et

intestinis1678 Lorenzini: Observationi intorno alle

topedini1679 Bonet: Sepulchretum sive Anatomia

Practica1680/81 Borelli: De Motu Animalium1682 Newton describes partial decussation

of optic nerves1683 Van Leeuwenhoek sees bacteria1686 Ray: Historia plantarum 1685 Edict of Nantes revoked

1687 Newton: Principia Mathematica1688 ‘Glorious Revolution’ in England1690 Locke: An Essay concerning human

understanding1691 Ray: The Wisdom of God manifested in the

Works of Creation1692 Salem witch trials

1699 Tyson: Orang-Outang, sive Homo sylvestris1701 Grew: Cosmologia Sacra: or, A discourse of

the Universe as it is the Creature and Kingdom of God

1702 Baglivi: Specimen quatuor librorum de fibra motrice et morbosa

1704 Newton: Opticks 1704 Swift: Tale of a Tub1707 Stahl: Theoria medica vera 1707 Act of Union between England 1708 Boerhaave: Institutiones medicae and Scotland1709 Berkeley: New Theory of Vision1710 Petit: Lettres d’un Medecin 1710 Berkeley: Principles of Human Knowledge1714 Boerhaave commences clinical teaching 1714 Leibniz: Monadology

1718 Watteau: Gilles1719 Defoe: Robinson Crusoe1722 Defoe: Moll Flanders1725 Vico: The New Science

1726 Establishment of Faculty of Medicine 1726 Swift: Gulliver’s Travelsat Edinburgh

1727 Petit discovers functions of cervical sympathetics

1729 Bach: St. Matthew Passion1731/5 Gray: Electrical experiments1732 Boerhaave: Elementa Chemiae 1732/4 Pope: Essay on Man1733 Cheyne: The English Malady

1734 Voltaire: Lettres Pilosophiques


1735 Linnaeus: Systema Naturae (1st edn) 1735 Hogarth: The Rake’s Progress1737 Porterfield: An essay concerning the

motions of our eyes1737 Kinneir: A new essay on the nerves . . .1737/8 Swammerdam (published by Boerhaave):

Bybel der Natuure (Biblia Naturae)1739 Bayne: A new essay on the nerves 1738/9 D. Scarlatti: Keyboard sonatas (“exercises”)

1739/40 Hume: Treatise of Human Nature1740/41 Swedenborg: Oeconomia Regni Animalis

1742 Handel: Messiah1744 Trembley: Mémoires1745 Whytt: An Enquiry . . .1745/6 Invention of Leyden jar1745 Kratzenstein’s medical applications

of electricity1746 Nollet: Essai sur l’Electricité des Corps1746 Monro (primus): The Anatomy of Human

Bones and Nerves1747 Haller: Primae Lineae Physiologiae1747 La Mettrie: L’Homme Machine 1747 Richardson: Clarissa1748 Needham: Observations (spontaneous 1748 Gainsborough: Mr and Mrs Andrews

generation of life)1749 Buffon: Histoire Naturelle (vol.1)1749 Hartley: Observations on Man

1750 Rousseau: Discours sur les sciences et les arts

1751 Maupertuis: Système de la Nature 1751 d’Alembert: Discours préliminaire

1751 Whytt: An Essay on the Vital and other 1751 Diderot: Encyclopédie, vol.1Involuntary Motions of Animals

1751 Franklin: Experiments and Observations on Electricity

1753 Beccario: Dell’elettricismo artificiale et naturale

1754 Condillac: Traité de la Lumière1754/5 Bonnet: Essai de psychologie1755 Haller: Dissertation on the Sensible and 1755 Lisbon earthquake

Irritable Parts of Animals 1755 Johnson: Dictionary of the English Language1755 Whytt: Observations on Sensibility and 1755 Rousseau: Discourse on Inequality

Irritability1755 Whytt: Physiological Essays

1756-1763 Seven Years’ War1756 Lovett publishes on medical electricity1757 Adanson: Histoire Naturelle du Senegal1757/66 Haller: Elementa Physiologiae Corporis

Humani1758 Linnaeus: Systema Naturae (10th edn)1759 Porterfield: A Treatise on the Eye 1759 Voltaire: Candide

Chronology 7


1760 Wesley: Desideratum, or electricity made 1760 Sterne: Tristram Shandyplain and useful

1760 Bonnet: Essai analytique sur les facultés de l’âme

1760 Bonnet describes his eponymous syndrome1761 Morgagni: De sedibus

1762 Gluck: Orfeo et Euridice1762 Rousseau: Du Contract Social1764 Reid: Inquiry into the Human Mind1764 Voltaire: Dictionnaire

Philosophique1765 Whytt: Observations . . . on Nervous, 1765 Lunar Society founded

Hypochondriac, or Hysteric Disorders1766 Mesmer: De Planetarum Influxu1767 Priestley: History and Present State 1767 Fragonard: The Swing

of Electricity1768 Sauvage: Nosologia Methodica1768 William Hunter founds the Great Windmill 1768 Cook’s first voyage

Street anatomy school1769 Bancroft: Natural History of Guiana 1769 Arkwright’s Spinning Jenny1769 Bonnet La Palingénésie Philosophique 1769 James Watt invents steam engine1770 Holbach: Système de la Nature 1770 Cook at Botany Bay1770 Cullen: Lectures on the Institutions of

Medicine1772 Walsh: Experiments on the Torpedo or

Electric Ray1772 Priestley: The History and Present State

of Discoveries relating to Vision, Light and Colours

1773 Walsh: On the electric property of the torpedo

1773 John Hunter: Anatomical observations on 1773 First cast–iron bridge at Ironbridge,the Torpedo Shropshire

1774 Goethe: Die Leiden des jungen Werther1775 Lavater: Physiognomische Fragmente1775 Mesmer demonstrates ‘animal magnetism’1775 Hunter: An account of Gymnotus Electricus1776 Cavendish: An account of some attempts to 1776 American Declaration of

imitate the effects of the Torpedo by electricity Independence1776 Musgrave: Speculations and Conjectures 1776 Herder: Sturm und Drang

on the Qualities of the Nerves 1776 Smith: Wealth of Nations1776 Gibbon: Decline and Fall of the

