Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain—and How It Changed the World

Ostensibly about Thomas Willis, a 17th century physician and anatomist, and his discovery of the the brain as the seat of intelligence and the 'command center' of the rest of the body, the book actually documents what is essentially the transition from 'natural philosophy' to 'science'. It centers on Oxford in the mid 17th century and the extraordinary men who working there, men who were willing to discard centuries of accepted wisdom about the natural world, including medicine, in favor of doing actual experiments to discover how things, including the human body, actually worked. Unlike Willis, many of these men did not limit themselves to medicine, and the list of them reads like a who's who of 17th C science, philosophy, and of all show more things, architecture! The cast, besides Willis, includes: Descartes, Hobbes, Boyle, Vesalius, Paracelsus, Harvey, Hooke, Locke, Wallis, Ward, Wilkins, Wren, Sydenham, and many others.

The ferment of ideas in this period is extraordinary and Zimmer does an excellent job in summarizing them and tying them together, showing how discoveries in one 'area', like chemistry, affected other in other 'areas', like medicine (though these men certainly had not conceived of our modern 'areas' of science like chemistry and physics), and how these discoveries both were influenced by, and influenced in turn, the way we view the world around us.

Zimmer's centerpiece is Willis' investigations into the brain and nerves, and he argues that his discoveries essentially presaged much of modern neurology, limited mostly by Willis' lack of knowledge of electricity. He further argues that these discoveries had a profound effect on how we viewed sickness and health, and how we understand 'the soul'.

I want to spend a second taking issue with some comments by another reviewer: First, because Willis is not generally as well known as some of the other scientists described here does not mean his importance has been overstated. Zimmer's arguments that his discoveries changed how we look at the body and world are compelling, even if most of the world has forgotten where the discoveries originated. Second, I don't think that people feel relief just because they find out that mental illness is treatable; whether treatable or not, patients are often relieved to find out that their illness has a rational basis, that we can put a label on it, and describe why it is happening. It relieves them to know that they are not just 'crazy'. Third, to paraphrase Mozart in 'Amadeus', the book is precisely as long as it needs to be to get Zimmer's points across. It does not ramble, it is not repetitious, and is just plain interesting from beginning to end.

For all students of science and history, this is a wonderful book and is well worth your time. show less

I hadn't even thought this was a topic worth reading about, but a friend recommended this book and I had a peek. I was drawn in immediately and amazed at the history I didn't know and was never taught! What's interesting is that it takes about 120 pages to finally get to the gist of the actual subject of the book, but those 120 pages are filled with wonderful detail of English history, war, medicine, religion, superstition and science. The story of the protagonist is then told over another 120 or so pages, before giving way to a beautiful educational history-filled coda. What an enlightening book. What an experience!

It's difficult to think, but for centuries the heart was considered as the ruler of the body - not the brain. When medicine was based all around a set of four humours those unbalance were supposedly the source of all diseases, the brain was seen as just a nest for 'pumps', various ventricules just there to distribute 'vital fluids'. Thomas Willis, a 17th century English doctor and scientist, will radically change all that.

Willis was the first to describe some sort of 'animal spirit' travelling through the brain and being responsible for our emotions and various skills (eg. perception...), what we would describe now as the electrical signals travelling through neurons to neurons. Willis was the first to understand that different parts of show more the brain had different functions. Willis was the first to note that the human brain bears striking similarities with the brains of other animals - which will later make sense in the light of evolutionary biology. Willis had dissected the human body with such careful precision that, his anatomy of the brain and nerves not only led him to coin the word 'neurology' (a new whole science) but, also, discover a crucial set of arteries supplying the brain with blood (a set of arteries named after him -'the circle of Willis'). Willis completely blew away the previous paradigm whereas the heart was the ruler of the body (illnesses the product of an unbalance in four humours) to demonstrate instead that most diseases could be linked to abnormalities in the brain. The shift was massive. As Carl Zimmer asserts:

'Thomas Willis ushered in the Neurocentric Age... His mixture of anatomy, experiment, and medical observation has set the agenda of neuroscience into the twenty-first century.'

