The Evolution of Depression

It seems to be a popular topic these days....

Book Review: Wilson and Cory, The Evolutionary Epidemiology of Mania and Depression: A Theoretical and Empirical Interpretation of Mood Disorders

We should never judge books by their covers or indeed their typeset. Were we to do so, then this unglamorous-looking book by Daniel Wilson and Gerald Cory would be found wanting on both counts and in the process, we would end up ignoring an interesting set of questions, arguments, and hypotheses that claim to announce the new field of evolutionary epidemiology. Yet, just as the cover and typeset imply little concern for the aesthetic sensibilities of audiences, so too is it unclear who the authors intend for this manifesto. Although spotted with occasional references to arguments by Aristotle, Bacon, Nietzsche, Darwin, Tuke, and other figures of historical and scientific import, this cannot be a book intended for historians of science or medicine. It seems equally unlikely that most psychiatrists, ethologists, neuroscientists, or geneticists will have the time to dedicate to it – it is long but possesses a rather shorter message that the authors could have condensed into a review article. Nevertheless, this book may appeal to any scientist or clinician with a passion for big pictures, synoptic arguments, and theoretically ambitious syntheses. Its primary audience is probably one that does not yet exist – a new generation of scientists and clinicians who may become enamoured with its ideas and start applying Darwinian insights to medicine (if they ever get around to reading the book).

In this work, Daniel Wilson and Gerald Cory ask a very large question. They wish to know how and why it is that certain psychiatric disorders (presumed now to be at least partially genetic in origin) should appear with a population frequency far greater than evolutionary theories would permit for conditions so seemingly mal-adaptive (see pp. 130-1). In a subsequent argument that ranges across contemporary theories on the evolution of human sociality and its normal limits, through to discussions of psychopathology, population genetics, game theory, anthropology, sociology, and ultimately psychiatry, Wilson and Cory arrive at the startling conclusion that “neuropathologies of talent” probably possess evolutionary advantages that promote their survival in the population. While these neuropathologies appear, the authors claim, to be (and often are) mismatched to their industrial and post-industrial societies, the advantages conditions like mania or bipolar disorders bring in terms of innovation, creativity, intensity, imagination, ambition, and even sexual desire, offset the destructive tendencies that accompany these conditions, such as: self-medication with alcohol and drugs; paranoia; megalomania; and domestic instability. They thus pithily summarize the implications for psychiatry in their penultimate chapter: “It is important that any genetic therapies not assume disease is simply disease. Certain polymorphisms of at least utility are at risk of misguided therapy. Surely other gene systems now notable only as causes of individual disease will come to be seen, in the light of evolutionary epidemiological analysis, as fundamentally salubrious characteristics (p. 295).”

Wilson and Cory’s argument is elegant in its simplicity. If their theory is correct, moreover, then it is also easy to see that clinical and cultural perceptions of certain psychiatric diseases would necessarily have to change. The strength of their work is that it does do not sink into an unending search for neural structures that might circumscribe normal behaviour and thus explain pathological disorder. Instead, the authors search for genetic aetiologies: hence long and short discussions of Hamilton’s Rule, Hardy-Weinberg equilibriums, quasi-Mendelian genetics, and Hawk/Dove strategies appear with greater frequency than do discussions of the brain and nervous system. This strength, however, also reveals the central weaknesses of the text. Often the links between the many different areas of scientific knowledge are asserted rather than revealed, necessary constructs become black boxes (e.g. reptilian neo-cortex), hypothetical species (i.e. Hawks and Doves) supplement for hard examples, affective states (e.g. ego and empathy) become reified, and the relationship between reductive biological structures (e.g. neurotransmitters) and correlative behaviours (e.g. affection) assumed obvious and demonstrated. In consequence, like many clinical and scientific works that attempt a general statement, Wilson and Cory’s theoretical and empirical treatment, while rich and thoughtful, cannot fully deliver. Thus this work, which nevertheless represents a fine attempt at synthesis, may not get the attention it deserves.

Book Review: L. S. Jacyna, Medicine and Modernism: A Biography of Sir Henry Head

Amanda Mordavsky Caleb, at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, has published the following review of L. S. Jacyna's Medicine and Modernism: A Biography of Sir Henry Head.