Roman Empire1777 Cullen: First lines in the practice of Physic 1777 Goya: El quitasol1778 Mesmer develops group treatment by 1778 Banks elected President of Royal

animal magnetism Society1779 Mesmer: Mémoire sur la découverte du 1779 Lessing: Nathan der Weise

magnetisme animal1779 Prochaska: De structura nervorum1780 d’Eslon: Observations sur le magnétisme 1780 Gordon riots in London

animal

8 C.U.M. Smith


1780 Spallanzani: Disssertazione di fisica animale e vegetabile

1781 Fontana’s first microscopical observation 1781 Kant: Kritik der reinen Vernunftof a nerve fibre 1781 Schiller: Die Rauber

1781 Fontana: Traité sur le Venin de la Vipère 1781 Houdon: Bust of Voltaire1783 Monro Secundus: Observations on the 1783 Blake: Poetical Sketches

Structure and Functions of the Nervous System 1783 First human ascent in hot-air balloon1784 Franklin commission on mesmerism1784 Vicq d’Azyr: Recherches sur la structure

du cerveau1785 Hutton: Theory of the Earth1786 John Hunter: Observations on certain 1786 Kant: Metaphysische Anfangsgründe

parts of the animal economy der Naturwissenschaft1786 Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro

1787 Abernethy establishes a surgical curriculum at St Bartholomew’s Hospital

1789 Lavoisier: Traité Elémentaire de Chimie 1789 Revolution in France1789 Pinel: Nosographie Philosophique1790 Goethe: Versuch die Metamophose der 1790 Burke: Reflections on the Revolution

Pflanzen zu erklären in France1791 Paine: The Rights of Man1791 Mozart: Die Zauberflöte

1791 Galvani: De riribas electricitatis in motu 1792 Stewart: Elements of the Philosophy of musculari the Human Mind

1792 Volta: Memoria sull’elettricità animale1792 Wells: An Essay upon Single Vision1792 Kirkland: A Commentary on Apoplectic

and Paralytic Affections1793 Young: Observations on Vision 1793 David: Marat Assassinated1794-6 Darwin: Zoonomia 1794 Lavoisier guillotined1793 Richard Fowler: Experiments and

Observations relative to the influence lately discovered by M. Galvani and commonly called animal electricity

1794-1801 Soemmerring: De corporis humani fabrica

1794 John Hunter: A Treatise on the blood, inflammation, and gun-shot wounds

1797 Schelling: Ideen zur Philosophie der Natur

1798 Malthus: Essay on Population1798 Wordsworth/Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads

1798 Jenner: Inquiry into variolae vaccinae 1798 Haydn: Die Schöpfung1799 Rosetta stone1799 Napoleon overthrows the Directory

1800 Volta: On the electricity excited by the mere 1800 Mozart: Requiemcontact . . . 1800 Schelling: Transcendental Philosophy

1801 Bichat: Anatomie Générale Appliquée à la Physiologie et à la Médecine

Chronology 9


1802 Paley: Natural Theology1802 Young: On the theory of lights and colours 1802 Coleridge: Dejection: An Ode

1802 Constable: Dedham Vale1802-22 Treviranus: Biologie1803 Darwin: Temple of Nature1804 Aldini: Essai théorique et expérimentale 1804-8 Beethoven: 5th Symphony

sur le galvanisme 1804 Jacquard invents eponymous loom1804 Wilkinson: Elements of Galvanism 1804 Trevithick invents first steam

locomotive1805 Battle of Trafalgar

1807 Trotter: A view of the nervous 1807 Hegel: Phänomenologie des temperament . . . Geistes

1807 Abolition of Slave Trade Act passed in British Parliament

1808 Dalton: New System of Chemical Philosophy 1808 Goethe: Faust part 11808 Goya: El Tris Mayo

1809 Rolando: Saggio sopra la vera struttura del 1809 Davy invents first electric lightcervello dell’uomo e degl’animali

1809 Lamarck: Philosophie Zoologique1809-11 Oken: Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie1810 Goethe: Zur Farbenlehre

1811 Luddite revolts in England1810-19 Gall and Spurzheim: Anatomie et

physiologie du système nerveux. . . . par la configuration de leur têtes (first two volumes only with Spurzheim)

1811 Bell: Idea for a New Anatomy of the Brain1814 Austen: Mansfield Park1814 Stevenson’s steam locomotive1815 Battle of Waterloo; Congress of Vienna

1817 Parkinson: Essay on the Shaking Palsy 1817 Coleridge: Biographia Literaria1818 Shelley: Frankenstein1819 Schubert: Trout quintet

1820 Cooke: A Treatise of Nervous Diseases

10 C.U.M. Smith

Section BBackground

Introduction

13

This section consists of four chapters which sketchin some of the background against which the devel-opment of Neuroscience in the ‘long eighteenthcentury’ took place. The chronological table in thepreceding section shows some of the major eventsin the wider world during the ‘long century’. It hasoften been called ‘the Age of Enlightenment’ andthe table shows how societies in the Western Worldemerged from the fundamentalisms of the seven-teenth and earlier centuries – the Civil War inEngland during the 1640s, the Revocation of theEdict of Nantes in 1685, the Salem witch trials inthe American colonies in the 1690s – to a more sec-ular, not to say rational, settlement. Sterne’sTristram Shandy, Diderot’s Encyclopédie,Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews, Fragonard’sThe Swing, Scarlatti’s Keyboard Sonatas, allbreathe a different air from that breathed by thefanaticisms of the earlier century. It did not last. In1793 Charlotte Corday came from Normandy toassassinate Marat in his bath, in 1794 bothRobespierre and Lavoisier were guillotined, in1799 Napoleon came to power. The clear rationalair of the eighteenth century thickened. In England,taste for the gothic climaxed in Mary Shelley’sFrankenstein, in Spain Goya painted El Tris Mayo,in Germany, Goethe initiated the Sturm und Drangmovement and Hegel published Phänomenologiedes Geistes.

