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Carl Zimmer

Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain--and How it Changed the World Paperback – Illustrated, June 6, 2005

by Carl Zimmer (Author)

4.3 56 ratings

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In this unprecedented history of a scientific revolution, award-winning author and journalist Carl Zimmer tells the definitive story of the dawn of the age of the brain and modern consciousness. Told here for the first time, the dramatic tale of how the secrets of the brain were discovered in seventeenth-century England unfolds against a turbulent backdrop of civil war, the Great Fire of London, and plague. At the beginning of that chaotic century, no one knew how the brain worked or even what it looked like intact. But by the century's close, even the most common conceptions and dominant philosophies had been completely overturned, supplanted by a radical new vision of man, God, and the universe.
Presiding over the rise of this new scientific paradigm was the founder of modern neurology, Thomas Willis, a fascinating, sympathetic, even heroic figure at the center of an extraordinary group of scientists and philosophers known as the Oxford circle. Chronicled here in vivid detail are their groundbreaking revelations and the often gory experiments that first enshrined the brain as the physical seat of intelligence -- and the seat of the human soul. Soul Made Flesh conveys a contagious appreciation for the brain, its structure, and its many marvelous functions, and the implications for human identity, mind, and morality.

Print length

384 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Atria
Publication date

June 6, 2005
Dimensions

5.5 x 0.96 x 8.44 inches
ISBN-10

0743272056
ISBN-13

978-0743272056
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Carl Zimmer's illuminating book charts a fascinating chapter in the soul's journey."
-- The New York Times Book Review

"Describes a kind of second Copernican revolution -- one inside the body. Thrilling."
-- Ross King, Los Angeles Times

"This page-turner is a tribute to the heretical thinkers who decoded nature by relying on direct observation rather than received opinion."
-- Wired

"A thumping good read."
-- Timothy Ferris, author of The Whole Shebang and Coming of Age in the Milky Way

About the Author

Carl Zimmer, author of At the Water's Edge, is a frequent contributor to Discover, National Geographic, Natural History, Nature, and Science. He is a winner of the Everett Clark Award for science journalism and the American Institute of Biological Sciences Media Award. A John S. Guggenheim Fellow, he has also received the Pan-American Health Organization Award for Excellence in International Health Reporting and the American Institute of Biological Sciences Media Award. His previous books include Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, Parasite Rex, and At the Water's Edge. He lives in Guilford, Connecticut.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Atria; Illustrated edition (June 6, 2005)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0743272056
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0743272056
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.1 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.96 x 8.44 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,187,169 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,317 in History of Medicine (Books)
- #1,557 in Anatomy (Books)
- #4,101 in History & Philosophy of Science (Books)

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4.3 56 ratings

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Carl Zimmer

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Carl Zimmer is the author of fourteen books about science. His latest book is Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive.

Zimmer’s column Matter appears each week in the New York Times. His writing has earned a number of awards, including the Stephen Jay Gould Prize, awarded by the Society for the Study of Evolution. His previous book, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, won the 2019 National Academies Communication Award. The Guardian named it the best science book of 2018.

Zimmer is a familiar voice on radio programs such as Radiolab and is professor adjunct at Yale University. He is, to his knowledge, the only writer after whom both a species of tapeworm and an asteroid have been named.

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5

56 global ratings

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Vincent Poirier

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

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 7, 2006

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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

6 people found this helpful

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Robert Carlberg

The Long Slow Climb out of the Dark Ages

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 22, 2013

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Zimmer's book though ostensibly about the "discovery of the brain" and its elevation to the center of consciousness is actually more of a description of the slow emergence of reason and rationality from behind the iron wall of religion and bible teachings. It took hundreds of years for the church to stop persecuting scientists, hundreds of years for the scientific method to finally reach a critical mass and begin to hold its own against the tyranny of the Roman Catholic anti-intellectuals. Blasphemy sent many inquiring minds to the gallows or the stake, and kept the scientific Dark Ages in place throughout the Middle Ages and first part of the Renaissance. Time and time again, Zimmer documents thinkers who catch glimmers of deeper truth only to be tortured or killed for publishing, or who refuse to publish for fear of the same, meaning their ideas failed to reach a wider audience. This struggle is not over: even today religious prohibitionists hamper stem cell research, carbon dating of religious artifacts, and fact-based education of a vast number of our schoolchildren. Scriptural falsehoods are still promulgated by the likes of Duane Gish, James Dobson and Henry Morris. It's kind of a sad commentary on secular knowledge that it only gained traction when internal schisms in the established church weakened their hold on universities and the scholars within them.

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Morris T. Reagan

How much truth is here?

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 18, 2009

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This was a wonderful book centered around the life of Thomas Willis, but also concerned with other great men of 17th century England--Christopher Wrenn, William Harvey, Mr. Boyle of Boyle's Law and others. It also gives an interesting picture of life and politics of the time. It's amazing how much Thomas Willis was able to learn about the structure and function of the brain almost 400 years ago. According to the book, before Willis came along, people had no idea that the brain was the seat of thought, feeling and necessary to all the other functions that we now know are dependent on the brain. Rather, according to the book, people considered the brain to be an organ of secondary importance, much the way we view the spleen or the thymus. William Shakespeare died before Willis was born, but there are passages in some of Shakespeare's plays that suggest that Shakespeare had at least some inkling of the brain's function. So one has to wonder a little whether the book may overstate Willis' importance in the discovery of the brain. But don't let this keep you from reading the book. It's a marvelous story and I have no doubt that it is essentially true.

2 people found this helpful

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Paul Carleton

Paradigm Shifts

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 12, 2004

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Not only does Zimmer trace the history of medicine down from Hippocrates and Galen, but provides a personalized account of 1600s England's politics. He describes in appalling detail the mis-treatments inflicted on patients by `doctors' back then. He similarly describes the dissection of cadavers that eventually led to a better understanding of the human body's functioning and its diseases.

What struck me was the parallel between the paradigm shift back then in medicine from concepts based on philosophy and theology, to concepts based on observation and science; and the paradigm shift going on today in `religion' from concepts based on the supernatural, to concepts based on nature and science. If you have an interested in this latter paradigm shift, you might explore my book, "Concepts: A ProtoTheist Quest for Science-Minded Skeptics."

3 people found this helpful

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Dr.David Robson

Carl Zimmer has done justice in bringing Thomas Willis to ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 7, 2016

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Carl Zimmer has done justice in bringing Thomas Willis to life. It is a fascinating read and immaculately researched. Willis was the first person to get to understand the human brain and to see how the different parts had different functions. It is a must for the student of neurology and neuroscience

One person found this helpful

j illingworth

An excellent review of the important changes in the scientific approach ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 3, 2015

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An excellent review of the important changes in the scientific approach to knowledge as we moved out of the age of alchemy, guess work, and blind belief in the writings of Ancient Greek and Roman philosophers and into the age of true scientific research as by Davy, Faraday and others in the early 18th century.

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