Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth
Century: Cerebral Localization and Its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier
by
[ Contents | Preface | Introduction |
Chapter: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Bibliography ]
NEW PREFACE
The history of the localization of functions in the
brain in the nineteenth century must seem a truly obscure topic. In some ways it
is, but I would maintain that it is of fundamental importance to the
understanding of human nature. I am inclined to say this with greater force two
decades after this monograph first appeared and more than thirty years after I
began the research upon which it is based.
Cerebral localization is the most accessible and clear
point where the understanding of human nature connects with the methods and
assumptions of natural science. Put philosophically, it is the empirical and
conceptual domain within which the mind-body problem was-and continues to
be-investigated. It is the space in the history of culture where the limits and
aspirations of human nature have been brought into relation with naturalistic
observation, correlative studies, and experimental research.
What do we mean, in particular, when we say that "the
brain is the organ of mind?" Rather less than we might anticipate, and certainly
less than I thought when I began to study the topic. That is, the more closely I
looked at the history of cerebral localization, the more it became apparent that
it was not the empirical findings that mattered. Indeed, there are really only
three fairly unambiguous scientific discoveries of significance to my argument
that were made during the period covered in this study: the sensory and motor
functions, respectively, of the posterior and anterior spinal nerve roots; the
role of the third frontal convolution in motor aphasia; the role of the cerebral
cortex in sensory and motor functions. What emerged as of far greater interest
was a network of closely intertwined conceptual issues: the rise of functional
thinking that developed from the organ-function model as applied, first, to the
brain, and then to psychology and other disciplines in the human sciences; the
history of ideas about normative concepts of mind-reason, memory, imagination,
and so on-versus the sorts of concepts that are determinate for character and
personality; the progressive reduction of both of these sorts of conceptions to
sensory-motor functions; the role of the association of ideas-in both its mental
and reflex forms-in the history of nineteenth-century psychology; the hugely
important impact of comparative and then evolutionary perspectives on how mind
came to be viewed.
Compared to these basic issues, cerebral localization
itself was merely the loom upon which these conceptual threads were interwoven.
I shall
viii
say more about some of these issues, but I want to say
here that the deeper I went into this, as into subsequent issues, the more
broadly my enquiries took me. The readers of this monograph may not wish to
follow me in these directions, but I think it worth issuing the invitation.
Oversimplifying what was itself a multilayered and multicausal set of
determinations, the question of the history of concepts of function led me to
spend the 1960s on Darwin and biological explanation. The factors at work in the
history of the Darwinian debate on "man's place in nature" led me to spend the
1970s on Marx and the sociology of knowledge. The failure of biological
explanation and the study of the ideological critique of scientific knowledge
led me, both personally and conceptually, to become preoccupied during the 1980s
with Freud and psychoanalysis, i.e., the inner world-the other half of the
psychophysical parallelism that was shared by Spencer, Hughlings Jackson, and
Freud.
Freud's first book, On Aphasia, was concerned
with cerebral localization, and his argument was profoundly influenced by the
functional, evolutionary, and parallelist assumptions described herein. Indeed,
it was psychoanalysis that first led me to cerebral localization-to a possible
natural science testing ground for analytic concepts. I now feel, as Freud came
to feel, that the study of the inner world must proceed on its own grounds and
maintain its own clinical evidential criteria. I have listed the publications
that correspond to the three phases of my subsequent research-Darwin, Marx, and
Freud-and wish to maintain that this trajectory is an appropriate development of
the study of mind, brain, and adaptation in the nineteenth century.
In emphasizing that this book is about the history of
terms of reference, assumptions, and frameworks, I am stressing that it is a
philosophical book and is only incidentally about the history of science in the
positivist sense. I tried to emphasize this throughout the book by my choice of
epigraphs to each of the chapters. Each says, "Don’t forget: we are doing
philosophy here. How is it appropriate to think about human nature?"