It is against this background that investigationsof the brain and nervous system were carried out.This section does not, however, attempt to placeeighteenth-century physicians, anatomists andphysiologists in their wider cultural context but tofocus more closely on their professional interests

and technical abilities. The first chapter, con-tributed by C.U.M. Smith, sets the scene byreviewing the development of ideas concerningmind and brain during the ‘long’ century. Heargues that the century, so far as physiological psy-chology is concerned, was a century of transition.The old ideas of spirit-filled cerebral ventricles andhollow nerves inherited from the medievals werediscredited by anatomical and especially micro-scopical research. Yet until the very end of the cen-tury, when investigations of ‘animal electricity’began to take hold, it was difficult to see with whatthe old ideas could be replaced. This dissonancebetween what was shown by the anatomist’sscalpel and the microscopist’s lens and what thegeneral public believed persisted for a century andmore. Nevertheless, both physicians and politesociety became increasingly interested in the nerv-ous system and nervous disease. The affect of thisinterest on the sophisticated classes can be seen inthe best-selling novels of the time and in the devel-opment of fashionable spa society. Right at the endof the period evolutionary ideas began to challengethe established order and Smith’s chapter endswith an account of Erasmus Darwin’s evolutionarypsychophysiology.

In the next chapter Brian Ford reviews thedevelopment of microscopy during the eighteenthcentury. He starts with the first great pioneers –Robert Hooke (1635–1703) and Anthony vanLeeuwenhoek (1632–1723). Ford notes that someof Leeuwenhoek’s first specimens were preparationsof bovine optic nerve (1674) and that he could findno evidence that they were tubular. Other micro-scopists examined nerve fibres during the late

seventeenth century but preparative techniques werenot sufficiently well developed to allow a definitiveanswer to the question whether the fibres were hol-low (as had long been believed) or solid, and thecontroversy lingered on into the eighteenth century.Ford next provides a valuable account of the designof eighteenth-century microscopes and their use bymany of the luminaries of that century – Della Torre,Fontana, Monro (Primus and Secundus), Prochaska,etc. – and points out that although the resolution of thethese microscopes was often surprisingly good,severe limitations were imposed by undevelopedpreparative techniques. The chapter ends with a lookforward into the nineteenth century when microtomesand the first achromatic compound microscopesbecame available, finely tooled from brass, and oftencollectors’ items.

The topic of medical education and its associa-tion with the voluntary hospital movement inEngland is the subject of the next chapter byJonathan Reinarz. Reinarz starts his account in thesixteenth century when British physicians receiveda university education but surgeons were taughtthrough an apprenticeship scheme as befitted whatseemed more like a craft. After a discussion of thefamous Italian centres of medical education, espe-cially Padua, the focus shifts to Leiden. Here grad-uates from Padua sought to replicate their owneducational experience and initiated clinical teach-ing at the city’s hospital. From Leiden many med-ical graduates migrated across Europe, especiallyto Scotland where William Cullen, at Edinburgh,lecturing in English rather than Latin, established asystematic medical curriculum. The scene thenpasses to London where the practice of clinicalteaching at a number of the capital’s hospitals,especially St Bartholomew’s and Guy’s, hadalready been established. Unlike the rather bureau-cratic hospitals across the channel, London hospi-tals customarily allowed students much morefreedom to develop their own programmes ofstudy. With the exception of smallpox, they wereallowed to see the full range of medical and surgi-cal cases. The most famous London medicalcourses were given by physician William Hunterand his brother, surgeon John Hunter, at GreatWindmill Street. The success of this school soon

led to the founding of several other teaching estab-lishments so that, by 1780, no less than 16 anatom-ical courses were advertised in the Londonnewspapers. By the end of the century London hadbecome a major world centre for medical educa-tion. Jonathan Reinarz traces these developmentsinto the beginning of the nineteenth century whenclinical teaching in a hospital environment hadbegun to spread to the English provinces.

In the final chapter in this section, ChristopherGardner-Thorpe examines the medical milieu inthe last quarter of the eighteenth century throughthe lens provided by the life and work of JamesParkinson (1755–1824). Although Parkinson isnowadays best known for his 1817 Essay on theShaking Palsy, he had led a varied and eventful lifebefore the Essay was published. Like others in theeighteenth century (one immediately thinks ofErasmus Darwin and Benjamin Franklin), his mindvoyaged widely over the world being revealed byenlightenment thought and discovery. In additionto his medical interests he involved himself inpolitics, where he became a notable (thoughanonymous) pamphleteer, the church, where hewas for many years a churchwarden, and geologyand palaeontology where he was not only a foundermember of the Geological Society but also pub-lished a highly regarded three volume work,Organic Remains of a Former World. Gardner-Thorpe shows how country physicians (like manycountry vicars) could sustain a wide-ranging inter-est in the world around them and yet make signifi-cant contributions to their own chosen profession.Parkinson was not only a founder member ofLondon’s Medical and Chirurgical Society but alsomuch involved in domestic medicine (writing pop-ular medical compendia for the general public), theregulation of ‘Mad Houses’, promoting good nutri-tion, studying gout and many other medical topics.Gardner-Thorpe’s review provides a valuableinsight into the medical and scientific world of thelate eighteenth century. A world which, to para-phrase Thomas Wright’s words in his 1750 discus-sion of astronomy, seemed to open up on all sides,revealing truths undreamt of in earlier centuries.

The Editors

14 The Editors

15

Introduction

How should the ‘long’ eighteenth century be defined?January 1, 1700 and December 31, 1799 are quitearbitrary dates. Why should they be chosen to seg-ment our history rather than more significantperiods of time, periods which have a coherentcontent, or are marked, perhaps, by the working outof a theme? Students of English literature some-times take the long eighteenth century to extendfrom John Milton (Paradise Lost, 1667) to thepassing of the first generation of Romantics (Keats(d. 1821), Shelley (d. 1822), Byron (d. 1824),Coleridge (d. 1834)). Students of British politicalhistory often take it to start with the accession ofCharles II (the Restoration) in 1660 or, alterna-tively, the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688and to end with the great Reform Act of 1832.Others might choose different book ends. In thehistory of science and philosophy the terminus aquo is sometimes taken as the publication ofDescartes’ scientific philosophy or, in moreAnglophone zones, the 1687 publication ofNewton’s Principia with its vision of a ‘clockworkuniverse’. ‘Nature and Nature’s laws’ as AlexanderPope enthused, ‘lay hid in Night: God said, “LetNewton be!” and all was light!’.

