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  • The Brain Takes Shape: An Early History
  • Lynda Payne
Robert L. Martensen. The Brain Takes Shape: An Early History. New York, Oxford University Press, 2004. xxviii, 247 pp., illus. (No price given).

This is a thoughtful work that seeks to unravel part of the history of the relationship of the mind to the body through focusing on the flurry of dissections, physiological experiments, and debates that took place among medical men in seventeenth-century England. The overarching argument of the book is that due to the work of Thomas Willis in particular, the brain and the nerves came to be seen as the source of emotions and behavior in living beings. Martensen refers to this new theory as the cerebral body and traces how it did, and in some cases did not, replace the older theory of the humoral body that put the spirits and the heart at the center of personhood.

The first two chapters block in the background to this change through considering the work of Vesalius, Paracelsus, Harvey, Bacon, and Van Helmont, and their ideas about the roles of organs, humors, and spirits. The third chapter discusses Descartes and his theories about the mind and his fascination with the pineal gland, while the fourth, fifth, and sixth consider Willis's and his colleagues' rejection of the Cartesian argument that the soul was unitary. Martensen reconstructs their dissections and experiments on the brain in detail and explains why certain patrons, such as the Archbishop of Canterbury, supported them and why others opposed them. He connects Willis's theory of a neurocentric body and multiple souls to his practice of medicine, especially the diagnosis of conditions previously thought to be humoral, such as the convulsive disorders of epilepsy, stupidity, hysteria, scurvy, and asthma. Interweaved through the analysis of the intellectual debates are discussions of the political and religious events that influenced and reflected these medical endeavors, including the English Civil War, the execution of Charles I, the Protectorate, and the Restoration. The seventh chapter considers how the cerebral body transformed older humoral views of the female body and includes an interesting discussion of Anne Conway and her theory of mind-body relations. In the final two chapters, the impact of the new cerebral body on the British Enlightenment and empiricism and on medical philosophy today are considered. Intriguingly, Martensen sees the rise of empiricism in the eighteenth century as coming partly out of a rejection of the neurocentric body.

Essentially, this is a story of how one theory was questioned, defended, and changed in early modern England. Martensen's interdisciplinary approach, however, makes it much more than that. He draws on history, [End Page 221] anthropology, and art history to give us a sense of how the shaping of the brain, rather than the heart, as the primary site of reason and emotion was part of a bigger shift in natural philosophy and theology from "presence" to a desire for "likeness." This was a theory first expounded upon by the art historian Hans Belting in reference to images in the Reformation. Martensen adapts it to explore early modern books on health, disease, and medicinal plants. Presence was a way of coming to knowledge of God and the world through a dependence on spiritual capacities. Likeness replaced this with the epistemic assumption that the natural world could be known and depicted accurately without spiritual mediation. Martensen sees this change beginning with the works of Vesalius, Fuchs, and Copernicus, in which nature could be understood "without reference to metaphysical explanations" (p. 2). The growing desire for likeness led to more precise imagery in anatomical texts, as evidenced by Christopher Wren's exquisite drawings of the brain taken out of the skull for Thomas Willis's Cerebri Anatome of 1664. In sum, this is an excellent book that integrates Martensen's earlier writings on anatomy, theology, and women's bodies with newer materials in challenging and satisfying ways. It deserves a wide readership.

Lynda Payne
Department of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City, Kansas City, Missouri 66110.
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