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  • Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800-1950
  • Sam Halliday
Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800–1950. Laura Salisbury and Andrew Shail, eds. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2010. Pp. xiii + 298. $85.00 (cloth).

The confidence and ambition of this collection are announced by its subtitle: this will be a cultural history, rather than a medley of “histories.” On this basis, readers might feel entitled to expect a narrative momentum, thematic continuity, and interpretative consistency belying the volume’s necessarily eclectic make-up. It is to the credit of the editors that their book succeeds in satisfying these expectations, at least in part. And it is not too much to the discredit of anyone if, in other respects, it remains what such collections almost always are (again necessarily): a thing of parts.

Thematically and stylistically, the volume is well represented by its final essay, Melissa M. Littlefield’s “Matter for Thought: The Psychon in Neurology, Psychology and American Culture, 1927–1943.” Beginning with a dash of Foucault (reproving any attempt to impose totalizing narrative order on its titular object’s conceptual history), the essay provides an enjoyable and informative account of what “the psychon” meant to various neurologists, psychologists, and science fiction writers from 1800 to 1950. Studies of this type often describe a well-worn path in which a new term emerges in the sciences, is consolidated there, and subsequently seeps into the consciousnesses and works of figures in the wider culture. By contrast, as Littlefield’s essay shows, the “psychon” emerged in quite discrete ways across a range of disciplines—often as a frankly speculative, if not fantastic, category. Particularly salutary in this regard is Stanley Weinbaum’s science fiction, in which one Professor van Manderpootz extracts psychons from the minds of subjects via a device so that they can be visualised upon a screen (280–81). As Littlefield shows, this conception is both related to and distinct from contemporary neurological theory concerning what is nominally the same object: related, in that the term was sometimes used by scientists no less hypothetically; distinct, in that in Weinbaum’s work, psychons are not said to be specific to the individual but to consist of archetypal ‘“ideal form[s]’” (281).

This invocation of the ideal is atypical of the nexus between neurology and modernity more generally. As several contributors observe, a more pronounced tendency is to emphasise what Salisbury and Shail call the “materiality of thought”: the dependency of ideation, consciousness, and subjectivity itself on physical, organic processes (37). In the first single-authored essay of the volume, Michael K. House traces the emergence of this view to Franz Joseph Gall’s “organology” (the fount of what was later called “phrenology”), in which specific mental faculties were for the first time identified with local regions of the brain (for Gall, these regions were themselves distinct “organs”). Moving beyond the brain to bodily process more generally, Hisao Ishizuka notes “the powerful influence of the stomach on the mind” mooted by influential nineteenth-century theories of dyspepsia (85). Yet another take on the mind-body relationship—or perhaps, one should rather say, brain-“other”-bodily relationship—is offered by Jean Walton, whose gleefully (and yet again necessarily, albeit here for different reasons) scatological discussion of peristalsis focuses on what twentieth-century research calls “‘the second brain, a division of the automatic nervous system that completely escapes directives from the first brain, and yet which is responsive (and therefore susceptible) to the natural and cultural environment” (245–46). For all these contributors, the tendency of modernity as inflected by neurology is to both disperse the self into discrete parts and insist on these parts’ ineluctable, if not always clearly intelligible, imbrication.

All of this is not to say, however, that Neurology and Modernity presents a monolithic narrative in which the “materialisation” of mind or any other such tendency runs in one direction only. Contrary to this very tendency run some fascinating counter-currents. For instance, Aura [End Page 650] Satz’s essay on phantom limb syndrome illuminates the strange twist whereby the pre-eminent theorist of this syndrome within materialist nineteenth-century neurology, Silas...

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