But in the biological sciences, as the long eigh-teenth century wore on, the Newtonian illuminationdimmed. After early enthusiasms, mechanisticinterpretations of life-processes proved unfruitful.The models proposed by Descartes, Borelli andothers began to seem absurdly simplistic. The reac-tion against ‘clockwork’ models took the form ofRomantic biology and, especially in Germany,

drifted far from the clarity of Descartes andNewton. Kant published Metaphysical Foundationsof Natural Science in 1786 and Goethe’sMetamorphosis of Plants came out in 1790. Inearly nineteenth-century England, Samuel TaylorColeridge, eschewing his fine poetical talent,sought to develop a science of life based onNaturphilosophie (Smith, 1999). The terminus adquem of this long decline in mechanistic interpreta-tions of the living process can, perhaps, be seen in thepublication of Lawrence Oken’s turgid Lehrbuch derNaturphilosophie in 1809–1811 (trans. Tulk:Elements of Physiophilosophy 1847). Thus, in the lifesciences, we might adapt Squire’s riposte to Pope’sencomium and write: ‘Then came the devil, howling“Ho! let Oken be!” and restored the status quo’.

Neuroscience could not be immune to thesemovements of thought. Perhaps the most obviousdate to start is 1664 with the publication of Willis’Cerebri Anatome. The end point is less clear.Should it be with Gall and Spurzheim’s phrenology(1810–1819) or Charles Bell’s Idea for a NewAnatomy of the Brain in 1811, or even later still, inthe 1840s, with Emil du Bois Reymond’s discoveryof the action potential and the action current innerve and muscle? What happened during thislong period? It has been called the Age ofEnlightenment. In France, Denis Diderot and Jean-le-Rond d’Alembert published the Encyclopédie,often taken to be the Enlightenment’s master work;Diderot was sufficiently interested in physiology towrite a treatise called Eléments de Physiologie,although this was never published. Roy Porter, per-haps the foremost of our recent historians of thisperiod, saw it as an era when the old spiritual

1Brain and Mind in the ‘Long’ Eighteenth CenturyC.U.M. Smith

16 C.U.M. Smith

certainties, the old theologies, evaporated to bereplaced by an uneasy materialism. Yet this materi-alism, as we shall see, was very different from themechanistic materialism put forward by RenéDescartes and his followers in the seventeenth cen-tury. The thought world of Erasmus Darwin, at theend of the ‘long’ century, is very different from thatof the Cartesians at the beginning! Nevertheless,the old ideas about the brain and its physiologyrefused to go without a tenacious rearguard action.Long before the eighteenth century, Vesalius, in the1543 Fabrica, had strongly denied that the nerveswere hollow: ‘I have never seen a channel, even inthe optic nerve’ (p. 317), and in 1620, the Edinburghmedical student, John Moir, recorded in his lecturenotes that ‘nerves have no perceptible cavity inter-nally, as the veins and arteries have’ (French, 1975).Yet the notion of animal spirit travelling in nervetubes was still current in popular culture 150 yearslater. For Tristram Shandy, in Laurence Sterne’snovel of the 1760s, it was simply conventional wis-dom. The long eighteenth century, for the historian ofneuroscience, is an age of transition but not of revo-lution. The old framework of ideas, animal spirit,subtle fluids, spiritual substances and hollow nerveslived on, in spite of the evidence, because it was dif-ficult to see until the very end of the period with whatthey could be sensibly replaced.

Setting the Scene

At the beginning of the Western tradition 2,500 yearsago, Hippocrates expounded a view of the brain withwhich we would hardly be uncomfortable today. Inhis work on epilepsy, On the Sacred Disease, helocated all the psychical functions (‘ – joys, delights,laughter, . . . sorrow, griefs, despondency, . . . theacquisition of wisdom and knowledge, . . . ethicalunderstanding, . . . seeing and hearing, . . . bad dreamsand delirium, . . .’) in the brain.

At about the same time, on the other side of theAegean, Plato’s Pythagorean tract, the Timaeus,had a very different story to tell. A rational soul isconfined within the skull whilst a mortal soul fullof passion is confined in the torso and beneaththat, separated by the diaphragm, a lower, concu-piscent soul. The Timaeus is an explicit continua-tion of the Republic and its tripartite schematicmirrors the tripartite sociology of Plato’s ideal

state. Plato’s famous pupil, Aristotle, far more abiologist than his master, also developed a tripar-tite psychophysiology. The three divisions of hisanimating principle – vegetable, animal andrational souls – clearly relate to his classificationof the biological world, rather than the social strat-ification of an ideal state.

It is, however, only with the Alexandrians of thethird century BC that we find the first physiologi-cal thought based on anatomical dissection. BothHerophilus and Erasistratus were aware of the cere-bral ventricles and Erasistratus developed a physi-ology in which pneuma zotikon was transported byblood to the brain where it was transformed intopneuma psychikon to be distributed to the musclesby hollow nerves (see Smith, 1976). This idea reap-pears in Galen in the second century AD and vari-ants (pneuma psychikon being translated as ‘animalspirit’) persisted for two millennia up until theRenaissance and beyond.

The origin of that other long-persisting notion,the ‘cell’ or ‘ventricular’ theory, where the‘rational’ soul is divided into a number of parts andlocated in three cerebral ventricles or ‘cells’, ismore obscure (1). There are hints both in Nemesiusof Emesa (fl. fourth century AD) whose work, Onthe Nature of Man, synthesises ancient Hellenisticand Judaic thought, and in St. Augustine of Hippoat the beginning of the fifth century. It was onlywith the rebirth of anatomy in the sixteenth centurythat it was recognised that the medieval cell dia-grams, valuable though they were as representa-tions of psychology, bore little or no resemblanceto the anatomy of the brain.

Leonardo’s early sixteenth-century wax cast of theox ventricles (unknown until the nineteenth century)is perhaps the first true representation. Leonardowrites, ‘My works are the issue of pure and simpleexperience, who is the one true mistress’. Renaissanceanatomists began to insist that function – in thiscase mental function – should be related to structurerevealed by the scalpel. This brings us, rapidly, tothe beginning of the modern era.

Descartes and Willis

Descartes’ L’Homme was published just 2 yearsbefore the start of our period, in 1662, though ithad been written long before. Descartes’ anatomy

1. Brain and Mind in the ‘Long’ Eighteenth Century 17

was, of course, far inferior to that of Willis(Willis, 1664), although he had much first-handexperience of dissecting specimens from butch-ers’ shops in Amsterdam. His psychophysiologyis yet more speculative (see Smith, 1998). BothDescartes and Willis were, however, clear thatthe ‘lower’ souls of the ancients and medievals,the animal and vegetable souls, were whollymaterial.

