This is the story of Thomas Willis, who in the seventeenth century was the first to understand (or, at least, to conjecture) the importance of the brain as the body's control center. At the same time, the book follows the tumultuous history of England and other experiments by Willis's circle---for example, the study of respiration and blood circulation.

Willis is an interesting character, for while he based his studies on careful dissections of patients (from all classes) and animals, his medical treatments were mostly the same traditional ones---just justified with new logic. He also had to juggle to stay on the right side of the church, which did not like purely mechanistic explanations for reason. Willis proposed that every person has a sensitive soul and a rational soul, both located in the brain but the latter not being material and surviving the body's death.

Zimmer can be a good writer, and there are several interesting stories here. He overstates Willis's importance, but that is to be expected. He claims that people are pleased to learn of depression's physical causes because that means it is separate from the self. He is trying to argue that Willis's separation of the sensitive and rational souls is deeply embedded in modern culture (because we are relieved that depression is a disease of the sensitive soul), and that this false dichotomy---mental versus physical, the self versus the brain---causes grief and confusion. In fact, the real reason for this relief is that it makes depression something treatable. It is still interesting that Willis, being unwilling to accept purely mystical explanations for rationality, was among the first to confront these separations.

More importantly, the book cries out for editing; it should be half as long. ( )

This book is a fascinating history of what the scientific world looked like in the late 1600's. I don't think I ever realized so completely how many of our breakthroughs in medicine and physiology came from “scientists” who were so deeply steeped and interested in alchemy. A great many of these men (few women are mentioned) were the snake-oil salesmen of their day. And, in truth, many of these ideas of spirits and fires and ferments happening in the blood and other organs of the body and not far from the truth, and no more fanciful or magical then some of our own ideas in developmental biology today. (See The Making of the Fittest by Sean B. Carroll, for example.)

Most interesting to me were the descriptions of experiments these practitioners of the medical arts came up with to understand the human body. How does one, for example, prove that the blood circulates in the body? Or that something in the blood (invisible to everyone then as now) was required for life? Fascinating reading by an excellent science writer. ( )

As science progresses, our views about humanity and our place in the world are constantly in flux. This was just as true in history as if is for us today, colorfully illustrated by Carl Zimmer. Following developments stretching back to ancient views on medicine and the human body, through the enlightenment all the way to modern day MRI machines, pulling back the curtain on the brain and the soul. If you hold to old notions of the soul and feel firm in your facts, you'll see that commonly held conventions have changed radically from old ones as science uncovers further natural truths. A decent read for perspective for neuroscience students and lay people alike. ( )

Another excellent book about England’s “miracle century”, this one focusing on the work of Thomas Willis, a vital part of the Oxford circle who pioneered much of our knowledge of the brain. Turning away from the traditional acceptance of Aristotle’s and Galen’s views of how the human body was assembled and functioned, Willis and the others in the Oxford circle (which later became the core of the Royal Society) dissected humans, dogs, and other animals to find out how things really worked.

Willis is best known today as the source for the “Circle of Willis”, the circle of blood vessels allowing continuous arterial blood flow to the brain. But he, along with Thomas Lower, Christopher Wren, and Robert Hooke made the first real studies of the brain under conditions that allowed them to see the brain’s structure without the damage done by earlier surgical methods (and, of course, the rapid decomposition of the brain under comparatively primitive conditions). In the process, the concept of the soul (or several souls) gradually became localized from the body as a whole, or from assorted organs in the body, to the brain itself.

The seventeenth century was, indeed, a miracle century. The turmoil of the Glorious Revolution, the Restoration, and James’s flight and replacement by William and Mary of Orange allowed a loosening of church oversight that provided the opportunity to question everything. Science came to be in this age, and the discoveries that were made by these men with the tools they had available and devised for themselves are still relevant today. ( )