Now to some self-critical reflection. First, the book
does seem a bit pat. It was a neat project to move from the first empirical to
the first experimental work in a distinct domain in science. On re-reading the
text, I feel ambivalent. Sometimes it strikes me as a well-constructed and
finely woven tapestry; sometimes it seems too much so-like a Meccano or Erector
Set construction. This influence and that give (presto!) the next chapter-a sort
of associationist connectionism in the history of ideas. Then I noticed that
there are those deeper layers as well-ones that I have continued to mine in
subsequent research and writing.
One of my mentors, Irwin C. Lieb, once told me to read
someone very carefully while I was still an undergraduate. I tried it twice-with
Plato and Ernest Cassirer. The first always led me to the deepest assumptions
(see the epigraph opposite the Preface), while the other provided a postKantian
caveat: the conceptual without the empirical is empty, while the empirical
without the conceptual is blind. In my subsequent research, I took Arthur O.
Lovejoy's advice and explored as closely as I could two of the "lesser thinkers"
whose ideas could be counted on to display the spirit of an age more accessibly
than could more subtle writers. The specific concepts of Franz Joseph Gall and
Herbert Spencer are now almost wholly discredited, yet their ways of thinking
have shaped quite profoundly how we see ourselves in the twentieth century. I
have no regrets. The American functionalist sociologist, Talcott Parsons, began
his magnum opus, The Social System, with the following question, "Who now
reads Herbert Spencer?" I do, and, by the way, who now reads Talcott Parsons?
The vicissitudes of phrenology in the nineteenth century provided a conceptual
laboratory for thinking about the sorts of variables that are appropriate for
pondering human nature. My exploration of the strange origins and fates of
theories in the nineteenth century has emboldened me to find good ideas wherever
they turn up, without trying to be overly systematic. It seems to me that the
understanding of human nature has suffered mightily from "system."
In the book-which remains unaltered from the first
edition-I now feel I came near to a deep positivism. I privileged the category
of biology as relatively unproblematic and, in spite of my own views on the
history of ideas, I tended to denigrate philosophy as passé. In this vein, I
also seemed enthralled by animal behavior or ethology (see, for example, p.
186), apparently forgetting my own strictures about carefully
scrutinising where questions come from. I suspect that in both of these matters
I was seeking the approval of my supervisor and mentor, Oliver Zangwill,
professor of experimental psychology at Cambridge, a life-long proponent of
psychology as a biological science. His views were certainly an important reason
why I kept quiet about the psychoanalytic origins of my enquiries and relegated
Freud to footnotes (pp. x, 196).
I also kept quiet about my views on the role of
purposive thinking in science, though I slipped in a quotation to signal this
interest at the head of the Index (p. 273) and spoke of the need for ontological
reform in science at the beginning and end of the book (pp. viii, 252). I have subsequently taken this idea much further in various of my writings,
especially "Science is social relations" and "Parsons, organisms and . .
. primary qualities."
x
Where I emphasized biological categories in the text, I
would now wish to stress moral, social, and political ones. I stand by the
quotation from Zangwill with which I concluded, "I am convinced that we must
limit ourselves to the study of biologically significant behaviour patterns, no
matter how complex their underlying physiology may be" (p. 252), but I would now
wish to recast the injunction in much broader, humanistic terms. This has led
me, of late, to the study of concepts of mental space and to pondering the genre
of biography.
I stand by the story of the progressive reductionism of
mind to physiology to which my account leads: "It must follow from the
experimental data that mental operations in the last analysis must be merely the
subjective side of sensory and motor substrata" (p. 241). My point in bringing
up humanism is that I now wish to emphasize how important it is, when looking at
mechanisms, to hold the line against reductionism. Sensory-motor
psychophysiology was a complete colonization of conceptions of human nature and
thoroughly confused means with ends. Jackson's emphasis-as a neurologist-on the sensory and motor basis of ideational phenomena had a baleful influence
in psychology. His insistence that one cannot cross over from impressions and
movements to mental states made it easy for people to ignore the other half of
the parallelism. Indeed, it became easy to forget the phrase, "so far as
clinical medicine is concerned" in the following sentence: "That along with
excitations or discharges of nervous arrangements in the cerebrum, mental states
occur, I, of course, admit; but how this I do not inquire; indeed, so far as
clinical medicine is concerned, I do not care" (p. 208). As I said (p. 209), in a period of half a century cerebral localization had moved from a
physiology dominated by psychological faculties, but without any knowledge of
the underlying physiology, to a physiology of sensory-motor processes that
dominated psychological functions and impoverished conceptions of mental life.
