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| Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain--and How it Changed the World | 
 enlarge | Author: Carl Zimmer
Publisher: Free Press
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (19 reviews)
Sales Rank: 425545
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.1
ISBN: 0743272056
Dewey Decimal Number: 612.81
EAN: 9780743272056
ASIN: 0743272056
Publication Date: May 24, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
In this unprecedented history of a scientific revolution, award-winning author and journalist Carl Zimmer tells the definitive story of the dawn of the age of the brain and modern consciousness. Told here for the first time, the dramatic tale of how the secrets of the brain were discovered in seventeenth-century England unfolds against a turbulent backdrop of civil war, the Great Fire of London, and plague. At the beginning of that chaotic century, no one knew how the brain worked or even what it looked like intact. But by the century's close, even the most common conceptions and dominant philosophies had been completely overturned, supplanted by a radical new vision of man, God, and the universe.Presiding over the rise of this new scientific paradigm was the founder of modern neurology, Thomas Willis, a fascinating, sympathetic, even heroic figure at the center of an extraordinary group of scientists and philosophers known as the Oxford circle. Chronicled here in vivid detail are their groundbreaking revelations and the often gory experiments that first enshrined the brain as the physical seat of intelligence -- and the seat of the human soul. Soul Made Flesh conveys a contagious appreciation for the brain, its structure, and its many marvelous functions, and the implications for human identity, mind, and morality.
Amazon.com Review
In Soul Made Flesh, Carl Zimmer reveals the strange and complicated history of the discovery of the human brain. Amid the turmoil of 17th century England, with religious leaders and monarchs battling for control of the country, an elite group of thinkers used every scientific means at their disposal to figure out that the unassuming putty in our heads was crucial to human health and wisdom. Primary among these Oxford scholars was Thomas Willis, whom the Royal Society affectionately called "our chymist." Soul Made Flesh is as much a biography of Willis and the men who shaped him as it is a medical history. Zimmer admirably sets the stage for what would become a metaphysical revolution and spark arguments that continue to this day about what the mind is and where, if anywhere, the human soul resides: Thomas Willis... isolated the soul from stars and demons and made the chemical workings of the brain the key to sanity and happiness. Just as important, he helped make the brain a familiar thing. Zimmer applies the same dedicated research and quietly sparkling style to this book as he did to Parasite Rex and At the Water's Edge, distilling reams of historical and scientific information into a concise yet comprehensive narrative. The book's chapters are accompanied by drawings by Willis' contemporary Christopher Wren, whose architectural sensibilities made the brain's structure beautiful to behold. --Therese Littleton
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| Customer Reviews: Read 14 more reviews...
 Full of tangential, irrelevant history January 4, 2009
I bought this book in the hope that it would elucidate an historic moment in the evolution of science: when we learned that thought, emotion and perception were not activities of the incorporeal soul, but actions of the brain. This was a monumental realization, and it surely must have been not only fascinating, but also staggering in its implications for the world view of society which always looked at such things in a theistic way. This magnificence is lost in this book.
Thomas Willis was the person who made the momentous discovery of the brain and its function. One would expect such a book to explain European society's beliefs about the mental and emotional aspects of life, and how they influenced people's assumptions about human nature. It would then make sense to explain how Willis went about his research, what he discovered, how these discoveries affected him and his colleagues, and, finally, how they affected society. This doesn't happen. The author, rather, tells stories about the political goings-on at the time of Willis' life, but ignores the core of the matter. He only gives small snippets of Willis' research and discoveries, each snippet separated from the next by seemingly interminable, irrelevant filler. One gets the feeling that the author didn't do enough hard research, and so he needed to add filler to thicken the book. I found it infuriating to wade through so many irrelevancies, and when he finally got to the meat of the book, I was so discouraged that didn't enjoy it.
Great, though a little on the heavier side for the novice studier. December 9, 2008
This one is a little bit heavier of a read, but it's really fascinating. I think it's a little easier for me to read because it really relates to the history and philosophy courses I've taken in college, and to the history programs I've watched on A&E. My only complaint is that the author jumps around a lot from people to people, rather than going in chronological order. Therefor, as he progresses from person to person, it bounces from, say, the 18th century to the 16th, to the 19th, and back to the 16th. To me that makes it harder to follow since I like things in a progressive order when about a single subject like this.
However, I still recommend this to anyone who is curious about the birth of neurology and the human fascination with the 'soul' throughout history, and the church's influence on such.
I would not recommend this to anyone with weak reading skills.
How we came to know the brain as the seat of thought November 7, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is the story of how we came to understand that life and thought are not beyond a naturalistic, material explanation. It centers on one seventeenth Englishman, Thomas Willis, around whom Zimmer assembles in Oxford a cast of early natural philosophers.
