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

The title of the volume under review is clearly a misnomer – and unfortunately a misleading one. Readers expecting a comprehensive history of the brain and mind sciences, or a systematic introduction to the role of technique, technology, and therapy therein, will hardly find what they are looking for. The editors are searching, instead, for another history of mind and brain, a different one, by looking at usually neglected spaces, materials, and figures: "This volume makes a collective case for exploring the field through the lens of marginal stories – stories that appear, from a contemporary perspective – to be situated at the edges of history" (2). Where are such "edges of history" to be found, how can history of science be narrated via the marginal, and what are the aims for doing so?

The history of science has flourished over decades by critiquing master narratives of progress and ingenious men in multiple ways: voice has been given to neglected figures and the attention has shifted to schools and styles, to the roles of instruments and representations, to the formatting effects of media mobilized in experimentation, to the traffic of materials and people, or to the local contingencies of scientific developments. The sometimes explicit and often implicit agenda for doing so was that the neglected voices and forgotten actors played, indeed, important, if not decisive roles. Delia Gavrus and Stephen Casper suggest with their volume of essays something more: they intend to highlight the marginal for describing the mundaneness of allegedly exuberant science – like the brain and mind sciences with their extraordinary status in contemporary society.

This bold attempt finds its realization in a series of highly innovative, informative, and unusual contributions: Stephen Jacyna ("We Are Veritable Animals") takes his readers to the Menagerie in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris where the demonstration of animal intelligence provided new grounds for questioning and exploring the foundations of human intelligence. Together with the studies in comparative anatomy of the nearby Museum of Natural History, the output of the Menagerie helped to overcome older ideas of animal collections as pure luxury or domestication tools for economic purposes and thus paved the way, as Jacyna convincingly shows, for establishing a new type of human science, looking at the brain and the nervous system as underlying humanity. Max Stadler ("The Biophysics of Nerve, ca. 1930") follows the zigzagging path of gadgets and tools, until he arrives at heaps of whipped cream as an experimentally testable model of the electrical behaviour of organic cells – a model crucial for the formation of biophysics as the dominating disciplinary space for the experimental investigation of nerve cells. In other contributions, Thomas Schlich looks a the epistemic and rhetorical impact of experimental physiology on the development of neurosurgery; Kenton Kroker considers the decisive role of an international effort in (mundane) information gathering and bibliography for shaping the emerging disciplinary stature of "neurology" when encountering the mysterious condition of encephalitis lethargica – rather than an exclusive body of specialized knowledge or exquisite clinical techniques; and Frank Stahnisch looks at how the intellectual "luggage" of forced emigration not only resulted in huge gains, shaping the disciplinary landscape through new research programs, but also in much more complex stories where collaboration and new connections turned out to be difficult or impossible.

In their own contributions, the editors powerfully contrast the ostensibly materialist agenda of the exhibits on nerve physiology at the famous Festival of Britain in 1951 with the carefully orchestrated immersion of the visitors in imaginary and imaginative spaces, in direct opposition to the materialism exhibited (Stephen Casper, "Dualist Techniques for Materialist Imaginaries"); and unearth the crucial role of the histological work by Edward Dokrill, technician in Wilder Penfield's clinic, in establishing the famous program in neurosurgery (Dalia Gavrus, "Epilepsy and the Laboratory Technician"). Gavrus's careful analysis of Dokrill reveals him as more than another case of...