Minds behind the Brain: A History of the Pioneers and Their Discoveries (review)

Stanley Finger. Minds behind the Brain: A History of the Pioneers and Their Discoveries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. xii + 364 pp. Ill. $35.00.

This is a major contribution to the growing but still meager body of literature on the history of the neurosciences. Because of the literature's insufficiency, there could be an expectation for this book to be more than its author intended, so it is important to judge the book by its preface, not by its cover. Stanley Finger is a prominent neuroscientist and historian of neuroscience who teaches neuroscience history at Washington University. In the course of his teaching he realized that his students "wanted to know more about these pioneers as real people, what led to their discoveries, and the ramifications of their insights" (p. xi); Minds Behind the Brain was therefore written as an adjunct to teaching the history of the basic neurosciences--but it will have a wider appeal.

The book spans recorded history from Imhotep to the mid-twentieth century, through the device of brief biographical sketches. The device works well in this instance because the text makes the frequent and necessary connections among the subjects of the successive chapters. Eighteen individuals are listed in the chapter titles, from Hippocrates to Roger Sperry and Rita Levi-Montalcini; most of the obvious names are included, such as Galen, Vesalius, Willis, Galvani, Gall, Broca, and Ferrier. In a single volume, the inclusion of some people obviously requires the exclusion of others. In his epilogue (chapter 18), Finger nominates von Helmholtz, Hughlings Jackson, Alan Hodgkin, and J. C. Eccles as other pioneers who might have been included.

Judged according to the purposes stated in its preface, Minds Behind the Brain succeeds admirably, though not without a few glitches. The prose is well written, and Finger manages to interweave science and personal stories in a way that is interesting and informative. I found no major inaccuracies, but there are some typos and at least one technical mistake: a stroke should be defined as a blockage in a cerebral vessel; it is not usually a "break" (p. 32). In general, the earlier part of the book has a somewhat Whiggish tone, which is a by-product of the author's effort to put the work of his historical subjects into modern perspective for readers who are not fully initiated into the mysteries of contemporary neuroscience. This tendency reaches a level of palpable annoyance in the chapter on Willis, but it is much less evident thereafter, and it is not really a problem in the later chapters.

Indeed, it is the later chapters that fulfill the most critical need, because we have so little synthetic material about the burgeoning neuroscience of the twentieth century. There is a modest body of secondary literature on the internal history of basic neuroscience up to the time of Cajal and Sherrington in the early twentieth century; Cajal is well served by this literature, but Sherrington is not. For the bulk of the twentieth century, however, there is only a small amount of biographical/autobiographical material and a scattering of papers. Even the second edition of Clarke and O'Malley's Human Brain and Spinal Cord (1996) contains little material from the twentieth century after its first two decades. Finger's Origins of Neuroscience (1994) is now the most important encyclopedic source for the history of basic neuroscience. It brings its subject well into the twentieth century, but it is divided into sections by experimental subspecialties, so the reader does not get an overview of neuroscience's recent history. Chapters 13 to 17 of Minds Behind the Brain were not exactly written for that synthetic purpose, but they will serve quite nicely until a more definitive treatise comes along.

This book became available just as my own seminar course on neuroscience history was getting to Sherrington...