Descartes, it will be remembered, argued thatthe rational soul swayed the pineal gland, thusdirecting animal spirit present in the ventricle intoone or other nerve conduit, hence causing appro-priate behavioural movements. Willis’ theory is inmany respects rather similar. Animal spirit, dis-tilled from vital spirit in the blood by the greymatter of the brain, fills ‘the medullar trunk’ andpasses from thence via the nerves to the body ‘andso imparts to those bodies, in which the nervousfibres are interwoven, a motive or sensitive feel-ing of force’ (Willis, 1681, p. 126). But in bothcases an immaterial soul, unique to man, lurkedsomewhere beyond the scalpel (see Changeux,1985, p. 11).

On the other hand neither Descartes nor Willisdenied infra-human animals sensation. Descarteswrites to the Marquess of Newcastle, ‘As for themovements of our passions . . . it is . . . very clear thatthey do not depend on thought, because they oftenoccur in spite of us. Consequently they can also occurin animals, even more violently than they do inhuman beings . . .’ and in a letter to Henry More in1649 he writes, ‘I do not deny life to animals . . .;and I do not even deny sensation, insofar as itdepends on a bodily organ’ (Cottingham,Stoothoff, & Murdoch, 1985, p. 366). The fashion-able notion that Descartes (though not some of hisfollowers) regarded animals as unfeeling automatais plainly incorrect.

Willis, for his part, maintains that animals pos-sess a ‘corporeal soul . . . having extension andlocal parts’ (Willis, 1672) which, although thor-oughly material, nevertheless vivifies the bodyand is sensitive to the aches and pains and pleas-ures of life. It is fashionable to say, withColeridge, that Descartes, in exorcising the lowerspirits, transformed the body into an unfeelingmachine. The truth, as ever, is more ambiguous.This ambiguity lived on to plague the eighteenthcentury.

Nerves are not Hollow Conduits

The ancient neurophysiology to which bothDescartes and Willis subscribed – that the nervesare conduits linking the brain with the peripheryalong which the animal spirit travelled – was, evenas their works were being published, on the pointof being discredited. In the last decades of the sev-enteenth century both Jan Swammerdam andGiovanni Borelli provided experimental evidenceagainst the idea that animal spirit travelled downnerve tubes like a wind to inflate the muscles.Swammerdam had shown by an ingenious anddelicate experiment, as early as 1663, that frogmuscles did not expand on contraction (2). However,although he demonstrated his experiment widely toacademic audiences (Nordstrom, 1954), he tried toexplain away its implications and his work was notplaced in the public domain until Boerhaave pub-lished an edited version in the 1737/1738 Bibjelder Nature (Biblia Naturae) (see Cobb, 2002).Borelli also contested the old idea of nerves as hol-low conduits. He believed the nerves were ‘canalsfilled with a spongy material, like elder pith . . .moistened with a spirituous juice (succus nerveus)originating in the brain . . . saturated to turges-cence’. Instead of a flow of ‘spirit’, he argued thata ‘commotion’, ‘concussion’ or ‘undulation’ was allthat was transmitted (Borelli, 1680/1681; see alsoGlynn, 1999). Willis, although satisfied that nervescontained no cavity visible to the naked eye or sim-ple microscope, nonetheless believed that theywere like ‘Indian canes’ through which animalspirit could percolate (Willis, 1681).

The work of the physiologists was supplementedby that of microscopists (see Ford, this volume). Atthe end of the seventeenth century Antony vanLeeuwenhoek used his microscope to examine sec-tions of bovine optic nerve and concluded that nocavity could be perceived, although he laterappears to have had second thoughts. During thenext century improved microscopical techniquessuggested ever more strongly that nerves containedno cavity (3). The old neurophysiology thusbecame highly questionable. Yet the old ideas heldon tenaciously. In The English Malady, GeorgeCheyne devotes many pages to a discussion of ani-mal spirits, what they might be and how they mightact (Cheyne, 1733, pp. 75–89). Ford (this volume)refers to an illustration depicting hollow nerves in

a publication dated as late as 1842! The old neuro-physiology also lingered in popular culture.Tristram Shandy in 1760 is well versed in them.‘You have all, I dare say, heard of the animal spirit’he writes, ‘Nine parts in ten of a man’s sense andnonsense . . . depend on its motions and activity . . .’(Sterne, 1760, p. 1), and Jonathan Swift, in the1704 Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, writesthat ‘it is the Opinion of Choice Virtuosi, that theBrain is only a Crowd of little Animals, but withTeeth and Claws extremely sharp, and therefore,cling together in the Contexture we behold, like thePicture of Hobbes’s Leviathan, or like Bees in per-pendicular swarm upon a Tree, or like a Carrioncorrupted into Vermin, still preserving the Shapeand Figure of the Mother Animal’. Swift alsofamously defines ‘punning’ as ‘the art of harmo-nious jingling with words, which passing in at theears, excites a titillary motion in those parts; andthis being conveyed by the animal spirit into themuscles of the face, raises the cockles of the heart’.

One important reason for the lingering of the oldneurophysiology was the difficulty of knowingwith what to replace it. The traditional understand-ing of the human being was at least a consistentsystem. Alexandre Koyré says the same ofAristotelian physics. He remarks that it ‘. . . formsan admirable and perfectly coherent theory which,to tell the truth, has only one flaw (besides that ofbeing false) . . . that it is contradicted by the every-day practice of throwing’ (Koyré, 1943). The samecould be said of the ancient neurophysiology, sub-stituting ‘the fact that nerves are not hollow tubes’for ‘the everyday practice of throwing’. But replacingthe usefully ambiguous psychophysical substancewith straightforwardly physical substance, thoughseemingly inescapable, merely made the psy-chophysical problem more intractable.