I would not now change my account, but I would be more
stern in my critique-hence my own turning to the study of the sociology of
knowledge and psychoanalysis. Another way of saying this is to look at the
subsequent history of functional thinking, as I and others have done. It has
produced too much adaptation in the human sciences. The concept of function
comes into the human sciences via phrenology (p. 250) and gets fully developed
by merging the influence of the Idéologues with the ideas of Spencer. Spencer's
fundamental claim: "A function to each organ, and to each organ its own
function, is the law of all organization" (p. 159) became an all-embracing
explanatory principle in the human sciences. As I have shown elsewhere, this has
led to a shoddy, palliative view of human
xi
nature across the board, including psychology,
sociology, the division of labor, anthropology, systems theory, Taylorism, and
those aspects of psychoanalysis that are called "ego psychology" and strive to
represent human nature as a metaphorical physiology. The same kind of thinking
has also been applied in some aspects of work on group relations.
The criticism that has been most often and most
legitimately levelled at this book is that it is woefully weak with respect to
German sources. Indeed, the eminent historian of medicine, Erwin H. Ackerknecht,
said:
This is undoubtedly a very important story, and the
book an important and well written contribution to its history. Unfortunately it
is a torso. Apparently the author is not familiar with the German language
(German authors are consulted only in translations), and probably for this
reason he does not discuss, e.g. Herbart (in spite of Herbart's enormous
influence on Johannes Mueller, whom Young does analyse), Fries, Beneke, Lotze,
Moleschott and other materialists, E. H. Weber, Helmholtz, Fechner, Romberg,
Griesinger, Wundt, Ziehen, Flechsig, Wernicke, Edinger, Benedikt, Exner and
Mach. He also disregards important secondary work like that of Max Neuberger,
while he quotes a simple hack like J. Thorwald. But all this is understandable.
The omission of Marshall Hall is not.[1]
This last point leads to a second common criticism that
I accept: that I have underplayed the role of the reflex concept in the history
of studies of the central nervous system. Alas, I am now in no better position
to put this right than I am with respect to the role of German sources. I got
along with translations and with help from friends, but I still do not read any
European language well enough to do scholarly research with untranslated
sources. The book was written from a British or Anglo-American point of view,
and its strengths and weaknesses are those of a person trapped in the English
language. Nor can I, at the distance of thirty years, bring it up to date.
Tampering with a closely woven tapestry would produce shoddy work. I have, as
the appended bibliography shows, gone to other-closely related-fields of
enquiry. I have sought lots of advice from friends and colleagues and have
included the references to which they have pointed me. This book was a
distillation of a set of conceptual issues. They ought to be recontextualized in
the light of my and others' subsequent work, but I am not the person to do it.
I shall close by saying that I am terribly flattered
that this monograph is being reprinted in the History of Neuroscience Series. It
may be of some use to neophyte scholars to report something of the history of
its publication. When the thesis of which it is an unaltered version was first
1 Medical History, July 1971, p. 311.
xii
examined, I was approached by a fine man, J. C.
Crowther, who asked if Oxford University Press could consider it for
publication. I said no, but he persuaded me that one of my examiners, R. C.
Oldfield, had spoken well enough of it, so that it was an appropriate thing to
do. Some months later, as I was rushing to a lecture, my doorbell rang. I opened
it, and a man saying he was from Oxford University Press held out a package. I
snatched it, thanked him and sheepishly closed the door. I intended to wait a
decent interval for him to walk away, but the doorbell rang again, and he said
that he was the science editor of Oxford University Press, and that they wanted
to publish it. I was genuinely astonished and sat on it for five years in the
forlorn hope that I would get a lectureship before the book was judged by its
peers. I finally had to get it out as part of a (still forlorn) effort to get
tenure.
I hope that this background makes it not too immodest
to reproduce some of the comments made on the book.