L. S. Jacyna's study of Henry Head is one of the finest medical biographies ever written - I say that without fear of exaggeration. It is a subtle, sensitive, and rich portrait, and one that deserves to be on the bookshelf of any neurology or neuroscience enthusist.

Since, however, Jacyna was my graduate adviser, I offer Caleb's words of praise rather than my own:

Students of the humanities and the sciences (and those who dare to cross the boundaries) are very familiar with the arguments regarding the separation of the humanities from the sciences. Historically, the focus has been largely on the nineteenth century, largely due to the influence of works such as Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots (1983) and George Levine’s Darwin and the Novelists (1992). Less prominent is the work on the relationship between science and modernism—although recently there has been an increase in articles on modernism and science, as well as university courses on modernism and physics. Medicine and modernism, however, have been passed over, specifically the work of Sir Henry Head. Head’s contributions to the development of medical science and specifically neurology are well-known to those who study the history of science. However, his role as a modernist writer and thinker has been only touched upon in passing, and never with much analysis of how his medical training influenced his modernist view. Stephen Jacyna seeks to correct this oversight by providing a biography of Head that represents his intersections between the worlds of medicine and modernism.

Jacyna’s biography is split into two halves: the first three chapters addresses Head’s professional career as a neurologist; the last three chapters consider Head’s personal and artistic life, specifically the “rag books” he and Ruth Mehew used to record their artistic views. Although this is perhaps an unusual approach to organizing a biography, it does allow Jacyna the opportunity to discuss the public and private in a separate manner, and to dedicate more attention to Mehew herself, who, like many wives of scientists, has been neglected by all academic communities. However, it seems to suggest a separation between the doctor and the poet; rather than bridging the gap between medicine and modernism, it increases it, at least on a superficial level.

If the reader can forgive this structural decision, the biography itself is excellent. Most of the previous work on Head was written by his professional colleagues and lacked the care Jacyna places on his private life, specifically his relationship with Mehew. Jacyna is a well-respected historian of medicine, and his skill at reconstructing the relevance of Head’s work to the development of neurology and psychology is unparalleled. Through a careful reconstruction of Head’s early career schooling at Cambridge and Halle through to his neurological experiments with W. H. R. Rivers, the reader is exposed to both Head’s drive and his importance to the development of neurological studies. Of particular note is the attention Head paid to his medical experiments, including his well-known experiment with Rivers in which he traced the neurological sensation by severing cutaneous nerves in his own arm. Jacyna expertly interweaves his own analysis with the letters of Head, Rivers and Mehew to create a comprehensive depiction of Head’s dedication to his profession and his passion.

Jacyna’s ability to historicize Head the medical man is not surprising; what is remarkable is his analysis of Head’s appreciation of and role in the development of modernism, which is evident in both his relationship with Mehew and his careful considerations of the connections between neurology and art. The second half of this biography is almost as much about Mehew as it is about Head, and while this might seem unorthodox, it is essential to understand how Head developed as both a medical man and a modernist thinker and writer. Mehew, as Jaycna rightly claims, was “something of a fin-de-siècle ‘New Woman,’” and it is her influence as a forward-thinking woman that helped to shape some of Head’s own views of aesthetics (155). What is particularly intriguing are their “rag books” which they used as a means of communicating their thoughts on art and literature, as well as a means to record their favourite or meaningful literary passages. The works of George Gissing, Henry James, and Gustave Flaubert all held prominent positions within the volumes, and certainly influenced some of Head’s own views of aestheticism.

The “rag books” are an interesting insight into the thoughts and feelings of both Head and Mehew, but far more fascinating in regards to modernism is Head’s own theory of aesthetics, which was shaped by his experience as a neurologist. Head supported the idea of “phenomenalism,” which “connoted a receptiveness to sensory experience—free from any presuppositions about what might underlie those sensations—on the part of an observer who then sought to give these impressions an adequate linguistic representation” (223). As Jacyna points out, phenomenalism would have been appealing to both scientists and artists—particularly modernist—as both were seeking the same truths through impression. Head also recognized this connection; through his poetry and criticism, the reader can see how phenomenalism and impressionism allow for the connection between the neurological and the literary. This is the true strength of Jacyna’s argument regarding medicine and modernism and Head’s involvement in both: Head recognized the physiological connection between the image and the sensory experience, thereby providing a scientific understanding of impressionism and modernism.

