History of neuroscience

This mechanical artificial hand, with fingers that could be moved individually by means of tiny internal cogs and levers, was designed and made almost 500 years ago by Ambroise Pare. Pare (1517-1590) began working as a battefield surgeon in 1536. When treating gunshot wounds on the battlefield, he often amputated limbs. Pare treated many amputees during his career. He developed safe and effective methods for amputation, and closely followed the progress of all his patients. He therefore recorded many first-hand accounts of phantom limb syndrome, and, in 1551, provided the first medical…

The ancient theory of 'animal spirits' (pneuma psychikon in Greek; spiritus animalis in Latin) was first proposed by Alexandrian physicians in the third century BCE. Animal spirits were thought to be weightless, invisible entities that flowed through the hollow nerves to mediate the functioning of the body. The animal spirits theory was related to the notion of the four humours (blood, phlegm, and yellow and black bile), and was popularised by the Roman physician Galen (c. 129 -216) in the second century AD. Because of Galen, animal spirits dominated thinking about the nervous system for 1,…

This print shows the "brain of someone described as an idiot". Published in the Journal of Mental Science, the illustration is by George Edward Shuttleworth, who was Superintendent of the Royal Albert Asylum in Lancaster, U. K., between the years 1870-1893. Shuttleworth's drawing comes from a huge database of images released recently by the Wellcome Trust Library under a Creative Commons Licence. The database contains old and new images depicting 2,000 years of medical history and human culture. (via Boing Boing)

PHINEAS GAGE (1823-1860) is one of the earliest documented cases of severe brain injury. Gage is the index case of an individual who suffered major personality changes after brain trauma. As such, he is a legend in the annals of neurology, which is largely based on the study of brain-damaged patients. Gage was foreman of a crew of railroad construction workers who were excavating rocks to make way for the railroad track. This involved drilling holes deep into the rock and filling them with dynamite. A fuse was then inserted, and the entrance to the hole plugged with sand, so that the force…

For most of the nineteenth century, there was an on-going debate among researchers about the organization of the nervous system. One group of researchers, the so-called reticularists, believed that the nervous system consisted of a large network of tissue, or reticulum, formed by the fused processes of nerve cells. The other group, the neuronists, argued that the nervous system consisted of distinct elements, or cells. Both groups used the same methods to study nerve cells, but came to different conclusions about the fine structure of the nervous system, which could not yet be seen in…