Table of Contents
Introduction: A Bowl of Curds
Chapter One: Hearts and Minds, Livers and Stomachs
• Greeks explore the soul, puzzle over the brain, and embrace the heart• Christians build a soul from ancient parts
• Natural philosophy is born and anatomy becomes a sacred art
• Vesalius discovers monkeys where men once stood
• The Greeks are transformed, the soul questioned
Chapter Two: World Without Soul
• Anatomy of the cosmos• Galileo's new sky
• Marin Mersenne makes the world a machine
• Pierre Gassendi sanctifies the atom
• Descartes's anatomy of clear ideas
• The human body as earthen machine
• The soul climbs into its cockpit
• An arrest
• The perfect argument
• The ice queen makes Descartes an offer
• The captive leaves its prison
Chapter Three: Make Motion Cease
• Thomas Willis with the beasts of the field• Protestants and Puritans
• The divine right of kings and the complaints of Parliament
• God and Aristotle at Oxford
• Servant and alchemist
• Mystical medicine comes to England
Chapter Four: The Broken Heart of the Republic
• Charles I stumbles toward war• Fever swings its scythe
• Portrait of a physician as a young man
• Willis fights for his king
• Oxford dark and nasty
• William Harvey under siege
• Harvey at the school of Aristotle
• Harvey finds the soul in the blood and says little about the brain
• Harvey discovers the circle of blood
• Oliver Cromwell tightens the noose
• Surrender to madness
Chapter Five: Pisse-Prophets Among the Puritans
• Thomas Willis returns• Medicine in the marketplace
• Ferments dissolve the four humors
• The Puritans demand an oath
• The Oxford Experimental Philosophy Club
• William Petty: From Thomas Hobbes's mouth to Thomas Willis's ear
• Charles becomes a martyr to the people
• England the republic
• The madness of defeat
• The Miraculous Case of Anne Greene, or A Clock Reset • William Petty measures the soul of a nation
• Willis hosts an illegal church
Chapter Six: The Circle of Willis
• William Harvey comes out of retirement• Thomas Willis searches for the agents of fever
• The Experimental Philosophy Club fights for its life and for respectability
• Hobbes as politician and neurologist
• Robert Boyle gives shape to the New Science
Chapter Seven: Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Air
• Willis stirs up a ferment of atoms• A crude dream of the brain
• Cromwell uprooted
• Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke pump away the soul
• Christopher Wren, surgeon and injector
• The return of the king
Chapter Eight: A Curious Quilted Ball
• The Church of England meets its less than divine leader• Thomas Willis becomes hero of a nation
• "I addicted myself to the opening of heads"
• Willis discovers a doctrine of the nerves
• The Royal Society
Chapter Nine: Convulsions
• The lady with a migraine• Convulsions in the year of plague and fire
Chapter Ten: The Science of Brutes
• From Oxford to London
• Richard Lower transfuses blood into a madman
• Lower and Hooke discover Willis's mistake in the lungs of dogs
• Willis constructs a doctrine of the soul
• Madness explained
• Thomas Willis avoids Hobbes's fate
Chapter Eleven: The Neurologist Vanishes
• A final book by Thomas Willis and a ridiculously sumptuous funeral• How John Locke buried his teacher
• Robert Boyle sees the future before he dies and is not consoled
Chapter Twelve: The Soul's Microscope
• A long journey forward• The soul as information
• Lightning in a nerve
• The wisdom of the reflex
• Neurologists read the brain
• MRI and the module
• The networked mind
• The able animal soul
• Emotion with reason, not versus
• Steel syrup and Prozac
• The self anatomized
• The social brain
• Morals and neurons
• Lady Conway and Dr. Willis meet again
Dramatis Personae
Notes
References
Acknowledgments
Index
