The History of the Brain and Mind Sciences: Technique, Technology, Therapy ed. by Stephen T. Casper and Delia Gavrus (review)

This collection is a welcome addition to the history of mind and brain science. Framing their selections in the context of technique, technology, and therapy, editors Stephen T. Casper and Delia Gavrus identify their common threads. “This volume,” write the editors, “was conceived as a meditation on the role of technique, technology, and therapy—as conceptual and rhetorical categories, as well as practical embodiments—have played in the constitution of the mind and brain sciences over the past one and a half centuries” (p. 1). The editors challenge the grand narratives of progress that often accompany the history of brain sciences. Moreover, they are skeptical of the growing application and appropriation of the adjective “neuroscience” to a host of disciplinary studies. In contrast, Casper and Gavrus endorse the observations of Nikolas Rose that such endeavors tend to simplify the engagement of recent neuroscience, which requires a willingness to examine the subtleties, complexities, and ambiguities of a truly cross disciplinary analysis. “This volume,” asset the editors, “makes a collective case for exploring the field through the lens of seemingly marginal stories—stories that appear, from a contemporary perspective—to be situated at the edges of history” (p. 2). Rather, they hope that by “foregrounding these marginal stories,” they will “disrupt the standard narrative” while substituting “a competing view” of brain science history (p. 2). To accomplish this, the chapters of this book “attempt to go beyond a conceptual concern with the monolithic notion of the human self itself, exploring instead the heterogeneous, diverse, and ultimately exceptionally complex set of scientific and medical techniques, technologies, and therapies that allow their practitioners to claim expertise and license to intervene into some aspect of the nervous system and the mind” (p. 7). Taken together, these chapters emphasize “the heterogeneity of practices and intellectual aims; the epistemic breaks that occur for various historical reasons; and what appears to be, but only in retrospect, the marginal episodes that make up the complex and fractured history of mind and brain sciences” (p. 7).

While space will not allow an in-depth discussion of the individual contributions, an overview reveals their intersection. L. Stephen Jacyna demonstrates how creation of the Menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes in postrevolutionary Paris “served as a versatile and productive ‘truth machine’” where the study of animals served “in its broader signification, as a contribution to the creation of Man as an object of study for the emergent human sciences” (p. 43).

In the second chapter, Thomas Schlich explores how the growing technical sophistication of physiological surgery meshed with an increasing confidence that such interventions rested on a firm scientific basis. “The idea of a solid scientific basis and technical competence was paired with the trust of surgeons as dispassionate, detached objective technical experts, who were free of bias and vested interest and who could offer surgery as the ‘inevitable, scientific solution’ to the problem of disease” (p. 69). But not all brain disorders were seen as responsive or appropriate for surgery. The origin and course of epidemic encephalitis remained a puzzle in the post–World War I era. The League of Nations Health Organization’s Commission on Smallpox and Vaccination, along with other national investigations, seemed to settle on the dominant theoretical perspective that novel neurological epidemics result from viral variability (p. 95). Yet, as Kenton Kroker shows, epidemic encephalitis was seen as “a natural force still largely resistant to human understanding.” In contrast, Max Stadler examines the role of algae and whipping cream in industrial food production in the 1920s and 1930s. This enables him to reexamine the production of electrophysiological knowledge in relation to the dissemination of the wireless, which in turn became a model for understanding the human nervous system.

Brain researchers played an important role in framing techniques of...