There were a number of attempts to incorporateneurophysiology into the Aristotelian system’ssuccessor: Newtonian mechanism. Boerhaave pro-posed that nerve fluid consisted of the finest of allparticles, far smaller than the large corpuscles mak-ing up other body fluids, and that these strung endto end communicated impetus along a nerve fibremuch as a line of billiard balls in a tube. Becauseof Boerhaave’s immense reputation, this ideahelped prolong hydraulic neurophysiology wellinto the eighteenth century. David Hartley, taking ahint from Newton’s Optics, proposed a rather

different idea (see Buckingham, this volume). Heargued that the nervous system operated by way ofvibrations and vibratiuncles (in many ways thisreminds us of Borelli’s ‘undulations’) (Hartley,1749). Like most of his eighteenth-century con-temporaries he felt the pull of Newton’s genius andwished to develop ‘an experimental physics of themind’ (see Smith, 1987). However, although hisassociationist psychology was very influential, hisneurophysiology did not find favour. Anatomistslike Alexander Monro primus were quick to pointout the anatomical infelicities of his theory: ‘. . . thenerves are unfit for vibrations because theirextremities . . . are quite soft and pappy’ (4). Thebeginnings of our modern understanding awaitedthe second part of the nineteenth century, first withthe work of Emil du Bois Reymond and thenwith that of Helmholtz, Bernstein and others, andwas not fully completed until the work of Hodgkin,Huxley and Katz in the mid-twentieth century.Indeed, it might even be said that complete under-standing awaited the Nobel Prize researches ofRobert MacKinnon and colleagues at the beginningof the twenty-first century (MacKinnon, 2003;Smith, 2002b).

The Mind Escapes the Cells

The puzzle posed by transmission down ‘solid’nerves was not the only puzzle facing eighteenth-century anatomists. Another, and equally acute,puzzle was that posed by the neural correlatives ofmind. What and where were they? The newanatomy gave no hint. The ancient ‘cell’ or ‘ven-tricular’ psychology had long been recognised ashaving no anatomical basis. Descartes and manyothers insisted instead that the ‘mind’ had no phys-ical dimension and thus, as Henry More remarked,was strictly speaking, ‘nowhere’. This seemed topoint directly to atheism, a conclusion which didnot escape the Holy Office. In 1663, it putDescartes’ physio-philosophy on its IndexLibrorum Prohibitorum.

Interest in this problem was not confined tophilosophers, theologians and anatomists. LaurenceSterne, for instance, has much to say about it in hisnovels. Tristram Shandy’s opinionated fatherphilosophises over this very question in intenselyhumorous passages, eventually insisting that the

18 C.U.M. Smith


neural correlatives of mind were to be found in thefine material of the cerebellum. Accordingly heinstructed his man-midwife, Dr Slop, to take greatcare to ensure that the back of Tristram’s head waswell protected at birth.

More seriously, Samuel Johnson, that epitome ofclarity of thought and expression, writes in manyplaces, not least in his Dictionary, that the union ofpsyche and soma is incomprehensible: ‘Man iscompounded of two very different ingredients,spirit and matter, but how two such unallied anddisproportioned substances should act upon eachother, no man’s learning could yet tell him’(Johnson, 1755, quoting Collier). He was bitinglydismissive of those who would identify mind withbrain: a ‘quagmire’, he remarked, whose ‘clammyconsistency’ could have nothing to do with the‘motion of thought’ (Porter, 2003, p. 169).

Johnson was burdened with many of the ‘ills theflesh is heir to’, half blind in one eye, half deaf inone ear, corpulent, subject to all sorts of tics andcompulsions. Yet he was gifted with an astonishingmemory and articulacy. It must have seemed obvi-ous to him that mind and body had little to do witheach other. Humans, for him, were, as they werefor Plato, essentially embodied souls. He lived hislife in ever-present fear of the hereafter, seldom farfrom thoughts of his end, more than once descend-ing into black melancholia, striving always to actso as to be able, as he says, ‘to render up my soulto God unclouded’ (quoted in Porter, 2003, p. 188).He is said to have refused opiates at the end, wishingto pass over with a clear mind. His hero, HermanBoerhaave, thought much the same. Johnsonpoints out in the biography he wrote for theGentleman’s Magazine (Johnson, 1739, p. 174)that ‘he (Boerhaave) had never doubted of the spir-itual and immaterial Nature of the Soul, butdeclared that he had lately had a kind of experi-mental Certainty of the distinction betweenCorporeal and Thinking Substances, which mereReason and Philosophy cannot afford, andOpportunities of contemplating the wonderful andinexplicable Union of Soul and Body, which noth-ing but long Sickness can give. This he illustratedby a Description of the Effects which theInfirmities of his Body had upon his Faculties,which yet they did not so oppress or vanquish, buthis Soul was always Master of itself, and alwaysresigned to the Pleasure of its Maker.’

Animal Spirit Escapes the Nervous System

Not only did the ‘mind’ escape its traditional con-finement in the cerebral cells, but the ‘animalspirit’ of the ancients also began to escape, thistime from the nervous system itself. Towards theend of the seventeenth century, the first micro-scopes allowed Leeuwenhoek, Hooke (Willis’pupil), Swammerdam and others to discover theworld of microbes and protista. Leibniz at thebeginning of the eighteenth century, impressed bythe work of Jan Swammerdam and Antony vanLeeuwenhoek, saw continuity all the way frommonad to man. He believed, furthermore, that therewas no discontinuity between the plant and animalkingdoms. In a letter to Louis Bourget in 1715 hewrites that ‘Mr Swammerdam has supplied obser-vations which show that insects are close to plantswith respect to their organs and that there is a def-inite order of descent from animals to plants. Butperhaps there are other beings between these two’(Loemaker, 1956, vol. 2, p. 1079) and in anotherplace he writes that the existence of zoophytes is‘wholly in keeping with the order of nature’ and‘the principle of continuity’ (5).

Notions of a so-called ‘great chain of being’ had,of course, been around for centuries but, asLovejoy remarks, they achieved great prominencein the eighteenth century (Lovejoy, 1930).Alexander Pope’s lines are only the best known ofa multitude of similar expressions:

Vast chain of being, which from God began,Natures aethereal, human, angel, man,Beast, bird, fish, insect! what no eye can seeNo glass can reach! from Infinite to thee,From thee to Nothing! . . .

