Product Description
We take it for granted that the brain is the seat of our minds, the part of the body that is most ourselves. 500 years ago, Europeans, if they thought about the brain at all, took it much less seriously - whether it was a refrigerator or a pump, it was seen as little more than a mechanism, its only products tears and snot. Among the revolutions of the seventeenth century was a revolution on the understanding of the brain and mind. It's central figure was a 17th century Englishman called Thomas Willis. To him, we owe our modern understanding of the miracle that is the human brain, the first dissections of the skull and the word 'psychology'. Zimmer's new book tells Willis' story, against the background of Civil War, regicide and Restoration. Set in London and Oxford, we see the context of Willis' researches and dissections, meet his famous friends, the founders of the Royal Society, Boyle, Hooke and Sir Christopher Wren, who attended Willis' dissections and sketched the results. Few stories in the history of science are as important and fascinating - and as little-known - as this one.

Amazon.com Review
In Soul Made Flesh, Carl Zimmer reveals the strange and complicated history of the discovery of the human brain. Amid the turmoil of 17th century England, with religious leaders and monarchs battling for control of the country, an elite group of thinkers used every scientific means at their disposal to figure out that the unassuming putty in our heads was crucial to human health and wisdom. Primary among these Oxford scholars was Thomas Willis, whom the Royal Society affectionately called "our chymist." Soul Made Flesh is as much a biography of Willis and the men who shaped him as it is a medical history. Zimmer admirably sets the stage for what would become a metaphysical revolution and spark arguments that continue to this day about what the mind is and where, if anywhere, the human soul resides:

Thomas Willis... isolated the soul from stars and demons and made the chemical workings of the brain the key to sanity and happiness. Just as important, he helped make the brain a familiar thing.

Zimmer applies the same dedicated research and quietly sparkling style to this book as he did to Parasite Rex and At the Water's Edge, distilling reams of historical and scientific information into a concise yet comprehensive narrative. The book's chapters are accompanied by drawings by Willis' contemporary Christopher Wren, whose architectural sensibilities made the brain's structure beautiful to behold. --Therese Littleton

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 17 reviews)

How we came to know the brain as the seat of thought

This is the story of how we came to understand that life and thought are not beyond a naturalistic, material explanation. It centers on one seventeenth Englishman, Thomas Willis, around whom Zimmer assembles in Oxford a cast of early natural philosophers.

Zimmer begins in Greece with Aristotle and continues in Rome with Galen who while they did look at the human body, were too quick to come up with pet theories about biles and humors and present them as facts. For centuries their words ruled science.

Then comes Descartes with his mechanical view of the world, presenting a soul that ruled over the body. Descartes questioned the ancients and corrected some of their grosser factual mistakes but he made a few of his own and repeated their methodological error: he did not question his own pet theories enough.

The heroes of Zimmer's book are surgeons. Then, surgeons were simple menial workers with a gift for butchery and enough skill to allow their patients to survive their operations. The surgeons eventually gathered the courage to stand up to scholarly doctors and point out that Galen's descriptions were wrong. When challenged, they opened up cadavers and counterchallenged the doctors to show them Galen's fictional body systems.

The central hero is Thomas Willis, a country squire turned renowned doctor during the turbulent times of Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, and Charles II. He had the luck to live near Oxford and displayed a keen interest in anatomy. Willis studied the brain and the nervous system with unprecedented precision. He was one of the founders of the Royal Society, meeting with the likes of Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren. Together, these men studied anatomy so that observations overruled theory whenever one did not agree with the other.

Willis's observations, descriptions, and case studies make him the first neurologist. Living in times of religious extremes, this devout man never swore off the primacy of a supernatural soul, but he saw the brain as a tool of the soul and his studies of this organ mechanized our model and led to today's materialistic explanations of consciousness.

