Imaging the Medical Humanities: The Brain (Part I)

Sorry for the slow-blogging.  I've had several conferences in the last few weeks, been traveling, and been preparing for my upcoming qualifying exams. 

In lieu of "real" blogging, here's an installment in the Imaging the Medical Humanities series of posts.  One of the conferences I spoke at involved neuroethics, and much of my examinations will deal with pain and related matters of mind and neuroethics, so I thought it might be appropriate to do several posts on brain images in the West.  Part I takes us from the early Renaissance to the early modern era in the late 17th century.  As usual, I make no pretense to thoroughness, but hope to present a small and not necessarily representative sample of some interesting and significant images of the brain in the West over the last 500 years or so.

(image courtesy of Endotext)

This is a drawing of Leonardo da Vinci's -- who for important reasons deserves to be included in the company of the Renaissance humanists -- of the rete mirabilis, the collection of vessels in the brain that Galen identified.  The rete mirabilis is particularly important in intellectual history, as Galen discovered the vascular network in the brains of monkeys and analogized them to human primates.  Human brains, however, do not feature the rete mirabilis, thus underscoring the crucial dialectic between authority and observation that animated much of Vesalius's work.

(image courtesy of University of Otago [New Zealand] Library)

This is an image of Christopher Wren's famous drawing of the Circle of Willis, found in Thomas Willis's crucial anatomic atlas, Cerebri anatomie (1664).  Willis is important to the history of clinical neuroscience and brain anatomy for a number of reasons.  He discovered the arterial network (the human analogue to the rete mirabilis) that still bears his name; perhaps more important, Willis was acutely aware of the sanctity of the inner spaces of the human body.  He noted that he prepared to do his anatomical work with the same reverence with which he examined the Bible.  The holiness of the brain, of the inner spaces of the body, is important in unpacking the power of the visible.

(image courtesy of Stanford University)

Publishing his Lecture on the Anatomy of the Brain (1669) five years after Willis's Cerebri, Danish anatomist Nicolaus Steno widened the break with Galenic tradition inaugurated most notably by Vesalius.  Steno rejected the Galenic notion of "animal spirits," mostly because he could not see their effect in any of his anatomical studies.  He also noted that, despite the best efforts of generations of anatomists, the Galenic conception of the sensus communis -- the seat of our 'common sense' -- did not exist in neural architecture.  Again, the power of the investigating Eye/I is crucial, and the formulation of this way of knowing, this way of seeing, in many ways helped constitute a new image of the scientific self.  That this self-identity is almost self-evident to us late moderns should not contribute to an ahistorical picture of modernity in science, as Taylor warns.

Western thinkers did not always attribute such power to the seeing Eye, and certainly did not always constitute the self on such grounds.  That the power of this empiricism is a given today is in large part a function if how all-encompassing it is in our conceptions.

In Part II, I will move from these 17th century images to some of the 19th century work on anatomy and brain pathology, where many crucial ideas relevant to neural anatomy were developed (this is not to suggest that nothing important happened in between.  Again, these are blog posts, not detailed essays).