metaphor, analogy and the brain in the work of Thomas Willis

294 Pages·2017·2.69 MB·English

A love of ‘words as words’:
metaphor, analogy and the brain in
the work of Thomas Willis (1621 -
1675)

Rebecca O’Neal

A thesis submitted to Queen Mary, University of London, in partial fulfilment of the
requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History

Department of History and Centre for the History of the Emotions
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Statement of Originality

I, Rebecca O’Neal, confirm that the research included within this thesis is my own work
or that where it has been carried out in collaboration with, or supported by others, that
this is duly acknowledged below and my contribution indicated. Previously published
material is also acknowledged below.

I attest that I have exercised reasonable care to ensure that the work is original, and does
not to the best of my knowledge break any UK law, infringe any third party’s copyright
or other Intellectual Property Right, or contain any confidential material.

I accept that the College has the right to use plagiarism detection software to check the
electronic version of the thesis.

I confirm that this thesis has not been previously submitted for the award of a degree by
this or any other university.

The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or
information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the
author.

Signature: Rebecca O’Neal
Date: 23rd March 2017
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Abstract

Thomas Willis is commonly used as a touchstone for the modern brain sciences: his
Cerebri anatome (1664) is celebrated as having placed the brain on its ‘modern footing,’
while Willis is referred to as the ‘founding father’ of neuroscience. Driven by a set of
present-centred and medically orientated concerns, great emphasis has traditionally been
placed upon Willis’s neuro-anatomy as a precursor to our own ways of thinking about
the ‘neurological brain’. Such approaches have tended to neglect Willis’s broader
theoretical contributions, particularly his physiological theories, or have failed to consider
how (distinctly early modern) concepts around the soul informed Willis’s interpretation
of the anatomical brain. This thesis re-examines Willis through his use of metaphors and
analogies, exploring the relationship between his use of language and his physical
practices around the brain (dissection, chemical experiment). Although recent
scholarship on Willis has turned to social or cultural history approaches, there has yet to
be a detailed examination of Willis’s use of language. Ideas around the appropriate use of
metaphor and analogy in scientific writing have long informed responses to Willis. His
credibility has been undermined by suggestions of theoretical embellishment and
imaginative speculation – charges that necessarily pick up on the use of analogical
reasoning. In contrast, this thesis argues that Willis’s concept of the brain cannot be
viewed independently of the ways in which it was described and represented: rather than
mere ornaments, metaphor and analogy were an essential part of Willis’s conceptual
architecture and tools by which the brain (as an object of knowledge) was made to exist
in the world. Willis’s use of language embeds his knowledge within a specific set of
intellectual, cultural and material contexts of the late seventeenth century. His ideas
around the brain cannot, therefore, be straightforwardly appropriated as part of our own
understanding of neurology.
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Table of Contents

Title page 1

Abstract 3

Table of contents 4

Acknowledgments 5

Introduction 6

Chapter One: Metaphor, Analogy and Rhetoric in the Seventeenth century 52

Chapter Two: The Internal Laboratory: Chemical Ferments and the Brain 97

Chapter Three: The Unfolded Brain: New Methodologies and the Rhetoric of Practice
137

Chapter Four: The Cloistered Brain and the Clockwork Cerebellum 172

Chapter Five: The Soul of Brutes: Parts, Powers and Passions 211

Conclusion 251

Bibliography 261
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Acknowledgements

Expressing how I feel about the people in my life does not come especially easily to me;
which is perhaps ironic, considering that I have been fortunate enough to find myself
working among so many leading scholars of the emotions. Please forgive me any
awkward phrasing; it belies a far deeper sense of gratitude.

In no particular order, I would like to offer my sincere thanks to my supervisors Thomas
Dixon and Elena Carrera for their careful guidance, support and intellectual inspiration.
You have both encouraged me and given me the confidence I needed to see this project
through. I must also thank Mark Jenner for giving so much of his time to help me
articulate the concept for the thesis – and for recommending I get in touch with a certain
Chris Millard.

Thank you to the Wellcome Trust for their generous financial support and to the Centre
for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary for awarding me the grant and providing a
stimulating and supportive research environment. I must also thank Rhodri Hayward and
Miri Rubin for a helpful upgrade.