While the structure of this biography is perhaps questionable, the quality of the content is undeniable. This is a thoughtful, critical—and oftentimes compassionate—view of an overlooked figure of the modernist period. Jacyna expertly intertwines two disciplines that are indeed complimentary, demonstrating how Sir Henry Head was a bridge between medicine and modernism, and suggesting that if science was Head’s mistress, modernism was his muse

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Featured Neurologist: Joseph Godwin Greenfield

Joseph Godwin Greenfield (1884-1958) was born in Edinburgh, the son of W. S. Greenfield, Professor of Pathology and Medicine. Educated at Edinburgh University, where he trained under Byrom Bramwell, Greenfield qualified in 1908. After holding resident appointments at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, Greenfield moved to London where he was appointed pathologist at the National Hospital for Paralysis and Epilepsy in 1910. In 1914 he succeeded Samuel Alexander Kinnier Wilson as Dean at that Hospital, retiring in 1949. A frequent adviser to the Medical Research Council, Greenfield, along with others, founded the Neuropathological Club. This became the British Neuropathological Society in 1962. Remembered more for his laboratory technique than his lecturing style, Greenfield’s many publications, books and articles, gave him a significant reputation internationally. His first major work was Pathology of the Nervous System, which he co-authored with E. Farquhar Buzzard, appeared in 1921. His major textbook – Neuropathology – appeared in 1958. He was married and had two children.

This article is part of an on-going series of biographies published in this blog.

Neuroculture Watch

The blogsphere was really excited by Emily Yoffe's article on Slate on seeking behaviour. It didn't warrant that much attention. The only fitting comment I can muster: "your brain isn't doing this, you are".

New Book

Martin Skov and Oshin Vartanian have edited a new book entitled Neuroaesthetics.

Primary Source: International Neurological Congress Berne 1931

A fascinating letter: Adolfo M. Sierra to Henry Aslop Riley, 16 January 1931

Honorable Colega:

En contestación a su atenta de próximo pasado Diciembre de 1930, informo a Ud. Lo siguiente:


1. Que debido a los sucesos politicos que han agitado mi pais, a partir del mes de Septiembre de 1930, no he podido ocuparme de los asuntos del Congress Neurologique International. Debo mantenerme alejado de mi pais por algún tiempo.

2. La revolución que estalló en mi pais en dicha fecha ha traido otros hombres a las direcciones cientificias y politicas de la Argentina. La Sociedad de Neurologia Argentina deberá cambiar sus autoridades.

3. Yo personalmente, por las razones indicades, no podré continuar prestando mi concurso a la mesa directive del próximo Congreso en Berna. – Esto mismo ya lo he comunicado a nuestro colega Charles Dubois.

4. Entiendo, Dr. Henry Alsop Riley, que Ud. debe dirigirse directamente al Presidente actual del Comité Ejecutivo de Cuarto Congreso Nacional de Medicina. El Profesor José Arce seria el hombre indicado en la Argentina para que éste designe los miembros que deberán constituir la Comisión Argentina del próximo Congress Naurologique International.

5. El Profesor José Arce es politico que se halla en el Gobierno podrá serle a Ud. muy útil. Sin pérdida de tiempo estimo que Ud. Debe escribirle. (Santa Fé, N 1171, Buenos Aires).

Sin otro motivo, salúdale amistosamente:

Adolfo M Sierra

My thanks to Fabio de Sio for translation:

Honorable Colleague:

In response to your letter this year from December 1930, I wish to inform you that:

1. Due to the political events that have shaken my country, from the month of September 1930, I was unable to handle the affairs of the International Neurological Congress. I had to stay away from my country for some time.

2. The revolution that took place in my Country at that date brought new people to the scientific and political lead of Argentina. The Argentinean Society of Neurology should change its authorities.

3. I personally, for the reasons indicated, cannot continue to preside in my office as it relates to the next Congress in Berne. The same as I reported to Charles Dubois.

4. It is my understanding, Dr Henry Alsop Riley, that you have to address directly the present president of the Executive committee of the Fourth National Congress of Medicine. Prof. Jose Arce would be the man in Argentina to designate the members of the Argentinian Commission for the next International Neurological Congress.

5. Professor Jose Arce is a member of the new Government and could be very useful to you. I urge you Sir to write to him as soon as possible. (Santa Fe, No. 1171, Buenos Aires).