."......this volume is of unusual excellence-read it"
Mary A. B. Brazier
His subtitle 'Cerebral localization and its biological
context from Gall to Ferrier' is enough to stimulate anyone to read this book,
but it gives little idea of its astonishing content and scope. It must be the
most important work upon the evolution of thought upon the results of cerebral
function written in the decade now ending.
Denis Williams
His book as a whole seems a model for the writing of
the history of science. As, perhaps, a good historian of science must be, he is
much more than a historian. Of the continuing and current conceptual problems of psychology he shows an awareness which neuro-physiologists who write
on mind and brain might be encouraged, by reading his book, to share. As regards
the relation of human behaviour to the physiology of the organism he is surely
not overstating the case when he writes in conclusion that, 'historical,
philosophical and conceptual studies in the interpretation of man's place in
nature have a more important part to play than has hitherto been assumed'.
P. F. Strawson
Pleased as I am by these accolades I am most happy to have received one from a former student, Roger Smith, who has gone on
to become a distinguished historian of ideas of mind and brain. When I
approached him about the reprinting of this volume, he was kind enough to offer
a great deal of advice, including the following assessment:
xiii
’The book has an organic unity and I strongly agree
with the proposal to reprint it unaltered. The scientific/philosophical
questions that led you to the thesis remain, though Artificial Intelligence and
the cognitive revolution have shifted some attention from a neuroscience of
behaviour to other formulations of the aims of psychology. The strengths of the
book are surely that: it gave historical recognition to phrenology; it described
the historical development of the idea of function in relation to both
physiological and evolutionary theory; and it exemplified the need to understand
conceptual and historical issues in considering the scope and limitations of
scientific knowledge (very characteristic of Cambridge History and Philosophy of
Science in the 1960s). Further, as always, you had the intellectual energy to
shape diverse and often unknown sources into a firm historical structure. As the
request to reprint confirms, everyone recognizes your book as a reference point
and it is always cited in histories of brain.
’Yet you intended, and I think would still argue, that
the book is more than that: that it is not just an account of
nineteenth-century brain theories but uncovers the central arguments in
the attempt to construct a science of mind. As you say, 'The history of various
concepts of function is the history of psychology' (p. xxxii), or "the
study of the functions of the brain-what is now called psychology" (p. 16). The
concept of function does a tremendous amount of work, and I suspect many readers
have not grasped the abstract (and perhaps overly tacit) normative drive behind
this. Your historiography reflects an early 1960s preoccupation with
localization as (a) the key scientific investment in the attempt to overcome
dualism, and (b) the concept making possible psychology's shift from
epistemological to biological inquiry (and again you assume this shift is the
history of the subject). You then wish this discussion to contribute to
rethinking modern neuroscience/psychology. I do not think these grand claims
have ever really been taken up (though of course I am not familiar with the work
of neuroscientists). As you know, the whole direction of work in the history of
science has been to break down such claims into academic-sized portions and to
make the historical questions independent of present science. Thus I think
citation of your book reflects its perceived value as a contribution to the
history of particular nineteenth-century developments.’
I want to thank Roger Smith, Chris Lawrence, Roger
Cooter, and Michael Clark for advice and support during the preparation of this
preface and to express my admiration for the standards of scholarship that they
maintain in their own research.
Nearly two decades after the book was published, I was
sunbathing on a beach in Crete, reading Peter Gay's magisterial Freud: A Life
for Our Time. Something familiar led me to turn to the notes, where I found
this book described as "a minor modern classic." My immediate feeling was to
deeply miss my mother, who had recently died and whose mental infirmity had been
an important influence on my scholarly interest in the limits and prospects of
human nature. I wanted to be able to say to her
xiv
that she had always hoped that I might accomplish
something and that it now appeared that I had, nearly half a lifetime ago. I
subsequently learned that efforts had been made by Professor James Schwartz of
the Columbia Medical School to get it reprinted, but to no avail. I gathered
that Professor Larry Weizkrantz at Oxford has also been a supporter of this
idea. Then Professor Pietro Corsi at Florence suggested including it in the
Oxford University Press History of Neuroscience Series. I am grateful to these
people and to others who have written about it appreciatively, with judgements
extending from heavily qualified praise to a pleasing number of references to it
as a "classic." In my own mind I had relegated the book to a period before my
own thinking broadened and deepened from the history of ideas to social,
intellectual, and ideological dimensions of knowledge. On reflection, however,
it was wrong of me not to realize that our lives and works are more of a piece
than we sometimes like to think.