Essay on Man, 237–241

Leibniz’ prediction that zoophytes (links, as he sup-posed, between the animal and plant worlds) mustexist was confirmed in 1739 when Abraham Trembleydiscovered the fresh water hydrozoa. Trembley wenton to show that fresh water polyps could be subdi-vided indefinitely and that from each fragment anew polyp would regenerate (Trembley, 1744). Thishad an important implication, for it was taken toshow that ‘soul’, the principle of life, was distrib-uted throughout the body. Rieppel (1988) showshow strong an affect Leibniz’ ideas had on the

development of Bonnet’s holistic thought. Bonnetconcluded that it implied that body and soul couldnot be two distinct and separate substances but thatanimate beings constituted what he called an ‘êtremixte’ (6). Julien Offray de La Mettrie also seizedon this implication in his mid-century works,l’Homme Machine (1747) and Traité de l’âme (1751)(see Smith, 2002a). He concluded, like Bonnet, thatthe division of creation into two parts – body andsoul – was absurd. Both, he writes, were createdtogether, at the same instant, as if ‘by a single brushstroke’ (de La Mettrie, 1745, p. 2). To think other-wise was nothing more than a casuistry designed tothrow dust into the eyes of the watching theologians(6). But this sort of panpsychism has, of course,tricky implications. Does all matter have this ‘dualaspect’? Leibniz, at least, recognised this implica-tion and was content to allow his fundamentalunits – the monads – to possess both attributes.

Irritability

Towards the middle of the eighteenth centuryanother concept, that of ‘irritability’, began to makeheadway. The concept is, of course, of great antiq-uity. Francis Glisson had developed the notion andcoined the term in the seventeenth century, butAlbrecht von Haller made the idea very much hisown (7). Indeed, in Tissot’s 1755 preface toHaller’s Dissertation on the Sensible and IrritableParts of Animals, he apostrophises him as havingmade ‘the great discovery of the present age’ (vonHaller, 1755, p. 3).

Haller writes of making a multitude of experi-ments designed to discover which parts of an animalare irritable. His stimuli included blowing, heat,spirit of wine, lapis infinalis, oil of vitriol, butter ofantinomy, touching, cutting, burning, etc. He con-cludes that ‘it (irritability) does not depend on thenerves, but on the original fabrication of the partswhich are susceptible of it’ (p. 32). And, a little fur-ther on, he homes in on muscle fibres, ‘. . . there isnothing irritable in the animal’, he writes, ‘but themuscular fibre and the faculty of endeavouring toshorten itself when we touch it is proper to thisfibre’ (p. 37). This they do when quite isolatedfrom the nervous system.

What is it about muscle fibres which give themthis property? In the first half of the eighteenth

century this had to remain a mystery. Haller wouldhave nothing to do with Stahl’s mysterious ani-mism and writes that muscle fibres are composedof nothing more than gluten and earth. The powerof contraction could hardly be inherent in earth;ergo it must be a property of gluten. ‘Hence’, heconcludes, ‘the physical cause must depend uponthe arrangement of the ultimate particles (of whichgluten is composed), though the experiments wecan make are too gross to investigate them’. It isinteresting to note that Erasmus Darwin, later in thecentury, could not restrain his powerful speculativeenergy, and developed an interesting hypothesis toaccount for this contractile power (see below andSmith, 2005). But, as with the physical basis of thenerve impulse, a further two and half centurieswere to elapse before experimental techniques haddeveloped sufficient delicacy to provide an answerto Haller’s question.

Sensibility

Sensibility is quite different. Haller writes that ‘. . .the sensible parts of the body are the nerves them-selves, and those to which they are distributed inthe greatest abundance; for by intercepting thecommunication between a part and its nerve, eitherby compression, by tying, or cutting, it is therebydeprived of sensation . . . Wherefore the nervesalone are sensible of themselves . . .’ (von Haller,1755, p. 31). Far from all, eighteenth-century phys-iologists agreed with Haller’s distinction. WilliamCullen, in particular, believed that the fine endingsof nerve fibres transformed into muscle fibres in theinterior of muscles (Cullen, 1827; see Rocca, thisvolume). This somewhat bitter dispute seems tohave been more about words and personalities thanabout the observations. Both Haller and Cullenagreed that the muscle fibres contained an inherentpower of ‘contractility’, a vis insita, and thisimplied that the animate principle was diffusedthroughout the neuromuscular system, not confinedto the brain. Similarly, both agreed that the web-work of nerves was endowed with ‘feeling’. RobertWhytt, a colleague of Cullen’s at Edinburgh, writesthat ‘we know certainly that the nerves areendowed with feeling’ and the notable eighteenth-century English physician, George Cheyne, alsoeducated at Edinburgh, agreed, writing that ‘Feeling

20 C.U.M. Smith

(physical sensibility) is nothing but the Impulse,Motion or Action of Bodies, gently or violentlyimpressing the Extremities or Sides of theNerves . . .’ (Cheyne, 1733, p. 49).

This recognition that the nerves were not merelyinanimate conduits for an animating principle orig-inating in the brain influenced medical practice.Thomas Trotter writes in 1807, p. 17, that

the last century has been remarkable for the increase in aclass of diseases little known in former times, and whichhad but lightly engaged the study of physicians prior tothat period . . . Sydenham at the conclusion of the seven-teenth century computed fevers to constitute two thirdsof the diseases of mankind. But at the beginning of thenineteenth century we do not hesitate to affirm that nerv-ous disorders have now taken the place of fevers and maybe justly reckoned two thirds of the whole, with whichcivilised society is afflicted.

Trotter also notes that nervous disorders ‘are tobe found in abundance in large towns, or whereverluxurious habits have displaced simplicity’ (p. 200).It has been remarked that these luxurious habits ledto the growth of the fashionable ‘spa society’ sowell captured in the novels of Jane Austen,Brinsley Sheridan and Tobias Smollet.

This new understanding of the nerves influencedlate eighteenth-century English literature in otherways. In Samuel Richardson’s best seller of the1780s, Clarissa, the heroine dies because of hernervous sensibility (Stephanson, 1988). ‘The originof your disorder’, the doctor tells Clarissa, is that‘you were born with weak Nerves . . . and then theNerves have been wasted and relaxed by yoursedentary life and thinking attentively’. RobertWhytt writes in 1765 that ‘In some, the feelings,perceptions and passions are naturally dull, slowand difficult to be aroused . . . in others the oppositeis the case on account of a greater delicacy and sen-sibility of the brain and nerves’ (Whytt, 1765).George Cheyne agreed. ‘Persons of slender andweak Nerves are generally of the first Class: theActivity, Mobility and Delicacy of their intellectualOrgans make them so’, he writes, and he goes on tosay that nervous debility only attacks persons ofthis upper class, ‘the brightest and most spiritual,and whose Genius is most keen and penetrating’(Cheyne, 1733, p. 105). The lower, plodding,labouring classes are spared these agonies. It wascomforting for those living a cosseted life to be toldby their medical advisors that their ailments were

not due to character or spiritual weaknesses but toreal physical causes (see Porter, 2001).

