"The brain contains ten thousand cells," wrote the poet Matthew Prior in 1718, "in each some active fancy dwells." In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, just as scientists began to better understand the workings of the nerves, the nervous system became the site for a series of elaborate fantasies. The pineal gland is transformed into a throne for the sovereign soul. Animal spirits march the nerves like parading soldiers. An internal archivist searches through cerebral impressions to locate certain memories. An anatomist discovers that the brain of a fashionable man is stuffed full of beautiful clothes and billet-doux. A hypochondriac worries that his own brain will be disassembled like a watch. A sentimentalist sees the entire world as a giant nervous system comprising sympathetic spectators. Nervous Fictions is the first account of the Enlightenment origins of neuroscience and the "active fancies" it generated. By surveying the work of scientists (Willis, Newton, Cheyne), philosophers (Descartes, Cavendish, Locke), satirists (Swift, Pope), and novelists (Haywood, Fielding, Sterne), Keiser shows how attempts to understand the brain’s relationship to the mind produced in turn new literary forms. Early brain anatomists turned to tropes to explicate psyche and cerebrum, just as poets and novelists found themselves exploring new kinds of mental and physical interiority. In this respect, literary language became a tool to aid scientific investigation, while science spurred literary invention.
...More
Book
Lori A. Schmied;
(2019)
The Advance of Neuroscience: Twelve Topics from the Victorian Era to Today
(/isis/citation/CBB066337856/)
Article
Bassiri, Nima;
(2013)
The Brain and the Unconscious Soul in Eighteenth-Century Nervous Physiology: Robert Whytt's “Sensorium Commune”
(/isis/citation/CBB001212822/)
Thesis
Habinek, Lianne;
(2009)
“Such Wondrous Science”: Brain and Metaphor in Early Modern English Literature
(/isis/citation/CBB001562859/)
Chapter
Matteo Revolti;
(2015)
Dallo stomaco al cervello: l’ipocondria in Bernard Mandeville
(/isis/citation/CBB347995325/)
Book
Charles T. Wolfe;
Céline Cherici;
Jean-Claude Dupont;
(2018)
Physique de l'esprit. Empirisme, médecine et cerveau (XVIIe-XIXe siècles)
(/isis/citation/CBB630081903/)
Thesis
Bassiri, Nima Rad;
(2010)
Dislocations of the Brain: Subjectivity and Cerebral Topology from Descartes to Nineteenth-Century Neuroscience
(/isis/citation/CBB001567167/)
Article
Lichterman, Boleslav L.;
(2010)
The Moscow Colloquium on Electroencephalography of Higher Nervous Activity and Its Impact on International Brain Research
(/isis/citation/CBB001034923/)
Article
Wübben, Yvonne;
Vöhringer, Margarete;
(2009)
Reflexe in Hirnforschung, Kunst und Technik. Einleitende Bemerkungen
(/isis/citation/CBB000932088/)
Article
Fuller, Steve;
(2014)
Neuroscience, Neurohistory, and the History of Science: A Tale of Two Brain Images
(/isis/citation/CBB001321206/)
Chapter
Charles T. Wolfe;
(2016)
Tres medici, duo athei? The Physician as Atheist and the Medicalization of the Soul
(/isis/citation/CBB544167591/)
Article
Eling, Paul;
Hofman, Michel A.;
(2014)
The Central Institute for Brain Research in Amsterdam and Its Directors
(/isis/citation/CBB001420777/)
Book
Cornelius Borck;
(2018)
Brainwaves: A Cultural History of Electroencephalography
(/isis/citation/CBB788699072/)
Book
Carmela Morabito;
(2020)
Il motore della mente. Il movimento nella storia delle scienze cognitive
(/isis/citation/CBB028669021/)
Book
Juan Carlos González Espitia;
(2019)
Sifilografía: A History of the Writerly Pox in the Eighteenth-Century Hispanic World
(/isis/citation/CBB593267991/)
Article
Girten, Kristin M.;
(2013)
Mingling with Matter: Tactile Microscopy and the Philosophic Mind in Brobdingnag and Beyond
(/isis/citation/CBB001201896/)
Book
Lynn Festa;
(2021)
Fiction Without Humanity: Person, Animal, Thing in Early Enlightenment Literature and Culture
(/isis/citation/CBB396379434/)
Article
Lazar, J. Wayne;
(2015)
A Contextual Analysis of Nervous Force in Medico-Scientific and Literary Writings in English of the Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Centuries
(/isis/citation/CBB001551881/)
Book
Smith, Christopher Upham Murray;
Whitaker, Harry;
(2014)
Brain, Mind and Consciousness in the History of Neuroscience
(/isis/citation/CBB001214135/)
Article
Casper, Stephen T.;
(2014)
History and Neurosciece: An Interactive Legacy
(/isis/citation/CBB001321208/)
Article
Beaulieu, Anne;
(2004)
From Brainbank to Database: The Informational Turn in the Study of the Brain
(/isis/citation/CBB000501614/)
Be the first to comment!