R.M.Y.
Islington, London
March 1990
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human sciences, paper delivered to the Zangwill Club, Department of Experimental
Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, 1989.
______Second nature: the historicity of the
unconscious, paper delivered to Psychoanalytic Studies Seminar, University of
Kent, Canterbury, 1989.
______Transitional phenomena: production and
consumption, in B. Richards, ed. 'Crises of the Self: Further Essays on
Psychoanalysis and Politics (Free Association Books, London, 1989), pp. 57-72.
______Concepts of mental space, six lectures to
Psychoanalytic Studies Programme, University of Canterbury, Canterbury, 1990.
______ Darwinism and the division of labour, The
Listener 88 (17 August 1972), 202-5; reprinted in Science as Culture 9 (1990), l05-18.
______Marxism and the history of science, in R. C. Olby
et al., eds., Companion to the History of Modern Science (Routledge, London, 1990), pp. 77-86.
______The mind-body problem, in R. C. Olby et al.,
eds., Companion to the History of Modern Science (Routledge,
London, 1990), pp. 702-11.
______Scientism in the history of management theory, Science as Culture 8 (1990), 116-41.
______Psychoanalytic teaching and research: knowing and
knowing about, Free Associations (forthcoming, 1991).
PREFACE
But though the history of ideas is a history of
trial-and-error, even the errors illuminate the peculiar nature, the cravings,
the endowments, and the limitations of the creature that falls into them, as
well as the logic of the problems in reflection upon which they have arisen; and
they may further serve to remind us that the ruling modes of thought of our own
age, which some among us are prone to regard as clear and coherent and firmly
grounded and final, are unlikely to appear in the eyes of posterity to have any
of those attributes. The adequate record of even the confusions of our forebears
may help, not only to clarify those confusions, but to engender a salutary doubt
whether we are wholly immune from different but equally great confusions. For
though we have more empirical information at our disposal, we have not different
or better minds; and it is, after all, the action of the mind upon facts that
makes both philosophy and science-and, indeed, largely makes the 'facts'.
Arthur O. Lovejoy, 1936.
This question of origins is more than an abstract
discussion of historical justice or truth. Modern psychology (physiological,
experimental psychology) is faced by the same problems as all other scientific
disciplines. In order not to go astray, in order to find new, safer and more
direct paths, she must continuously re-examine her premises. In such
re-examinations, it is not sufficient to analyse some recent work; one must go
back to the real sources because they are the ones to reveal most clearly the
virtues and the vices of a method.
Ackernecht and Vallois, 1956.
In calling this work a study in the history of biology,
I am assuming the truth of what I have set out to show: that the history of
research in psychology should be viewed as a development away from philosophy
and toward general biology. The methods, concepts, and major assumptions which I
have chosen to examine are those which I believe have played the most important
role in psychology's movement in the nineteenth century from an epistemological
enquiry to a study of the adaptations of organisms to their environments. The
domain of psychology is bounded by the common-sense experience of the everyday
lives of men and other organisms on the one hand and by physiology on the other.
More than any other science, psychology is obliged to make sense to the layman,
for its explanatory task is to make sense of the behaviour of the layman.
Similarly, if it is to be a science it must
xx
demonstrate the relations between its phenomena and
those of the traditional science to which they are most closely related, the
physico-chemical science of physiology. Its task has been to develop categories
of analysis which satisfy both the common man and the physiologist. It has very
rarely succeeded in doing either of these. In fact, the most fundamental and
perplexing problem in psychology has been, and remains, the lack of an agreed
set of units for analysis comparable to the elementary particles in physics and
the periodic table of elements in chemistry.
