Origins of Neuroscience: A History of Explorations into Brain Function Reprint Edition

very poor print quality!

It's the most complete books about history of neurology I've ever seen. The only defect is the soft cover.

Informative but written too much like a long entry in an encyclopedia. No drama, no storytelling flair, just a an annotated chronology. I could see looking up a name or a discovery in it, but I couldn't imagine reading it from cover to cover.

The first thing I noticed about this book certainly differed from my expectations. It is really more of a textbook than a book designed for the casual reader. I should have noticed this from the description, but the book is 462 pages in length, nonfiction, organized into chapters like any other textbook, and is information rich. It spans an enormous amount of material, including ancient evidence of trepanning, progressing theories on brain and sensory function, a parade of landmark figures in neurological history, all the way up to treatment of brain injury in the pre-World War I era. It also includes several pages of references at the end of each chapter, for the reader's convenience.
The first portion of the book deals with my primary interest in choosing this book--man's understand of the brain in antiquity. The book discusses evidence of trepanning taking place in ancient Egypt and Peru. While I was already aware of most of this, the author reveals that the frequency of surgical evidence found on the skull is far higher than I would guess.
The ancient Greeks and Romans had some interesting medical ideas about the four classical elements (earth, air, fire, and water) which eventually became the four humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile). Their beliefs about the human body made it taboo to dissect a human cadaver, and so much of their understanding about basic anatomy stems from either first-hand surgical knowledge, or observations based on animals. As a result, there was a lot of disagreement between scholars on the function of various anatomical features. Followers of Aristotle believed that the body's soul dwelt within the heart, not the brain, and that the brain served as a way to cool the hot-blooded passions of the heart. Despite this, the great Roman physician Galen, believed the brain to be the seat of the soul, and not the heart. Ironically, it took something as horrible as the Black Plague of the Middle Ages to bring about a much-needed paradigm shift in medicine and neurology. It became obvious that the four-humors school of medicine and anatomy was completely inadequate. Also, the shock of constant death and endless supply of cadavers made human autopsy less taboo.
Physicians also strove to describe the purpose and function of the nervous system. The Greeks and Romans did not differentiate between the lymphatic system and the peripheral nerves. Galen, though, does differentiate between grey and white matter. He hypothesized that the softer tissue was able to take on sensory impressions from the world, and that the white matter was tougher and more fibrous. Galen was also the first to describe the optic nerve as an extension of the brain, and noted that the soft optic nerve would be particularly sensitive to impression. However, scientists of the Renaissance knew the difference between the nervous and lymphatic systems, and that the brain conveyed messages to the body. Their understanding of how nerves transmitted information was limited though, since electricity had yet to be discovered by this point. Instead, some hypothesized that nerves were hollow tubes that worked like a pneumatic system. Others surmised that messages were conveyed by pnumena animalis, or animal spirits--a paradigm that remained in place for a disturbingly long time.
Another subject of interest was ancient descriptions of the sensory systems. This is particularly interesting in the case of the eye since the people studying it did not have a good understanding of optics. In particular, the lens is often depicted as spherical instead of now familiar lens shape. Also, some scholars mistakenly thought the sclera of the eye as the area sensitive to light as recently as the early Renaissance. Shortly after Newton elucidated many of our modern principles of optics, the drawings of the eye slowly began to reflect their true anatomy instead of what they were perceived to be. Also, these erroneous drawings may be a consequence of the eye's anatomy--since it is hard to dissect something gelatinous. Surprisingly, the Greeks were aware that air is the medium that transmits sound to us--still they had no knowledge of how sound is perceived and sent to the brain. There are accounts though of the use of ear-trumpets for the hearing impaired. From the Renaissance until recently, olfaction and gestation were a relative mystery. While it was known that the two are interrelated, the two were usually treated separately. Apparently, there was quite a debate about whether or not odorants would be able to reach the olfactory bulb in the nasal sinus. There is an interesting plate showing an experiment where they used a chamber shaped like a horse's sinus and wafted smoke into it to see if would be able to reach the area where the olfactory bulb is located.
Much more recently, morphine and effective anesthesia have allowed the advent of modern, complex surgeries and neurosurgeries. Prior to this, anesthesia was usually limited to alcohol and some mild painkillers. Surgeons were often graded on their speed as much as any other quality, and during the civil war a good surgeon was able to amputate a leg in less than two minutes. Surgeries usually involved strapping the patient down or having several people hold them down, and the surgeon had to be well-practiced at operating on a moving target. Indeed, this text describes experiments by a scientist on a fresh animal skull attempting to gauge how long it would take to create a hole with a stone scraper or a trepanning tool. Skull fractures were also quite a fright, and some of the scariest plates in the book are of devices involving clamps, a drill, and a lever for relief a depressed skull fracture. In close chronological order, nitrous oxide and ether both became available and were demonstrated to be potent anesthetics. After this, extended surgery was pioneered, including the first neurosurgery. The book includes several short anecdotes about some of the early case-studies. Also, experiments were made possible on lesioned and decerebrated animals, allowing some of the most basic experiments of neurology to take place, and laying the framework for people like Broca.
Overall, I would not recommend this book for an independent reader looking for an enjoyable text. On the other hand, a professor looking for an interesting text that takes historical events in neurology and puts them into context may be quite interested in this book. Another benefit of this book as a textbook is that it is quite affordable, even as a supplemental text. While there is a ton of information, I do feel that the authors failed to put it in a very stimulating format. Chapters are information-dense, and read like a textbook, but unlike most textbooks, the information is not brought together in a visually stimulating format. The entire book is printed in black and white, and has no color plates. There are several interesting reproductions of drawings by early anatomists and surgical texts (that would not have benefited from a color printing), but the preponderance of figures in this text are paintings of great men who have been dead for ages (but were almost certainly painted in color). Also, other than a few photographs of skulls in the first chapter, they are otherwise absent. Curiously, the summaries I expected at the end of each chapter were also conspicuously absent--limiting its appeal as a textbook when it comes time to study. In short, this book is exactly what the title reads, but is not much for a personal read.

Stanley Finger's Origins of Neuroscience is an extremely useful and entertaining introduction to history of neuroscience. It entails multicultural contributions to philosophy of mind, and neural science from antiquity to contemporary times. In my opinion, this book is a 'must' for people interested in evolution of neural science and theories of mind from a neuroscientist point of view.

This book is a wonderful introduction into the history of neurosciences and our understanding of the brain. It is an excellent read for the physician, scientist, or brain enthusiast. It is easy to follow and well organized. Finger captures the excitement of the important discoveries about the brain and diseases of the brain. I highly recommend this book for anyones shelf who collects history of medicine books.