Best wishes:

Adolfo M. Sierra

Key terms in the Philosophy of Mind

This text, when it finally appears, will likely be of great use.

Critical Response: Fernando Vidal, “Brainhood, anthropological figure of modernity”

Dr. Fernando Vidal is an extraordinary thinker. He was the first to call attention to the rise of the “cerebral subject,” a conception of the self that proposes that identity and the brain are the same thing – as Vidal puts it: “that the brain is the only part of the body we need in order to be ourselves” (p. 6). Vidal’s scholarship is some of the best in the history of the neurosciences. He has single-handily inspiried many graduate students and young academicians, and mainly because he has something to profound to say and supports his profundity with extremely rigorous research. His scholarship, moreover, is a cure for the now widespread disease of “neuro-optimism”, a social condition whose ideological proponents presuppose with much hype the transcendence of all things neuroscientific and the simultaneous applicability of neuroscientific knowledge to everything that involves humans. It is not, however, the business of “The Neuro Times” to laud anyone (or for that matter to create animosity). In other words, I presume that the merits of any scholar (and his or her scholarship) featured in “The Dictionary of Neurology Project” are self-evident.

E. H. Carr’s famous series of lectures at Oxford titled “What is History?” surely number among the more brilliant passages ever written on history. In his fifth lecture titled “History as Progress”, Carr offers an observation that frames this critical response to Vidal’s essay. Carr wrote,

…only the future can provide the key to the interpretation of the past; and it is only in this sense that we can speak of an ultimate objectivity in history. It is at once the justification and the explanation of history that the past throws light on the future and the future throws light on the past.

For Carr, then, the judgment of posterity would provide the ultimate objectivity to contemporary history, while also shaping its subjects and frameworks and simultaneously offering explanations of the origins of human progress. At first, Carr’s claim appears little better than those trite aphorisms: “history is written by the victors” and “save us from the condescension of the historians”. But in fact, his remark indicates the central problem entailed by Vidal’s historical approach to the “cerebral subject”. For if, as Vidal claims, the “cerebral subject” first took shape in the thought of Descartes, Willis, and Locke, why was it only discovered after the “Decade of the Brain”? As I shall make clear shortly, this is not the cute rhetorical question it appears but rather the essence of our problem for understanding the history of the neurosciences and their stature in contemporary society.

I.


In the introduction to his essay, Vidal begins by noting the new cache of the neurosciences and the consequent legitimacy that cache has lent to the notion of brainhood – the idea that we are our brains. Importantly, Vidal claims that we can construe the “cerebral subject” as the archetypical “anthropological figure inherent to modernity”. He furthermore suggests that an originating thread of this conception arose in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, where Vidal argues Locke “redefined ‘person’ as a continuity of memory and consciousness.” And thus demonstrated that each individual had inalienable rights that “could in principle be attached to any substance” but were “in practice…necessarily located in the brain as organ responsible for the functions with which the self was identified.” (p. 7). What follows this powerful introduction is a provocative and curious story, one moreover that Vidal has arranged in a peculiar and highly noteworthy fashion.

In his first section – “Hoping for Breakthroughs” – Vidal examines the divisions of labor in formation and their tropes that manifested ultimately out of The Decade of the Brain and subsequent calls for The Century of the Brain. This period, perhaps 1945 to the present, brought with it a variety incarnations. Against such scary backdrops as Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report, the neurosciences appeared ominous and raised “the spector of mind control” and Owellianism. What we might call mind as machine optimism also led to many assertions and these in turn fostered the formation of new disciplines like neuroethics and neurophilosophy. These fields – and many others – contributed to a staggering transformation in the concept of being human, some of it banal, some of it profound, but almost all of it marked by a “self-serving function” that sustained the ideology of the cerebral subject and re-enforced the “alliance between the norms and ideals of individualistic autonomy and self reliance” and “the prestige of the advanced technology supposed to demonstrate that we are our brains” (p. 10).