Since the nervous system, in conjunction with the
musculo-skeletal and endocrine systems, mediates all aspects of experience and
behaviour, it must, in principle, serve multiple functions. A number of these
functions are discretely, and more or less uniquely, localized, in such centres
as the somato-motor cortex and primary sensory projection areas. However, these
same structures can be subjected to functional analyses beyond that of simple
sensation and movement. For example, they are involved in the functions of
contraction of the triceps, extension of the arm, striking an object, boxing,
aggressiveness, self-preservation, and seeking acclaim-all at the same time. The
problem for brain and behaviour research is whether or not there is anything to
choose among these alternative analyses. If not, then there can be no
straightforward 'natural classification' of functions and thus no unique basis
for a system of analytic units in psychology. Psychology will thereby have
nothing analogous to the chemists' periodic table of elements. Rather, there
will be a number of alternative tables, and the one that is used in a given
situation will depend on the nature and the level of the functional analysis
being conducted. In raising this issue here, I want to allude to a theme
implicit in my argument: the problem of providing functional or purposive
explanations within the context of Cartesian mind-body dualism set constraints
on the study of cerebral localization which were not overcome within the period
which is treated here; and, it seems to me, the problem is no less acute today.
Until the last decades of the eighteenth century,
psychologists adopted their categories of analysis from philosophy. These were
the attributes of mind in general: memory, reasoning, intelligence, imagination,
and so on. The present study is designed to show that after psychologists began
to attempt to determine a set of categories, they moved from the extreme
of allowing the terms of everyday experience to dictate how the nervous system
must be organized and must function, to that of allowing the categories of
physiological analysis to dictate
xxi
the elements from which the phenomena of everyday life
would have to be synthesized.
The major ideas involved in this history were:
1. cerebral localization as an assumption about the
functional organization of the brain,
2. sensation and motion as categories for the
physiological analysis of the nervous system,
3. the principle of the association of ideas as the
fundamental law of mental activity,
4. a changing context for psychology and physiology,
from a primarily philosophical approach within the static framework of the
'great chain of being' to a biological approach based on the dynamic of
evolutionary change.
This work is an attempt to show the relations between
these ideas and the various categories of function derived from philosophical
speculation and naturalistic observation in the nineteenth century, beginning
with the work of Franz Joseph Gall and culminating in that of Sir David Ferrier.
The result is a history of the ways in which psychologists related various sets
of explanatory elements to the phenomena which they felt psychology should
explain, and to the functions of the nervous system. This story is closely
linked with the development of methods in psychology, from speculation to
naturalistic observation and to experiment, and I have attempted to show these.
By the end of the nineteenth century, psychologists had provided themselves with
the elements of an adequate methodology and an apparently adequate set of
explanatory terms in the physiological aspect of their subject They had also
grasped that their field of enquiry was not merely (or, perhaps even primarily)
the life of the mind but rather the life of organisms, including men, and their
adaptations to their respective environments. What needed explanation was not
the representation of reality by the substance mind, but the adjustment to
reality by organisms which think, feel, and behave. My narrative ends just at
the point at which psychologists were beginning to realize that their methods,
their new approach to the subject, and their impressive findings relating
feeling and movement to the brain, still did not provide them with an adequate
set of elements for resynthesizing the phenomena of everyday life. Consequently,
in the last decade of the nineteenth century a number of new approaches-some
extending, some complementing, and some rejecting the views of their
teachers-branched off
xxii
from the parent tradition. At the present time vigorous
attempts are being made to relate the results of this divergence: reflexology,
behaviourism, psychoanalysis, brain and behaviour, factor analysis, and
ethology. It is hoped that the present study can be of use in recalling the
development of some of the issues which led these movements to take their
separate ways; that it might also encourage the recall of the basic questions,
thus prompting a re-assessment of whether or not we are-or should be-still
addressing ourselves to them. I hope that I have made a case for the use of
historical method in the analysis of current problems in science.
