Minds behind the Brain
A History of the Pioneers and Their Discoveries
Stanley Finger
Price: £14.99 (paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-518182-1
Publication date: 3 March 2005
384 pages, 104 halftones, 2 line illus., 7 x 10 mm
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| Reviews |
| - 'This book is entertaining and informative with plenty of personal detail and insights into the working practices and conditions of some of the major contributors to what we now call neuroscience.' - Advances in Clinical Neuroscience & Rehabilitation
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| Description | | - A leading science historian looks at the pioneers who revolutionized our understanding of the human brain
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Attractively illustrated with over a hundred halftones and drawings, this volume presents a series of vibrant profiles that trace the evolution of our knowledge about the brain.
Beginning almost 5000 years ago, with the ancient Egyptian study of "the marrow of the skull," Stanley Finger takes us on a fascinating journey from the classical world of Hippocrates, to the time of Descartes and
the era of Broca and Ramon y Cajal, to modern researchers such as Sperry. Here is a truly remarkable cast of characters. We meet Galen, a man of titanic ego and abrasive disposition, whose teachings dominated medicine for a thousand years; Vesalius, a contemporary of Copernicus, who pushed our understanding of human anatomy to new heights; Otto Loewi, pioneer in neurotransmitters, who gave the
Nazis his Nobel prize money and fled Austria for England; and Rita Levi-Montalcini, discoverer of nerve growth factor, who in war-torn Italy was forced to do her research in her bedroom. For each individual, Finger examines the philosophy, the tools, the books, and the ideas that brought new insights. Finger also looks at broader topics--how dependent are researchers on the work of others? What
makes the time ripe for discovery? And what role does chance or serendipity play? And he includes many fascinating background figures as well, from Leonardo da Vinci and Emanuel Swedenborg to Karl August Weinhold, who claimed to have reanimated a dead cat by filling its skull with silver and zinc, and Mary Shelley, who's Frankenstein
was inspired by such experiments.
Wide ranging in
scope, imbued with an infectious spirit of adventure, here are vivid portraits of giants in the field of neuroscience - remarkable individuals who found new ways to think about the machinery of the mind.
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| Contents |
Preface
1.
Introduction: A Voyage Across Time
2.
An Ancient Egyptian Physician: The Dawn of Neurology
3.
Hippocrates: The Brain as the Organ of the Mind
4.
Galen: The Birth of Experimentation
5.
Andreas Vesalius: The New "Human" Neuroanatomy
6.
Rene Descartes: The Mind-Body Problem
7.
Thomas Willis: The Functional Organization of the Brain
8.
Luigi Galvani: Electricity and the Nerves
9.
Franz Joseph Gall: The Cerebral Organs of Mind
10.
Paul Broca: Cortical Localization and Cerebral Dominance
11.
David Ferrier and Edward Hitzig: The Experimentalists Map the Cerebral Cortex
12.
Jean-Martin Charcot: Clinical Neurology Comes of Age
13.
Santiago Ramon Y Cajal: From Nerve Nets to Neuron Doctrine
14.
Charles Scott Sherrington: The Integrated Nervous System
15.
Edgar D. Adrian: Coding the Nervous System
16.
Otto Loewi and Henry Dale: The Discovery of Neurotransmitters
17.
Roger W. Sperry and Rita Levi-Montalcini: From Neural Growth to "Split Brains"
18.
Pioneers and Discoveries in the Brain Sciences
Notes
Index
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| Authors, editors,
and contributors |
Stanley Finger, Professor, Department of Psychology, Washington University
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