Where might this ideology of the cerebral subject have originated. In two subsequent sections titled “The Self Before Brainhood” and “Origins of Brainhood”, Vidal remarks that brainhood appears to be a Western formation inextricable from earlier conceptions of self, body, I, and the soul. With the breakdown of the Aristotelian system in seventeenth century Europe, the soul and mind became reduced into one entity. The animal spirits contributed to human volition, and with the localizationist debate that sprang up between the schools of Thomas Willis and René Descartes, the question of the seat of the soul became entangled with the notion promulgated by both thinkers that the brain and self were connected. According to Vidal, these debates represented a less clear formulation of brainhood. A clear version appeared in the writings of John Locke. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke described identity as being contingent upon the ability to engage in thinking, reason, and reflection in different places at different times. “Thus, if the soul of a prince, containing the consciousness of the prince’s past life,” Vidal paraphrases, “is transferred into a cobbler’s soulless body, then the being who resembles the cobbler would in fact be the prince” (p. 13). From this formulation, it follows, Vidal argues, that, “bodies become things we have, not things we are” (p. 14).

These provocative insights lead to the seemingly unavoidable conclusion that conceptions arising from brainhood anticipated many of the central insights of the modern neurosciences (broadly defined). “Thus” Vidal writes, “even thought the rise of the cerebral subject is irreducible to the history of the brain sciences, any attempt to understand how it became a central figure of modernity must give this history a central role” (p. 14). And hence a short history follows, the details of which I presume will be familiar enough to regular readers that for brevity I shall summarize only. Vidal moves rapidly through currents of intellectual history in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. The studies of von Haller, the phrenology of Franz Joseph Gall and Jean Pierre Flourens, the aphasia studies of Paul Pierre Broca, the comparatively more recent studies of Oskar Vogt, Wilder Penfield and Roger Sperry, as well as research in cybernetics and cognitive psychology receive succinct attention. The thrust of this wide-ranging intellectual history is neatly concluded with Vidal’s remark that workers in the contemporary neurosciences show a remarkable capacity for cannibalising a diet of diverse facts and regurgitating them as “the ideology of brainhood” (p. 20).

In the final two sections of the essay, Vidal turns to the contemporary moment and the question: what is to be done? (Note that he does not state the question this way.) The penultimate section – “The Situation Today” – reviews the recent literature that might be described as comprising the ideology of brainhood. The sources are popular, scientific, academic, cinematic, and sometimes even theological. All seemingly equate personhood with brainhood. Indeed, the brain, Vidal writes, emerges “as the somatic limits of the self, so that I cease to be (myself) if I lose it by amputation”. Such social formations invariably lend themselves to a radical reformulation of the human sciences, of which neuroethics, neurolaw, and neurophilosophy are manifestations. Invariably much of the work of these fields relies on marketing, popular conceptions, self-promotion, and likely bad science, but their message also capitalizes on modernist dreams – the promise of better knowledge and better technology.

Where does all of this leave us? For Vidal, the answer seemingly resides in reorienting statements – my mirror neurons don’t think; I think. My brain doesn’t love, I love. This strong position bears some resemblance to the positions of M. R. Bennett and P.M.S. Hacker, especially in the way that it calls attention to what those authors describe as the “mereological fallacy”. But Vidal locates his position not within an Aristotelian-Wittgenstein-ian philosophical tradition, but rather in the hope and promise of artistic enterprises – especially their open-ended unwillingness to see and declare progress and “their unwillingness to bring closure to questions such as that of free will”. It is hope only, because Vidal ends with a series of questions for consideration as well as an injunction to avoid reducing neuroimages “to an arbitrary manipulation of numbers” or “raising them to the status of portraits of the self” (p. 27).

II.

No one could or should accuse Vidal of failing to deliver. Like his other published works and public presentations, Vidal’s eloquence and argumentative power threatens to overwhelm his readers into submission. But I think there is much still to be said: E. H. Carr’s observation that it is only posterity that can order the past in conjunction with a consideration of the structure of Vidal’s essay are fitting places to begin (although I shall not end there).

Firstly, it is highly noticeable that much of this essay focuses on the period after the Second World War II – indeed really after 1980. “Breakthroughs”, the first section following the introduction, is mainly framed in modern terms; it is followed by a brief consideration of the origins of brainhood and its subsequent journey from the 1700s to the present. From here, Vidal returns to the contemporary moment – c. 1990-2009. Furthermore, a substantial proportion – though not all – of the primary and secondary works cited in his essay are from that period and afterwards as well.