I became an historian of science as a result of my
inability to derive a coherent picture of experience and behaviour from the
findings of current psychology. I had studied philosophy and psychology as an
undergraduate in preparation for a career in psychiatry. While at medical school
I was overwhelmed by the confusion in current attempts to relate the concepts
used in the explanation of normal and abnormal behaviour to the physiology of
the organisms. I devoted some time during my medical course to an attempt to
discover some of the basic issues which were causing confusion. A review of
current literature led further and further into the history of neurology and
psychology until I felt I had identified two crucial concepts: brain
localization, and the functions which various investigators had attempted to
localize. Localization has been the reigning assumption in brain research, and
the history of various concepts of function is the history of psychology.
It can be argued that the mind-body problem finds its most precise scientific
expression in the related problems of classifying and localizing the functions
of the brain.
A regressive study of the literature led back to the
inception of empirical localization research in the work of Franz Joseph Gall. I
then left medical school in order to work as an historian and trace the
development of concepts of localization and of function since 1798.
I have acknowledged all the sources which I have used,
and cited the ideas and specific quotations I have drawn from them, but the
conception, development, and results of the study are the products of my own
independent research. My treatment of Gall, the development of sensory-motor
physiology, Bain, Spencer, Jackson, Carpenter, and Ferrier are wholly original,
except for the specific information which I cite in the text. It will be seen
that my treatment of Magendie, Mueller, the early history of associationism,
Broca, and Fritsch and Hitzig, consists of straightforward exegesis and draws
heavily on
xxiii
secondary sources. The assessment of the place of their
work in the history of cerebral localization and psychophysiology is my own.
Finally, the importance of phrenology in many aspects of the histories of
psychology and biology has come as a complete surprise to me. I originally
studied Gall because his work was the starting point of empirical localization,
and I planned to spend only a few weeks on phrenology. It will be seen that the
result is quite far from what I anticipated. In a sense, then, I should
acknowledge an important debt to Gall. The perspective on later work which his
writings has provided has done more than any other single factor to shape my own
view of the domain and aims of biological psychology.
My field of interest has received scant attention from
professional historians of science and medicine. Therefore it has not been
possible in most cases to extend or qualify the findings of other scholars.
There are a few notable exceptions to this generally bleak situation: A. O.
Lovejoy, Owsei Temkin, Erwin H. Ackerknecht, Elie Halévy, Richard Hofstadter,
Ralph B. Perry, G. S. Brett, Jürgen Thorwald, Sir Henry Head, Sir Geoffrey
Jefferson, Sir Michael Foster, A. Macalister, J. M. D. Olmsted, and L. S.
Hearnshaw.
Professor O. L. Zangwill has shown a very gratifying
interest in the progress of my work. His initial encouragement and continuing
support made it possible for me to extend a one-year visit into a four-year
course of research. Mr John Dunn is responsible for any sense of sharpened
criticism and historical judgement that may be evident in this work. Mr Jeremy
Mulford is responsible for the language of those parts of the chapter on Gall
which are in English. Gerd Buchdahl, Mary Hesse, and Rita van der Straeten of
the Whipple Science Museum, Cambridge, have helped and encouraged me in
innumerable ways, as have Sydney Smith, Joseph Needham, and Ruth Schwartz-Cowan.
The cooperation of the (now disbanded) British Phrenological Society, and
especially the enlightened approach of its former President and Hon. Secretary,
Miss Frances Hedderly, F.B.P.S., enabled me to have access to phrenological
works not readily available in libraries. Though we cannot agree in our
conclusions, I hope that their interests may have paralleled my own in
indicating the debt which modern biology, psychology, and brain research owe to
Gall. I should like to thank the staff of the following libraries for their
cooperation in making manuscripts and books available to me, often for extended
periods: the departments of Anatomy, Physiology, Pathology, and Psychology of
the University of Cambridge, the British Museum, the Royal Society,
xxiv
the National Central Library, the University of
Edinburgh, and the National Library of Scotland. Sheila Young has provided both
home that allowed me to pursue my research and many helpful comments. Lady
Rosemary Fitzgerald has done an excellent job in checking the manuscript, Mrs
Verna Cole has done the typing, and Mrs Marilyn Pole has been indispensable in
proof reading and preparing the index. At various stages my research has been
supported by grants from the United States Public Health Service, the Wellcome
Foundation (U.S.A.), and King's College, Cambridge.
R.M.Y.
Cambridge 1969