Carl Zimmer

Soul Made Flesh (eBook, ePUB)

The Discovery of the Brain--and How it Changed the World

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

In this unprecedented history of a scientific revolution, award-winning author and journalist Carl Zimmer tells the definitive story of the dawn of the age of the brain and modern consciousness. Told here for the first time, the dramatic tale of how the secrets of the brain were discovered in seventeenth-century England unfolds against a turbulent backdrop of civil war, the Great Fire of London, and plague. At the beginning of that chaotic century, no one knew how the brain worked or even what it looked like intact. But by the century's close, even the most common conceptions and dominant philosophies had been completely overturned, supplanted by a radical new vision of man, God, and the universe.
Presiding over the rise of this new scientific paradigm was the founder of modern neurology, Thomas Willis, a fascinating, sympathetic, even heroic figure at the center of an extraordinary group of scientists and philosophers known as the Oxford circle. Chronicled here in vivid detail are their groundbreaking revelations and the often gory experiments that first enshrined the brain as the physical seat of intelligence -- and the seat of the human soul. Soul Made Flesh conveys a contagious appreciation for the brain, its structure, and its many marvelous functions, and the implications for human identity, mind, and morality.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Simon + Schuster LLC
• Seitenzahl: 384
• Erscheinungstermin: 26. August 2014
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781476799759
• Artikelnr.: 41368624

Autorenporträt

Carl Zimmer, author of At the Water's Edge, is a frequent contributor to Discover, National Geographic, Natural History, Nature, and Science. He is a winner of the Everett Clark Award for science journalism and the American Institute of Biological Sciences Media Award. A John S. Guggenheim Fellow, he has also received the Pan-American Health Organization Award for Excellence in International Health Reporting and the American Institute of Biological Sciences Media Award. His previous books include Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, Parasite Rex, and At the Water's Edge. He lives in Guilford, Connecticut.

Inhaltsangabe

Table of Contents
Introduction: A Bowl of Curds
Chapter One: Hearts and Minds, Livers and Stomachs
Greeks explore the soul, puzzle over the brain, and embrace the heart
Christians build a soul from ancient parts
Natural philosophy is born and anatomy becomes a sacred art
Vesalius discovers monkeys where men once stood
The Greeks are transformed, the soul questioned
Chapter Two: World Without Soul
Anatomy of the cosmos
Galileo's new sky
Marin Mersenne makes the world a machine
Pierre Gassendi sanctifies the atom
Descartes's anatomy of clear ideas
The human body as earthen machine
The soul climbs into its cockpit
An arrest
The perfect argument
The ice queen makes Descartes an offer
The captive leaves its prison
Chapter Three: Make Motion Cease
Thomas Willis with the beasts of the field
Protestants and Puritans
The divine right of kings and the complaints of Parliament
God and Aristotle at Oxford
Servant and alchemist
Mystical medicine comes to England
Chapter Four: The Broken Heart of the Republic
Charles I stumbles toward war
Fever swings its scythe
Portrait of a physician as a young man
Willis fights for his king
Oxford dark and nasty
William Harvey under siege
Harvey at the school of Aristotle
Harvey finds the soul in the blood and says little about the brain
Harvey discovers the circle of blood
Oliver Cromwell tightens the noose
Surrender to madness
Chapter Five: Pisse-Prophets Among the Puritans
Thomas Willis returns
Medicine in the marketplace
Ferments dissolve the four humors
The Puritans demand an oath
The Oxford Experimental Philosophy Club
William Petty: From Thomas Hobbes's mouth to Thomas Willis's ear
Charles becomes a martyr to the people
England the republic
The madness of defeat
The Miraculous Case of Anne Greene, or A Clock Reset William Petty
measures the soul of a nation
Willis hosts an illegal church
Chapter Six: The Circle of Willis
William Harvey comes out of retirement
Thomas Willis searches for the agents of fever
The Experimental Philosophy Club fights for its life and for
respectability
Hobbes as politician and neurologist
Robert Boyle gives shape to the New Science
Chapter Seven: Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Air
Willis stirs up a ferment of atoms
A crude dream of the brain
Cromwell uprooted
Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke pump away the soul
Christopher Wren, surgeon and injector
The return of the king
Chapter Eight: A Curious Quilted Ball
The Church of England meets its less than divine leader
Thomas Willis becomes hero of a nation
"I addicted myself to the opening of heads"
Willis discovers a doctrine of the nerves
The Royal Society
Chapter Nine: Convulsions
The lady with a migraine
Convulsions in the year of plague and fire
Chapter Ten: The Science of Brutes
From Oxford to London
Richard Lower transfuses blood into a madman
Lower and Hooke discover Willis's mistake in the lungs of dogs
Willis constructs a doctrine of the soul
Madness explained
Thomas Willis avoids Hobbes's fate
Chapter Eleven: The Neurologist Vanishes
A final book by Thomas Willis and a ridiculously sumptuous funeral
How John Locke buried his teacher
Robert Boyle sees the future before he dies and is not consoled
Chapter Twelve: The Soul's Microscope
A long journey forward
The soul as information
Lightning in a nerve
The wisdom of the reflex
Neurologists read the brain
MRI and the module
The networked mind
The able animal soul
Emotion with reason, not versus
Steel syrup and Prozac
The self anatomized
The social brain
Morals and neurons
Lady Conway and Dr. Willis meet again
Dramatis Personae
Notes
References
Acknowledgments
Index