Zimmer begins in Greece with Aristotle and continues in Rome with Galen who while they did look at the human body, were too quick to come up with pet theories about biles and humors and present them as facts. For centuries their words ruled science.
Then comes Descartes with his mechanical view of the world, presenting a soul that ruled over the body. Descartes questioned the ancients and corrected some of their grosser factual mistakes but he made a few of his own and repeated their methodological error: he did not question his own pet theories enough.
The heroes of Zimmer's book are surgeons. Then, surgeons were simple menial workers with a gift for butchery and enough skill to allow their patients to survive their operations. The surgeons eventually gathered the courage to stand up to scholarly doctors and point out that Galen's descriptions were wrong. When challenged, they opened up cadavers and counterchallenged the doctors to show them Galen's fictional body systems.
The central hero is Thomas Willis, a country squire turned renowned doctor during the turbulent times of Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, and Charles II. He had the luck to live near Oxford and displayed a keen interest in anatomy. Willis studied the brain and the nervous system with unprecedented precision. He was one of the founders of the Royal Society, meeting with the likes of Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren. Together, these men studied anatomy so that observations overruled theory whenever one did not agree with the other.
Willis's observations, descriptions, and case studies make him the first neurologist. Living in times of religious extremes, this devout man never swore off the primacy of a supernatural soul, but he saw the brain as a tool of the soul and his studies of this organ mechanized our model and led to today's materialistic explanations of consciousness.
Vincent Poirier, Tokyo
Reasonably Good; 3.5 April 30, 2006
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is a fairly good popular account of the scientific revolution in 17th century England with an emphasis on the pioneering neuroanatomical research and speculation of the physician Thomas Willis. Written clearly by an experienced science journalist, this book is largely a popularization of the fairly extensive secondary literature on 17th century science and medicine. This is a very interesting period in European history and the narrative features an impressive list of contributors, including not only Willis but Boyle, Locke, Hooke, and several other important figures. Zimmer does a good job of showing the evolution of thinking about the mind from exclusively metaphysical concepts to thinking about brain and mind functions in a more materialistic manner. The concentration on the very interesting and impressive Willis is the best feature on the book. Zimmer does less well on some other aspects. His account of the development of mechanistic thought is relatively superficial, as is his treatment of theological issues. The subtitle of the book "-and How it Changed the World" is somewhat inappropriate. As Zimmer himself explains, Willis' work was relatively neglected after his death. A final and striking omission is the lack of discussion of Newton. In one sense, this is understandable as Newton tends to eclipse his contemporaries but Newton's achievements became the primary vehicle for convincing the world of the power and utility of science and the mechanistic approach.
 What Willis was talking about October 22, 2005
12 out of 16 found this review helpful
For about a thousand years, the smartest people of every European generation tried to understand the world around them by reading texts based on scriptures and the works of ancient philosophers. At the end of the thousand years, the living conditions of the average person were the same as they were at the beginning of the thousand years. Life expectancy was around 40, and most people lived in fear of disease and starvation.
It's fascinating to read in "Soul Made Flesh" how completely the mind of the Middle Ages was infused with mysticism. People who were otherwise brilliant found it impossible to believe that any aspect of nature could operate in a purely mechanistic fashion, without spirit or purpose. In fact it was considered blasphemous to think otherwise. Human progress since the beginning of the Enlightenment is simply the adoption and development of a mechanistic understanding of the world, sometimes called "materialist" philosophy.
Zimmer's book provides a thoroughly enjoyable look at the transition between the mystical and mechanistic worldviews. Starting in the early 17th century, the coherent (and incorrect) set of doctrines sanctioned by church and state began to crumble: The Earth was found not to be the center of the universe, but one of several planets orbiting the sun. Matter was made not of Aristotle's four elements, but of atoms. Blood circulated through the body, rather than being absorbed by it. And crucially, the source of reason and consciousness was not a substanceless soul, but a gelatinous lump of biological tissue.
Interestingly, most of the men involved in these discoveries remained deeply religious, even though their findings contradicted what the church had been telling people for the previous 50 generations. And the ones that were physicans continued to rely on mysticism and alchemy to treat their patients. It would be centuries before people were able to talk candidly about a purely mechanistic account of the universe and its inhabitants. And we are only now beginning to enjoy the benefits -- life expectancy has doubled and formerly deadly diseases have been eradicated.
Remarkably, many people in the US have recently been calling for a return to the 17th century way of thinking. The problem is that mysticism didn't work out so well the first time, and now the stakes are much higher.
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