Imagining the Brain: Episodes in the History of Brain Research

Chiara Ambrosio is an Associate Professor in History and Philosophy of Science at the Department of Science and Technology Studies, University College London. She has worked extensively on the visual cultures of science in relation to the visual arts, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is an expert on American Pragmatism and particularly the philosophy of Charles S. Peirce. Her research integrates historical work on images and artefacts across art and science with a philosophical investigation on the nature and role of representations in scientific practice. William MacLehose is Lecturer in History and Philosophy of Science at UCL’s department of Science and Technology Studies. He is a historian of medieval medicine and culture, with a focus on the relation between medicine and religion in the central middle ages. He is the author of ‘A Tender Age’: Cultural Anxieties over the Child in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Columbia University Press, 2009) and is currently working on a study of sleep and its pathologies in medieval culture.

Part 1. Imagining the brain between body and soul 1. Ventricular localization in late antiquity: The philosophical and theological roots of an enduring model of brain function Jessica Wright 2. The pathological and the normal: Mapping the brain in medieval medicine William MacLehose 3. Imagining the soul: Thomas Willis (1621–1675) on the anatomy of the brain and nerves Alexander Wragge-Morley 4. Gaetano Zumbo’s anatomical wax model: From skull to cranium Rose Marie San Juan

Part 2. Representing the brain and the nervous system: Styles, media, practices 5. The nervous system and the anatomy of expression: Sir Charles Bell’s anatomical watercolours Brendan Clarke and Chiara Ambrosio 6. Gertrude Stein’s modernist brain Chiara Ambrosio 7. Imagining the brain as a book. Oskar and Cécile Vogt’s "library of brains" Chantal Marazia and Heiner Fangerau 8. Pinpricks: Needling, numbness, and temporalities of pain Lan A. Li

Part 3. Inside the brain: Arguments and evidence in the making of the modern neurosciences 9. From images to physiology: A strange paradox at the origin of modern neuroscience Paolo Mazzarello 10. One, no-one and a hundred thousand brains: J.C. Eccles, J.Z. Young and the establishment of the neurosciences (1930s–1960s) Fabio De Sio 11. Seeing patterns in neuroimaging data Jessey Andrew Kenneth Wright