Vidal’s essay acquires in consequence a polemic edge driven by concerns about the immediate urgency of now. Yet missing from this sense of urgency is a real explanation of “why brainhood” and "why particularly brainhood now"? And this requires, moreover, a stronger answer to the question of “how brainhood?” The answer, I would hypothesize, lies in the particular power of historical narrative and the acquisition of an official narrative amongst the brain sciences. Indeed, I would assert that a concept like the “cerebral subject” is only possible because of that historical narrative. To us the spectre that Carr’s comment should raise is that history itself has been the chief vehicle of propaganda for the neurosciences – a propaganda that Vidal unintentionally replicates.

There is no particular reason that we have to construe early modern research on the brain, heart, nerves, or muscles as having any real bearing on the modern neurosciences (see Elizabeth Green Musselman on this point). Vidal acknowledges this view, but argues nonetheless that these early conceptions of brainhood anticipated the future studies of the science and medicine of the nervous system. When construed as broadly as the “anthropological figure of modernity”, we might even generalize that claim to state that they prefigured capitalism, secularism, and the Enlightenment. And that, of course, is the point. “Brainhood” is not really a thing at all – it is a symptom of deeper historical forces. Brainhood, in other words, does not really possess a history. It was not there until we decided to see it. One can imagine easily that Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding and Second Treatise could be described as originating documents of practically every work of subsequent significance in Western culture. Putting it differently, to what could we not ascribe in some way to Locke?

This accusation is not intended in anyway to suggest that Vidal is finding what he wants to find in historical sources – he is not tilting a lance at windmills. However, we are all often guilty of ignoring what we wish not to see. And that is an entirely different statement that demands that we ask of what benefit is the discovery of a past for brainhood? To whom does such a construction offer advantages? It is curious that it should be described as an anthropological figure of modernity: why not an economic figure? a scientific one? even (given all of the limits of the knowledge Vidal so carefully reveals) a metaphysical one? Conceptually, brainhood does little to critique discipline building claims that workers in the contemporary neurosciences routinely make for their place in the distant past. If anything, it further justifies those claims. Brainhood furthermore seems to reassert the utility of intellectual history frameworks, even if it embroiders them with the thread of rather more recent vogues in the humanities.

Against this concept of brainhood, I would offer the notion of “invented traditions” and in particular the most vulgar materialist version of invented traditions (see Ranger and Hobsbawm). It is well-known that invented traditions offer individuals enormous advantages. The origins of the neurosciences are so regularly claimed to reside in antiquity (an ahistorical tendency Vidal notes on p. 10) that claims that their origins are better traced from the nineteenth century are construed as controversial. And despite some hard hitting justifications, claims for why we might consider them of even more recent origin are simply dismissed out of hand. Yet the question that few have made much effort to answer is in what sense were any of these notions of brain, mind, nerves, vital and animal spirits scholarly and public knowledge? Who possessed knowledge of these things? How many of the gentleman – to say nothing of the women and peasants or peoples beyond Europe – of the early modern period had any notion whatsoever of these concepts?

Even today, the notion that we are our brains has currency in only a few circles – had they attained a level of far-reaching public dissemination by the late eighteenth century? Literature, phrenology, animal magnetism, electricity, and even George Cheyne’s The English Malady suggests that the concepts had some public and scholarly resonance, but one could connect that resonance with a myriad of cultural formations of which the cerebral status of humans would be but one incarnation. In any case, resonance can hardly be considered the originator of an “anthropological figure of modernity”, especially one as high-minded as “brainhood”.

There is, of course, an alternative possibility: Brainhood could have originated in the period after the Second World War - perhaps even as late as the "Decade of the Brain. The context would thus be the “Cold War” or its end, the comparatively rapid deindustrialization of the West, the ageing of many Western societies (and their correlative increases per capita of neurological diseases), and in at least the United States the significant disparities in medical care and expectations between wealthy and poor, as well as each demographics’ intense preoccupation with matters of identity. The myths of these societies also included intense pre-occupations with notions of meritocracy, which when combined with eugenic thought or socio-biology could easily contribute to the formation of an ideology that represented failure in neurobiological terms.

