Making the Nervous System

Abstract

The nervous system sprawls across the eighteenth-century landscape, its fibres innervating the science and society of the period. It was within the nervous system after all that Lockean epistemology met physiology: to have 'feeling' meant not only to have superior perceptions but also refined and delicate nerves. It was by deliberate analogy with sympathy in the nervous system that Adam Smith understood social sympathy to act: both concepts underwrote the solidarity of a lowland Scottish elite. Rather later, it was by locating the mental faculties of traditional philosophy within the brain substance that the phrenologists sought to naturalize the interests of a new outsider group. At the end of the century the whole metaphor of nervous organization, in the philosophies of Lamarck and Cuvier, distinguished man from beast and European from savage. Historians who work on all these subjects will, at some point, have to take seriously the research in these two books, whose original publication dates differ by eightythree years. In one way Renato Mazzolini's The Iris in Eighteenth-Century Physiology is a superbly detailed footnote to Max Neuburger's monumental The Historical Development of Experimental Brain and Spinal Cord Physiology before Flourens. Neuburger was an Austrian Jew, born in 1868. He qualified in medicine in Vienna. A typical mid-European polymath, he taught the history of medicine in his native city for modest reward until 1938. In 1939 he fled Vienna and arrived in London, with two suitcases and five shillings. He returned to Vienna in 1952 and died there three years later. Neuburger's prolific historical work was characterized by two features. He had a supremely detailed acquaintance with a vast number of primary sources and he attempted to display the relations of medicine and philosophy. Such a sympathy with the past, of course, was directed by Neuburger's desire to celebrate the heroic labours of the forerunners of modern experimental science. Progressivist, but never patronizing, Neuburger was extraordinarily sensitive to the intricate technical details of early experimentation. The present work first appeared in 1897, when Neuburger was twenty-eight years old. It has long been regarded as a classic text. Written without the benefit of a rich secondary literature, it surveys theories of nervous function and experiments on the nervous system throughout Europe from Thomas Willis up to, but not including, Flourens. This excellent translation by Edwin