Minds Behind the Brain: A History of the Pioneers and Their Discoveries

  • Stanley Finger
Oxford University Press: 2000. 384 pp.$35, £24.99
Dressed for the job: nineteenth-century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot at work.

Six years ago, Stanley Finger published his monumental Origins of Neuroscience (Oxford University Press), nearly two kilograms of double-column format, profusely illustrated and fully referenced, with a cast of some 900 involved in events extending over more than four millennia. Inevitably, with such a wide scope, much had to be omitted or condensed. Even the principal characters held the stage for too short a time to become fully rounded. The book had an encyclopaedic quality, and has, I suspect, been much more often dipped into repeatedly than read from cover to cover — hence the need for another and different book on the same general topic.

The immediate stimulus for Minds Behind the Brain, Finger tells us, came from the students who attended his lectures at Washington University, St Louis, Missouri. They wanted to know more about the brain pioneers “as real people”; they wanted to see more fully what led to their discoveries, and to understand “the ramifications of their insights … knowing the year of a landmark and a ‘beard’ was not enough”. And Finger himself wanted space to look at the scientific literature in a social context. To achieve these aims he has had to prune his cast list drastically. He started, he tells us, by choosing a dozen highly influential players; but this figure waxed and waned, settling at 19, with a sizeable supporting cast who provide the background and illustrate the consequences of the achievements of the principal characters.

And the recipe works. Finger's erudition is remarkable. Even the characters we thought we knew about appear in a new light. René Descartes' conviction that animals lack consciousness seems even more remarkable when we learn not only that he had a pet dog, but also that he was extremely fond of it. We know about Galen's successes, so it is refreshing to hear of one of his failures — an attempt to increase the efficiency of leeches, by clipping their tails so that they could draw more blood, had to be abandoned when a sharp rise in leech mortality led to an increase in price. Those of us who have been raised on Michael Foster's History of Physiology have to revise (favourably) our views of both the character and achievements of the seventeenth-century anatomist and physician Thomas Willis. We know about Leyden jars, and we know that the Abbé Nollet, in eighteenth-century Paris, did party tricks with static electricity; but we may be surprised to learn that it was Nollet who coined the phrase ‘Leyden jar’, and that he once used one to make a 900-foot line of Carthusian monks jump en masse. Conversely, we might be astonished to discover that Franz-Joseph Gall, the founder of phrenology, never used the word phrenology.

But my favourite improbable story is of the physiologist Charles Sherrington as an immunologist. He and a colleague had been inoculating horses with small doses of diphtheria toxin in the hope that the animals would make a useful antitoxin. Hearing one night that his eight-year-old nephew had contracted diphtheria, he dashed down to Sussex with a flask of antiserum from one of the horses and, on being told by the family physician that the boy was expected to die within the next few hours, administered the antiserum. To the surprise of the physician, and to Sherrington's delight, the boy recovered within a day.

Even historical characters whom most of us would never have associated with the history of neuroscience are caught in Finger's penetrating spotlight. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, wrote a popular book recommending electrical treatment for disorders of the nervous system. Emanuel Swedenborg, after he had retired from being director of Swedish mines and before he experienced the visions that led to his reinterpretation of Christianity, was fascinated by the idea that different functions of the body were controlled by different areas of the cerebral cortex. Basing his arguments mainly on the observations of others, he reached original and important conclusions which, unfortunately, did not become widely known. In the next century, both Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley were fascinated by ‘galvanism’; and Shelley inadvertently electrocuted the family cat while trying to use electricity to treat his sister's skin disorder.

Inevitably, the draconian slimming down of the cast means that the choice of those who are left must sometimes appear arbitrary. In discussing localization of function in the cerebral cortex, Finger mentions Swedenborg, Gall, Paul Broca, Carl Wernicke, James Ferrier and Eduard Hitzig, but says nothing about Salomon Henschen, Louis Verrey, Jules Déjerine or Harvey Cushing; Wilder Penfield is mentioned only very briefly. The discovery of chemical transmission at synapses is described at length, but the long history of the discovery of the nature of transmission along nerve fibres is lightly skimmed over. These are not serious criticisms. The book is designed as a series of fascinating excursions into the past, not an all-inclusive grand tour. Each of us may miss favourite characters and topics; but we are rewarded by the extra time that Finger can devote to the people and topics he chooses to write about.