Delving into the life of such a bold and curious scientist, whose insights would be radical for our understanding of ourselves, is fascinating enough. Carl Zimmer, on that score, does an amazing job in retracing the biography of this original doctor. Even more remarkable, though, is the context into which Thomas Willis worked and evolved.

England, back then, was indeed at the throat of a Civil War that saw Royalists fighting Parliamentarians, and Christians battling each other (the Church of England against the Puritans against the Quakers). Willis' time was the time of a king being put to death, the two Cromwell, and of the Restoration. Chaotic? Surely. And for a Royalist like him, well, not that great! And yet... Willis was working in Oxford, the University from where he had graduated, and Oxford was then a strange peaceful haven in the surrounding chaos:

'A poor, orphan soldier on the losing side of a civil war, he [Thomas Willis] would struggle for a decade to survive in the turmoil between Puritans and conspiring royalists, in a country still facing years of war and the execution of a king. For Willis and many like him these years would feel like a national insanity.
Yet the political chaos also turned Oxford intellectually into a fizzing vial of spirits, a place where alchemists jostled with Aristotelians, where telescopes were trained at the sky and microscopes at the legs of fleas.'

And Carl Zimmer describes the place superbly: John Wilkins was there, Robert Boyle was there, William Petty was there, Christopher Wren was there, Robert Hooke was there... You get it! That bizarre melting-pot to such brilliant minds of all sorts would be the ferment of the Royal Society, created in 1662 and of which Willis was a founding member.

No matter how radical their ideas, though, these brilliant minds were still pretty much clinging to ancient beliefs and paradigms, Willis included. This is where the author manages to show us a man in all its contradictions: a scientist firmly grounded in experiments, who, yet, also dabbled into mysticism, alchemy, and, as a doctor, used to prescribe weird remedies reminiscent of snake oils! The 17th century might have been exciting and ground-breaking time for science (eg. besides his work on the brain, Willis will also pick up on William Harvey's discovery to experiment with blood transfusion...). It was also the age of Alchemy and superstitions, and, the mix of both makes for a bizarre era to plunge into.

A deep and engaging book, 'Soul Made Flesh' goes way beyond Willis, the Civil War and its impact, and, the burgeoning Royal Society. It depicts how a fascinating bunch of intellectuals of all sort, gathered in Oxford, would radically change the face of science besides greatly impact on modern medicine. Willis was more than a virtuosi, he was the first neuroscientist. Carl Zimmer, surely, does a great job in retelling it all; but be warned: it's so wide-encompassing and detailed, it's at times quite difficult to follow! So many names, so many intricacies, so many bubbling and contradictory ideas! Nevertheless, here's a biography to discover. show less

Subtitle: The Discovery of the Brain and How It Changed the World
The first two chapters are a quick but readable history of the whereabouts of the embodied mind as imagined by the ancient Greeks, Aristotle, Aquinas, and other philosophers. Until the 1600's, most doctors thought the ventricles were air filled and the source of spirits animating the muscles, while the rest of the brain matter was "a useless bowl of curds". This opinion was partly due to the the lack of study of human brains, and later, to the autopsy technique that sliced off the skull and brain in sections, without any perservatives. The body of the book is the history of Thomas Willis, and the Oxford Circle, set in the history of King Charles I and the Puritan show more revolution that followed. William Harvey was a bit older when Willis earned his medical degree, and began to do experimental studies on the brain, but he was revered in the Oxford Circle for his discovery of the circulation of the blood. He also, incidentally, discovered that soaking an organ in alcohol would preserve it for later study. Willis took advantage of this to remove the brain whole, and produce his detailed anatomy, including the circle of blood vessels at the base of the brain. He demonstrated that dye would flow from one carotid to fill the whole brain. His anatomical and experimental prowess, however, did not make him any better at diagnosis and treatment. He was a "pisse-prophet", looking at urine samples for diagnosis, and prescribed bloodletting, and other Galenic remedies, without much success. Nonetheless, he became famous and rich, and served for a time as the court physician to Charles II. This book was rich in detail, and well written, serving as a biography of Willis, an intellectual history of the Oxford circle, and a survey of the late 1600's in Britain. show less

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 show more 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. show less

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 show more 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. show less

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 show more 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. show less