Vincent Poirier, Tokyo
November 07, 2006

Reasonably Good; 3.5

This is a fairly good popular account of the scientific revolution in 17th century England with an emphasis on the pioneering neuroanatomical research and speculation of the physician Thomas Willis. Written clearly by an experienced science journalist, this book is largely a popularization of the fairly extensive secondary literature on 17th century science and medicine. This is a very interesting period in European history and the narrative features an impressive list of contributors, including not only Willis but Boyle, Locke, Hooke, and several other important figures. Zimmer does a good job of showing the evolution of thinking about the mind from exclusively metaphysical concepts to thinking about brain and mind functions in a more materialistic manner. The concentration on the very interesting and impressive Willis is the best feature on the book. Zimmer does less well on some other aspects. His account of the development of mechanistic thought is relatively superficial, as is his treatment of theological issues. The subtitle of the book "-and How it Changed the World" is somewhat inappropriate. As Zimmer himself explains, Willis' work was relatively neglected after his death. A final and striking omission is the lack of discussion of Newton. In one sense, this is understandable as Newton tends to eclipse his contemporaries but Newton's achievements became the primary vehicle for convincing the world of the power and utility of science and the mechanistic approach.
April 30, 2006

What Willis was talking about

For about a thousand years, the smartest people of every European generation tried to understand the world around them by reading texts based on scriptures and the works of ancient philosophers. At the end of the thousand years, the living conditions of the average person were the same as they were at the beginning of the thousand years. Life expectancy was around 40, and most people lived in fear of disease and starvation.

It's fascinating to read in "Soul Made Flesh" how completely the mind of the Middle Ages was infused with mysticism. People who were otherwise brilliant found it impossible to believe that any aspect of nature could operate in a purely mechanistic fashion, without spirit or purpose. In fact it was considered blasphemous to think otherwise. Human progress since the beginning of the Enlightenment is simply the adoption and development of a mechanistic understanding of the world, sometimes called "materialist" philosophy.

Zimmer's book provides a thoroughly enjoyable look at the transition between the mystical and mechanistic worldviews. Starting in the early 17th century, the coherent (and incorrect) set of doctrines sanctioned by church and state began to crumble: The Earth was found not to be the center of the universe, but one of several planets orbiting the sun. Matter was made not of Aristotle's four elements, but of atoms. Blood circulated through the body, rather than being absorbed by it. And crucially, the source of reason and consciousness was not a substanceless soul, but a gelatinous lump of biological tissue.

Interestingly, most of the men involved in these discoveries remained deeply religious, even though their findings contradicted what the church had been telling people for the previous 50 generations. And the ones that were physicans continued to rely on mysticism and alchemy to treat their patients. It would be centuries before people were able to talk candidly about a purely mechanistic account of the universe and its inhabitants. And we are only now beginning to enjoy the benefits -- life expectancy has doubled and formerly deadly diseases have been eradicated.

Remarkably, many people in the US have recently been calling for a return to the 17th century way of thinking. The problem is that mysticism didn't work out so well the first time, and now the stakes are much higher.
October 22, 2005

Did the firing of my neurons make me do it?

As a Christian who upholds the truth of Scripture and Science, I find that Carl Zimmer has written a wonderfully engaging, yet disturbing, introduction to the 17th century beginnings of neuroscience. Zimmer is wonderfully engaging in that he is a gifted story teller. He makes the world of Thomas Willis' 17th century Europe come alive. Tying in the ancient views of Aristotle and Galen, Zimmer leads us quickly into the advent of modern anatomical observation as the basis for Rene Descartes' and William Harvey's approach to natural philosophy and medicine. The stage is set for Thomas Willis and his colleagues, such as Christopher Wren and Robert Boyle, to revolutionize Western thought about the soul.

However, this surely isn't dry medical history. The story is filled with fascinating descriptions of other leading natural philosophers of the early Enlightenment, interwoven with social and political tales of the English Civil War and Restoration, and spiced with colorful details about the Christian devotion and theology of the time.

