Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain--and How it Changed the World @ richardeward.com

Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain--and How it Changed the World
by Carl Zimmer
from Free Press

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Customer Reviews:

• Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0

• How we came to know the brain as the seat of thought
  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... more info

• Reasonably Good; 3.5
  This is a fairly good popular account of the scientific revolution in 17th century England with an emphasis on the pioneering neuroanatomical research and speculation of the physician Thomas Willis. Written clearly by an experienced science journalist, this book is largely a popularization of the fairly extensive secondary literature on 17th century science and medicine. This is a very interesting period in European history and the narrative features an impressive list of contributors, including not only... more info

• What Willis was talking about
  For about a thousand years, the smartest people of every European generation tried to understand the world around them by reading texts based on scriptures and the works of ancient philosophers. At the end of the thousand years, the living conditions of the average person were the same as they were at the beginning of the thousand years. Life expectancy was around 40, and most people lived in fear of disease and starvation.
  It's fascinating to read in "Soul Made Flesh" how completely the mind of the... more info

• Did the firing of my neurons make me do it?
  As a Christian who upholds the truth of Scripture and Science, I find that Carl Zimmer has written a wonderfully engaging, yet disturbing, introduction to the 17th century beginnings of neuroscience. Zimmer is wonderfully engaging in that he is a gifted story teller. He makes the world of Thomas Willis' 17th century Europe come alive. Tying in the ancient views of Aristotle and Galen, Zimmer leads us quickly into the advent of modern anatomical observation as the basis for Rene Descartes' and William... more info

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