Why might such a cultural form have arisen? The government money that flooded the neurosciences in the 1990s created whole new divisions of labour. The students of the neurosciences had no conception of the post university careers they would find. Some went to medical school; some wrote popular books; some became entrepreneurs; and doubtlessly more than a few ended-up having nothing to do with the neurosciences. The amounts of money flooding these fields meant than inordinately large amount of information was generated about the neurosciences relative to most other areas of science (with the exception of genetics, which were also highly "neuro" by the mid-1990s). It is not in the least bit surprising that many workers in these fields sought to capitalize on their expertise through the development of a sub-specialty attached to these fields. With the collapse of the “dot-coms” at the end of the “Decade of the Brain,” three fields with enormous innovative and economic potential remained: nanotechnology, banking, and neuroscience. Banking had enormous supplies of capital, but the neurosciences had benefited from 10 years of government patronage. The fields that sprang out the neurosciences often fed upon the others: neuroeconomics certainly seems now the most overtly capitalistic, but springs in nanotechnology certainly fed streams as well.

For the entrepreneur in the neurosciences, the ideology of the cerebral subject was and is profoundly important. Moreover, the more ancient the origins of that ideology, so much the better (the oldest method of quackery has been to insist upon the importance of knowledge of the ancients). Vidal, like the artists he celebrates (as well as the author of this post), is embedded in this phenomenon as well. It seems inescapable – the new frontier of economy and therefore culture and society. Yet, Vidal presents himself as a critic of these formulations. If so, then a critical inquiry into this phenomenon requires not a knowledge of our connections to the past, but an examined awareness of our place in the present. The future is here and already – as Carr suggested – it begins to cast a new order on the past.

A Quack Doctor in San Francisco as Reported in Dublin 1875

A chapter as yet unwritten in the history of clinical neurology would consider the linkages between unorthodox practitioners and neurology. The following anecodote recorded in Dublin's Freeman's Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser in 1875 suggests that there must be quite a story to tell:

It is now the province of the Press to crush out recognised illnesses in the social system, which in earlier days were peculiarly the province of the police. The San Francisco News-Letter, whose especial business would seem to be to amuse not only the San Franciscans, but the universe generally, has assumed a more serious tone. No less a task than the clearance array of medical charlatans has been assumed by our contemporary, and as a natural result there have been actions for libel. In the latest, the quack plaintiff was a Dr. Flattery, and his appearance in the witness-box created quite a sensation. The News-Letter had called Flattery a quack and Flattery brought into court a tattered weather “stained piece of sheekskin,” which he declared to be his diploma. It purported to have issued from the Cincinnati Eclectic Medical Institute. Colonel Barnes, counsel for the News-Letter, then asked Flattery to identify a paper in his own writing, in which he stated that he had graduated in the Ohio Medical College. Thus confronted with more diplomas than he wished, the plaintiff said he wrote the Ohio document himself for the puporse of “humbugging the slimy den” – meaning the News-Letter office. He was then handed a pamphlet or thesis on “Noorollergy,” which, after a good deal of bickering and sparring was discovered to be intended for Neurology. Having got thus far, it was discovered that our physician did not know the meaning of the word. The judge, who was waggish throughout, requested him to give up “ the caressing way in which he manipulated his nose” and to answer the questions in an audible voice. Then counsel started a spelling bee, which ruined the poor quack altogether. Being asked to name the leg-bones he replied “the femur” and could not get further. Therapeutics he announced as a branch of material medica. The bone which terminates the spinal column – the coccyx – he took in the plural number, the coccyges and declared he could not spell the word. In the end it was made quite clear that the fell had no right whatever to practise medicine and surgery, and the case was dismissed. During the proceedings he had torn up a paper in displeasure, and the Judge had fined him $20. He was not able to pay the fine, so he cannot have done much harm to the San Franciscans. It is to be hoped that “Dr Flattery” will not take in Ireland on the route which he will doubtless speedily set down for his especial traverse. There are already too many of his tribe in Dublin doing irremediable harm every day.

International Society for the History of the Neurosciences

Interview with Professor Marjorie Perlman Lorch, President of the International Society for the History of Neuroscience

Marjorie Lorch: I am very honoured to be the International Society for the History of the Neurosciences President for 2009-10.

Stephen Casper: Tell us a bit more about the Society.

ML: It was founded in 1995 with the first meeting in Montreal. The annual meeting alternates between North America and Europe to encourage attendants from around the world. The group has grown over the years and has a thriving journal which comes out four times a year called the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences: Basic and Clinical Perspectives.

SC: That’s a long title. Why does it specify basic and clinical perspectives?