My special thanks to Joanna Wharton for her friendship, thoughtful discussions (and
numerous proof-reads) during my time at York - I hope we will get around to that
collaboration. My thanks to the community at Queen Mary: Jen Wallis, Sarah Crook, Lisa
Renken, Elle Betts, Craig Griffiths and Åsa Jansson for their thoughtful suggestions and
their wonderful, valuable friendships.

My gratitude and thanks to The Rushton (Lizzie, Matthew, Natty and Lucas) and to my
wonderful parents in-law David and Judith Millard for all their love, friendship and
support.

My love, thanks and sincere gratitude to my parents, Hugh O’Neal and Suzanne
Loverseed and my extended family for their essential support through the significant life-
events that have occurred during the writing of this thesis. I could not have done it
without you.

Finally, but by no means least, to my husband Chris Millard, without whose tireless
support and intellectual inspiration none of this would have been possible. You
challenged me to take my work and myself seriously. Above all, you have shown me
happiness. Thank you.
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Introduction
Thomas Willis, Neuroscience and History

Thomas Willis was once regarded as the most successful English physician of his day. A
contemporary, Anthony Wood, noted that Willis had become ‘so noted, and so infinitely
resorted to, for his practice, that never any physician before went beyond him, or got
more money yearly than he’.1 Despite his many notable achievements, Willis now stands
as a relatively marginal and poorly understood figure in the history of medicine. As
Michael Hawkins has remarked, Willis appears ‘only in passing’ in most histories of
medicine and science.2 His contributions are nevertheless frequently invoked within the
modern field of neurology, where Willis is widely recognised by medical students on
account of the arterial network at the base of the brain bearing his name, ‘The Circle of
Willis.’ Today, his works are predominantly read and written about by retired
neurologists, who frequently invoke Willis as a ‘founding father’ of the modern
discipline.3 This position is reflected in medical histories around the study of the brain
and nerves: in 2007, historian George J. Rousseau noted that Willis ‘invented the concept
of a ‘nervous system.’4 In the same year, C. U. M Smith wrote that those looking for the
birth of modern neurology would do well to begin with Willis’s Cerebri Anatome. This was,
he felt, a ‘most obvious’ starting point.5 Willis’s positioning as a rhetorical anchor for the
modern neurosciences is perhaps the single most prominent theme in the body of
literature surrounding him. This belies what is actually a rather fractured and
controversial historical picture.

Prior to the 1960s, there was a steady, if unremarkable, amount of interest around Willis;
following the tercentennial of Cerebri anatome in 1964, the period witnessed a marked

1 Anthony Wood, Athenae oxonienses, (London: Printed for Tho. Bennet, 1691-2), vol. 3, p. 1051.
2 Michael J. Hawkins, The Empire of Passions: Thomas Willis’s anatomy of the Restoration Soul (PhD Thesis:
University of London, 2004), p. 1.
3 William Feindel notably repeated the ‘founding father’ epithet in his introduction to Thomas Willis’s, The
Anatomy of the Brain and Nerves, tercentenary edition (1664-1964), ed. by William Feindel, 2 vols. (Montreal:
McGill University Press, 1965). A number of neurologists and clinicians have published studies on Willis:
Sir Charles Sherrington (1940); Alfred Meyer and Raymond Heirons (1965); Hansruedi Isler (1968);
Kenneth Dewhurst (1982); M.J. Eadie (2002); Mark Wilson (2012).
4 George S. Rousseau, “Brainomania’: Brain, Mind and Soul in the Long Eighteenth Century’, Journal for
Eighteenth-Century Studies, 30. 2 (June, 2007), pp. 161-191 (p. 171).
5 C.U.M. Smith, ‘Brain and Mind in the Long 18th century,’ in Brain, Mind and Medicine: Essays in 18th
Century Neuroscience, ed. by H. Whitaker and others (New York: Springer, 2007), p. 15.
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expansion of interest in and a certain ‘rediscovery’ of his works by medical historians.6 A
little before this in the 1940s, the eminent British neurophysiologist Sir Charles
Sherrington commented favourably on Willis noting that he had ‘practically refounded
the anatomy and physiology of the brain and nerves.’7 This was a recovery of much
earlier assessments, such as by John Friend who, in 1725, had acknowledged Willis as
‘the first inventor of the nervous system.’8 These comments reflected the fact that Willis
had been the first to use the term ‘neurologia’ (translated into the English ‘neurologie’ in
1681) to describe the study of the structure of the brain and nerves as a self-contained
system, which he had termed the ‘doctrine of the nerves’.9 Although this ‘doctrine of the
nerves’ did not specifically address physiology and pathology (which were dealt with by
Willis in a later book), our conception of the modern discipline of clinical neuroscience
assumes the inclusion of these elements when we refer to his ‘neurology’.