Yet the old understanding of what it is to be ahuman being refused to go quietly. It may be that theage-old language of ‘animal spirit’ was becoming asmetaphorical as the late-medieval cell theory, but theconcept still pervaded popular culture. People feltdifferently about themselves in the eighteenth cen-tury than we do today in our computer-obsessedtime. As John Sutton remarks, the language of spiritspills easily across the divide ‘from fibres and poresto passions and feelings and conscious and uncon-scious motivations’ (Sutton, 1998).

Electricity

Animal spirit refused to go quietly largely becausethere was, at the beginning of the long eighteenthcentury, no obvious successor and clearly someinfluence passed along the nerves, to and from thebrain. However by the mid-eighteenth century,there was at last a contender which began to growin popularity: electricity. The study of electricityhad, of course, been set on its modern course by thepublication of William Gilbert’s De Magnete in1600, but it only became a popular subject in themid-eighteenth century. In the 1730s, StephenGray in England and Charles du Chisternay Dufayin France initiated what became an electrical‘craze’. A little later, both Gray and the Abbé Jean-Antoine Nollet devised a series of public shows inwhich they astounded audiences by electrifyingboys and girls. Indeed this developed into a pieceof theatre in both countries. According to JosephPriestley the Abbé Nollet remarked that he would‘never forget the surprise when the first electricalspark was drawn from a human body’ (Priestley,1775, p. 47), and electrified young women pro-vided more than the usual excitement to the youngmen who ventured to embrace them (see Bertucci,this volume).

But what was this mysterious new ‘vertu’? In hisgreat work on the History and Present State ofElectricity, Priestley asks again and again whetherit is identical to Sir Isaac Newton’s aether(Priestley, 1775, especially pp. 448–450). Notionsof ‘subtle fluids’ or aethers were, of course, com-mon in the eighteenth century. Could the electricalfluid have medical applications? In the 1740s


Kratzenstein and others suggested that this mightwell be the case and soon many physicians andwould-be physicians were trying their hand at ‘theelectrical cure’ (see Bertucci, this volume). Thestudy of electricity in the mid-eighteenth centuryhovered between science, quackery and entertain-ment. As Paola Bertucci remarks, it played to thattaste for the marvellous and the inexplicable, whichis so much a part of human nature and which per-vaded the eighteenth-century learned world. Noone yet understood this mysterious and powerfulinfluence.

It was in this environment of intellectual uncer-tainty that Franz Mesmer (1734–1815) popularisedthe idea of animal magnetism (see Bloch, 1980).Mesmer had qualified in medicine in 1766 with adissertation on the influence of the heavenly bodieson human health. Just as the planets were held intheir courses by the mysterious force known as‘gravity’, so he believed that human bodies wereaffected by another mysterious force-carryingaether, ‘animal gravity’. This idea of an all-pervasive‘subtle fluid’ recurred in his later work when, afterbeing introduced to a new type of treatment usingmagnets by a Jesuit priest, Father Maximillian Hell,he replaced ‘animal gravity’ with ‘animal magnet-ism’ (see Lanska & Lanska, this volume).

In essence, he believed that good healthdepended on the free flow of the processes of lifethrough the body’s innumerable channels. He agreedwith George Cheyne in regarding the human bodyas ‘a Machine of an infinite Number and Variety ofdifferent Channels and Pipes, filled with variousand different Liquors and Fluids, perpetually run-ning, glideing (sic) or creeping forward, or return-ing backward, in a constant circle’ (Cheyne, 1733,p. 4). When these channels were blocked, illnessensued. In 1774 Mesmer successfully treated apatient by getting her to swallow a solution con-taining iron and then attaching magnets to variousparts of her body. Later he dispensed with iron andmagnets and cures were alleged to be effected bydirect control of the mysterious magnetic ‘fluid’.The physician’s task was to act as a conduit for thisall-pervading magnetic aether and channel it out ofthe patient’s body, rather like that other popularpractice, ‘blood-letting’, so that a healthy equilib-rium could be achieved. Mesmer believed that hewas able to control the flows of the magnetic aetherin a patient’s body by staring fixedly into his or her

eyes and making certain passes with his hands untila ‘magnetic crisis’ was experienced, analogous toan electric shock, after which recovery wouldensue. He also developed a device, the baquet, forconcentrating the magnetic fluid which he regardedas analogous to the Leyden jar. Anton Mesmerepitomises the confusion which reigned during thelatter part of the eighteenth century concerning thephenomena of magnetism and electricity. It was, asPriestley remarked, ‘a field just opened . . . (where)there is great room to make new discoveries’(1775, preface x). Mesmer’s belief that he hadmade one of these discoveries and was able to con-trol the new ‘fluid’ proved as groundless as manyof the other ‘discoveries’ of the time. He was unableto convince his fellow physicians in his nativeVienna and, when he transferred to Paris, his prac-tice was investigated by a commission set up byLouis XVI in 1784 which included Lavoisier,Guillotin and the American ambassador, BenjaminFranklin, and was shown to be without foundation(see Finger, this volume; for more detail onMesmer see Lanska & Lanska, this volume).

Very different from the unfounded speculationsof Mesmer were the sober researches of experi-mentalists interested in the electricity generated byelectric fish such as Gymnotus and Torpedo. Theseinvestigations made considerable headway in theeighteenth century and in the next century led bothto the science of neurophysiology and via the elec-tric or voltaic ‘pile’ to the physics of electricityitself. Indeed when Volta, at the end of the century,constructed the first ‘electric (voltaic) pile’, hemodelled it closely, on J. W. Nicholson’s artificialtorpedo which, in turn, had been modelled onHunter’s dissection of the Torpedo’s electric organ(Pancaldi, 1990). Indeed, in his letter to the RoyalSociety announcing his discovery he called it an‘artificial electric organ’ and hoped to improve itby adjusting its structure more closely to that of theorgan found in Torpedo (Volta, 1800). Theseresearches are discussed in detail by Piccolino inthis volume so it is unnecessary to expand onthem here.

Finally, at the very end of the century, in the 1790s,Galvani and others published the results of theirfamous frog experiments (see Focaccia & Simili, thisvolume; Piccolino, 2006;). Richard Fowler, a pupil ofMonro Secundus, repeated Galvani’s experiments (ashad Monro) and concluded that the effect was caused

22 C.U.M. Smith

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