Book Reviews: The Anatomy of a Scientific Revolution
By Jason Wu
Yale Scientific Magazine, 80.2:33, Winter Issue, 2006
Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain - and How it Changed the World
By Carl Zimmer
Free Press, 2004, 384 pp.
ISBN: 0743230388
The brain, declared the English philosopher Henry More, “shows no more capacity for thought than a cake of suet or a bowl of curds.” For More and his contemporaries, the notion that the brain was the seat of reason, emotion, and sensation was preposterous. Such exalted roles in the body were only fit for the spirits that comprised the soul. Those spirits, moreover, resided in the heart, not in a mere “bowl of curds.”
Before the century was done, however, views of this kind would be permanently discredited, and the discipline of anatomy would undergo a paradigm shift culminating in the birth of modern neurology. In Soul Made Flesh,science journalist Carl Zimmer exuberantly sketches this transformation and its corresponding intellectual ferment amidst a background of political and social upheaval. At the center of his narrative is the Oxford circle, a collection of virtuosi led by Thomas Willis, a brilliant but now obscure physician who, in his quest for understanding, “addicted [himself] to the opening of heads.”
Before Zimmer focuses his attention on Willis, he takes care to establish a detailed context. He embarks on a grand tour of the era, and his narrative somehow weaves together such disparate developments as the beheading of Charles I and the mathematical breakthroughs of Marin Mersenne. Here, at its best, the ebullient prose of Soul Made Flesh embodies the tumultuous spirit of seventeenth century England.
The imaginative leaps in the story parallel the restless swings of a society caught between dictatorship and civil war, and Zimmer expertly conveys the intimate intellectual reverberations of each political shock. The personal agonies of the young Willis, a royalist, and his delicate dance with the parliamentary and religious authorities of the period serve as a reminder of the struggle between scientific independence and political power that survives to the present day.
Zimmer takes a similar tack when he turns his attention to the intellectual milieu of what has become known as the century of genius. Zimmer contents himself with portraying the broad sweep of the intellectual advancements of the time, jumping as he does from Descartes to Hobbes with apparent abandon.
His swift and varied treatment of the contemporary revolutions in scientific attitudes and philosophies suffices in establishing an intellectual framework for his later discussion of Willis, but serves more effectively as an analogy to the diverse talents and relentless energy of the men of the time.
Apart from giving the work its character, however, the upbeat tempo and anecdotal nature of Soul Made Flesh occasionally confer an insubstantial feeling to Zimmer’s tale. The prose lapses, at times, into flighty discussions of subjects that feel only tenuously related, and the decision to exclude specific references to the evidence within the text lends a lighter quality to what is fundamentally a well-researched work. Zimmer also indulges a tendency to speculate with regards to the motivations and thoughts of his subjects; this habit helps to move the story along, but occasionally undercuts the authority of his analysis.
Soul Made Flesh eventually overcomes these minor reservations and settles into an illuminating portrait of Willis and his spirited peers in the Oxford circle, which counted Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren, and Robert Boyle among its members. Zimmer depicts their many exploits, which included the resuscitation of woman who had been hanged, with an agreeable mixture of admiration and wonder. Their playful curiosity and the revolutionary spirit they represent become evident through Zimmer’s writing, as do individual personalities. Wren comes off as an effervescent wunderkind; Boyle appears in the form of a pious alchemist with a flair for radical experimentation.
The most interesting man to emerge from the story, however, is the figure of Willis, a conservative but revolutionary physician who continued to prescribe “crushed millipedes” for his patients long after he had transformed medicine with his seminal works “The Anatomy of the Brainand Nerves” and “Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes.” Willis is portrayed as a contradictory, fortunate, and profoundly complex man through the narrative, and Zimmer succeeds in thoroughly humanizing him.
Soul Made Flesh moves forward into a hurried meditation on the potential of new technologies,such as magnetic resonance imaging. These new technologies, Zimmer seems to imply, may hold the key to understanding the link between the physical brain and the mental processes of consciousness and ethical decision making. In making his case, however, Zimmer overreaches and leaves the reader with big ideas but little in the way of concrete evidence.
Posted 星期二, 06/29/2010 - 17:37 by Fishville at www.tongjiyiren.com (hypathway@hotmail.com).