Aside from Willis, my other favorite in the story is Robert Boyle. Like Willis, Boyle was a devout Christian who combined his love for God's Word in the Bible with his love for God's Word as revealed in Creation. For Boyle, he was able to see God's truth and glory in both Holy Scripture and Nature. This is right in line with Francis Bacon's principle of the "Two Books," Scripture and Nature, that God has used to reveal his glory to humankind. In our time where many people see only warfare between science and religion, it is a relief that Zimmer shows us several portraits of great people who sought to find harmony between faith and scientific reason. Right from the start of the Scientific Revolution, Evangelical believers were advocates of the new scientific methods.

Nevertheless, Zimmer's book is disturbing. Concerns of atheism loomed on the horizon of the Anglican natural philosophy of Willis and Boyle. Willis and other Royal Society members struck a moderate position between extreme Puritan biblicists, Quaker spiritualists, and materialists like Thomas Hobbes. However, it was the challenge of the materialists that has proved to be the greatest threat. Willis, in many ways, was a victim of his own success. By granting that some of the soul's traditional characteristics can be explained in purely physical terms, this opened the door to modern skepticism.

Historically, Christians have championed either a trichotomist (spirit-soul-body) or dichotomist (spirit/soul -- body) view of the human person. Thomas Willis' anatomical research has led us to the 21st century tendency to eliminate the spirit or soul from the human person. This physicalist account of human reason, emotions and will challenges a literalist reading of the Scriptural soul and/or spirit of the human person. For example, in Matthew 12:34, Jesus says that it is "out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks." If the heart is no longer the seat of the soul, then would it be right for us to retranslate this as "out of the abundance of neurons in certain parts of the brain that the mouth speaks?"

Nevertheless, the data is not completely in yet. Granted, harmonizing the insights of neuroscience with the revelation in Holy Scripture is not easy. Yet despite the tension, we can still speak of our ourselves as "souled" beings. The function of the soul needs review but it has not been eliminated totally. The full replacement of the immaterial soul with nothing but a material soul would undoubtedly scandalize Thomas Willis as well. Oddly enough, even though Zimmer celebrates this scientific movement towards physicalism, in the final analysis Zimmer yearns for some type of return to an immaterial soul, along the lines of the Quaker, Anne Conway, or the Romanticism of William Blake. Yet the trend is still there and Christian apologists are faced with the exciting challenge of speaking of the soul in meaningful, biblical terms while being consistent with the findings of today's neuroscience. Those who do not share a Christian faith are faced with somehow finding a way to think about "soul" without falling into meaninglessness talk or else making up something as they go along.

There are a few problems to point out in the book:

(1) Zimmer suggests that "many Puritan sects" rejected the discovery of truth through human reason (p. 114-115). This is a broad overstatement. John Calvin, the primary architect of what would become Puritan theology argued that while reason does not save a person, truth can still be found to some degree through reason. Reformed theologians call this "common grace" which is extended to elect and non-elect alike. In other words, reason does not save but it is not opposed to revelation. Reason compliments revelation. The difference with the Anglicanism of Thomas Willis is that he saw a more significant role for reason as a prerequisite to salvation.

(2) Zimmer finds Darwin's evolutionary theory as being in conflict with the theory of divine purpose and design of Thomas WIllis. Sure, Darwinianism has been used that way to justify a pure naturalistic materialism. But the basics of evolutionary thought hardly rule out design and purpose altogether. Maybe this is why Zimmer is continually speaking out against "Intelligent Design" in his other writings. This is terribly unfortunate. Just because contemporary neuroscience has mapped out the brain does not mean that the soul is simply eliminated. The immaterial soul can and should be thought of in a new way, but to this Christian the God-designed and God-purposed place for the soul is far from gone.
March 02, 2005

The search for consciousness

Ths book is an excellent historical background to man's attempts to understand his own mind. It's also a great primer for some of the theories man has held about his own anatomy and
consciousness.

The author keeps it interesting by tracking the story to the lives Thomas Willis and his buddies at Oxford who must skillfully skate through a minefield of intellectual dogma and even civil war to lay the foundations for scientific mehtod.

The author does a fine job of turning history into a story and ends up teaching the reader quite a bit.

As a bonus the author gives us a short but thoughtful conclusion. Showing how modern researchers continue the quest for the answer to the question what is "man".
December 13, 2004

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