Importantly, as Nikolas Rose and Joelle M. Abi-Rached’s book Neuro: The New Brain
Sciences notes, the groundwork for what we would recognise as the modern discipline of
neuroscience was being laid in the early 1960s: the same period in which scholarly
interest in Willis began to expand. Neuroscience grew out of specific institutions
established in the 1960s and 1970s. Francis O’ Schmitt first coined the term neuroscience
in 1962, closely followed by the creation of the disciplines first major organising body, the
Society for Neuroscience (SfN) in 1969.10 The ‘re-discovery’ of Thomas Willis (from a
position of relative obscurity) as the early modern ‘founder’ of neurology and as a
rhetorical anchor for the emergent discipline occurred in conjunction with these
developments. 11 The timing suggests that the re-engagement with Willis, although certainly
helped by a tercentenary anniversary in this decade, became part of a much broader effort
by the new community to forge and promote a ‘long history’ for itself, rooted in the

6 Robert Frank Jr. notes that there were between four and eight articles or books per year published on
Willis in the 1940s, rising to thirty-three from the 1960s: ‘Thomas Willis and His Circle’, in The Languages of
Pysche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought, ed. by G. Rousseau (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990), pp. 107-147 (p. 109).
7 Sir Charles Sherrington, ‘The Brain and its Work’, Man on his Nature (Orig. Pub. 1940: Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 203-234.
8 John Friend, The History of Physick from the Time of Galen (London, 1725) ii, p. 315.
9 Clifford F. Rose has discussed the distinction between Willis’s use of the Latin and the introduction of
the English term by Samuel Pordage in The History of British Neurology (London: Imperial College Press,
2012), p. 28.
10 Judith P. Swazey, ‘Forging a Neuroscience Community: A Brief History of the Neurosciences Research
Program,’ in The Neurosciences: Paths of Discovery, ed. by Frederic G. Worden and others (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1975), pp. 529-546.
11 Nikolas Rose and Joelle M. Abi-Rached, Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind
(Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), p. 25.
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neurology of the late seventeenth century.12 Willis’s historical position cannot then, be
divorced from the institutional history of this profession.

Projecting a set of present-centred concerns back onto historical practices around the
brain, modern neuroscience has reproduced historical ways of investigating and thinking
about the brain which accord with its own image; this has involved highly selective and
teleological readings of historical neurology, especially – but not limited to – the work of
Thomas Willis. Outlining a set of emphases that would come to dominate this historical
picture, Sir Charles Sherrington made special note of those aspects of Willis’s practices
which appeared to most directly correspond with his own: namely, the correlation of
clinical observation with anatomical inspection and, above all, Willis’s emphasis on the
physical substance and structure of the brain itself. In so doing, he observed, Willis had
put the ‘brain and the nervous system on their modern footing so far as that could be
then done.’13 Here, the rather Whiggish implication is that Willis was always striving
towards what we know to be true today, but was simply held back by the limitations of
his age.14 This present-centred and medically orientated reading is clearly very much of
its time, yet it is an approach that remained remarkably stable in the following decades
and which continues to shape responses to Willis.