ML: I think it reflects something very special about both the journal and the Society. We gather people who come to the study of the history of the neurosciences from many different academic backgrounds and disciplines, having diverse research agendas. I think this Society is unique in providing a forum which encompasses neurologists, neurosurgeons, therapists, cognitive scientists, linguists, historians, and philosophers to share their common interest in the study of the nervous system. There is a positive atmosphere at the meetings, a real interest in hearing about scholarship being carried out using methods or analytical frameworks which may be very different from one’s own.

SC: Yes, I have been to several meetings and have found them very stimulating.

ML: I think the most amazing thing is that people who have met each other at the Society’s meetings have gone on to develop international and interdisciplinary research collaborations which have led to presentations and journal articles of original scholarship.

SC: Tell us about your plans for the coming year.

ML: We will hold the 15th annual meeting the Society in Paris, France from June 15-19 2010. Our hosts will be Dr. Jean-Gaël Barbara (Chair of local organising committee) in collaboration with the Ecole Normale Supérieure d’Ulm with Prof. Claude Debru. There is a growing body of French researchers interested in this area. They have a very active Club d’Histoire des Neurosciences, and a community of historians of the neurosciences within the national Société des Neurosciences. This meeting will be an opportunity for the French scholars to network with the larger international community in the Society.

SC: Will there be any special features of this meeting?

ML: Paris has a rich history of research in the neurosciences. During the meeting we will take the opportunity to visit the old Ecole de médecine, the old Anatomical amphitheatre, and the Musée Dupuytren which is the home of Broca’s famous Leborgne brain in the Cloître des Cordeliers. We will also go to the Salpêtrière Hospital to see the Charcot library and listen to an organ recital in the hospital chapel by Bernard Lechevalier. The Society Banquet will be held at the Maison de l’Amérique Latine, which was Charcot’s former Paris residence in the boulevard Saint-Germain.

SC: It sounds like it will be a full schedule. How can people find out more about the meeting and submitting an abstract?

ML: The meeting announcement is posted on our website www.ishn.org and the call for papers will be sent out in the autumn. The programme committee will consider abstracts on any topic broadly related to the history of basic, clinical or behavioral neurosciences including those drawing on individual perspectives, events or technologies from any time period and any part of the world. Anyone interested in finding out more can of course contact me directly at m.lorch@bbk.ac.uk

SC: It sounds like the Paris meeting will be a great success.

Dr. Marjorie Perlman Lorch is Professor of Neurolinguistics at Birkbeck, University of London. She has carried out clinical research at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queen Square London and at the Aphasia Research Center of the Veterans Administration Boston Medical Center where she received her PhD in 1985. Details of her research activities and publications can be obtained from her website.

Twitter and Telepathy?

Proof that we can't be Luddites any longer.



HT. Law and Neuroscience Project

Law and Neuroscience

I would like to draw attention to the "Law and Neuroscience Project". Their Mission Statement:

Welcome to the The Law and Neuroscience Blog--which we have created to provide an on-line forum where the members of the MacArthur Law and Neuroscience Project (LANP) can share their ideas and interact with not only other researchers but also with the interested public more generally. One of the main goals of the blog is to provide people with a resource for finding out about cutting edge research at the cross-roads of neuroscience, law, and philosophy. Hopefully, readers will be as interested in the recent and future developments in the growing field of neurolaw as we are. For now, we thought it might be helpful to say a bit more about both the mission and goal of the LANP more generally (taken from our homepage)--which can be found below the fold. That being said, welcome aboard! We look forward to hearing from you in the months and years ahead.

In my course "Neuroscience and Society" I assign essays from Brett Garland's Neuroscience and the Law. "The Dictionary of Neurology Project" takes a reserved philosophical position towards the inevitable convergence between law and neuroscience. I nevertheless feel that it is important to recognize that the neurosciences, broadly construed, have been involved in legislation and policy for some time. Professor Marjorie Lorch, for instance, describes the ways British lawmakers in the nineteenth century dwelt with questions of inheritance in cases of aphasia. Look for her essay in my forthcoming volume edited with Professor L. Stephen Jacyna, The Neurological Patient in History. The social and political issues are salient and fascinating. No course in the history of neurology and neuroscience, or neuroscience and society, can be complete if it avoids this rich topic.