One of Willis’s most prominent biographers from the 1960s, Hansreudi Isler, a retired
neurologist, wrote that Willis’s hypotheses and observations ‘very often come close to
what science today thinks important.’ For Isler, this proved ‘all the more astonishing
since the majority of his basic theories must be found wrong today.’15 He did however
note that Willis’s language around ‘biochemical processes in the body’ showed how he
was ‘transcending the possibilities of his age…postulating something like today’s

12 Gordon M. Shepherd, Creating Modern Neuroscience: The Revolutionary 1950s (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010).
13 Charles Sherrington, Man and his Nature, p. 203. Jaime C. Kassler also refers to Willis placing the brain on
its ‘modern footing’ in his ‘Restraining the Passions: Hydropneumatics and Hierarchy in the Philosophy of
Thomas Willis’, in The Soft Underbelly of Reason, ed. by Stephen Gaukroger (London: Routledge, 1998), pp.
147-164 (p. 148).
14 On ‘Whig’ history and present-centered concerns, see: Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of
History (London: 1931; 1965). For more recent works, see: Adrian Wilson and Timothy Ashplant, ‘Whig
History and Present-Centered History’ and ‘Present-Centered History and the Problem of Historical
Knowledge,’ both The Historical Journal (1988), 1-16, 253-74. See also, Andrew Cunningham, ‘Getting the
game right: Some plain words on the identity and invention of science,’ Studies in History and Philosophy of
Science, 19 (1988), pp. 365-389.
15 Hansruedi Isler, Thomas Willis, 1621–75, Doctor and Scientist (London: Hafner Publications Company,
1968), p. 67.
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laboratory-based medicine.’16 While there is necessarily scope for invention and creativity
in a given setting, it is difficult to see how Willis could have transcended the intellectual
frameworks of his age considering that new ideas are necessarily produced out of existing
categories of knowledge and practices. Another prominent example of scholarship from
this period is the comprehensive and much-noted study of Willis’s neurophysiology by
former consultant neurologists, Raymond Hierons and Alfred Meyer. In 1965, Meyer and
Hierons talked about the ‘controversial judgement passed by modern historians upon the
scientific achievements of Thomas Willis,’ even while they attempted to invoke some of
those very achievements.17 They noted in particular that his clinical observations had lent
a ‘veil’ of empirical accuracy to his works, which had helped them ‘appear modern,’
despite the historical ‘jargon’ of Willis’s discussions of animal spirits and iatrochemistry
(medical chemistry).18 What we see emerging here is the idea that, if medical history was
to find any value in Willis’s works, it would need to ‘recover’ his clinical and anatomical
observations from the historical language and terminology that accompanied (indeed,
obscured) his insights and discoveries. The recognisably ‘early modern’ aspects of his
‘science’ were a set of problems to be navigated around and explained away.

Although Willis wrote extensively on matters of physiology, the passions and
iatrochemistry, today he is primarily celebrated for his anatomical work on the structure
of the brain and nerves in his Cerebri anatome (1664).19 The focus on his anatomical
investigations reflects a particular concern to distinguish between what Willis got ‘right’
or ‘wrong,’ according, that is, to what we can verify through our own studies of the brain,
rather than to attempt to understand his ideas on their own terms. These approaches
tend to reproduce a careful selection of Willis’s anatomical achievements while
overlooking the significance of his broader theoretical explanations concerning the
physiological functions of the brain. This assumes that the two discussions – anatomy
and physiology - can be separated in his work; that, for Willis, describing the structure of
the brain and nerves was an end in and of itself. His attempts to explain how these
structures functioned have been frequently dismissed: in 1984, Mary A. B. Brazier
remarked that, in spite of Willis’s success in exploring brain and nerve structure, ‘he

16 Ibid. p. 67.
17 Alfred Meyer and Raymond Heirons, ‘On Thomas Willis’s concepts of neurophysiology: Part I & II,’
Medical history, ix (1965), part II, p. 152.
18 Ibid, p. 292.
19 Ann Thomson, Bodies of Thought: Science, Religion, and the Soul in the Early Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), p. 83.
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made little lasting contribution to the underlying mechanisms of their function.’20 Brazier,
in effect, criticised Willis here for daring to stray from simply describing what he could
see to offering up his own (physiological) explanations. For Brazier, these were
necessarily the ‘wrong’ explanations (and therefore, of little contemporary value) because
they were based upon notions of spirit, rather than electrical impulses.

A more recent example of a ‘cherry picking’ approach to Willis’s contributions is found
in Mervyn J. Eadie’s 2002 article in the Journal of Clinical Neuroscience: ‘if Willis’s
hypothesising about his animal spirit mechanisms and his locations of cerebral function
are ignored, most of his account of apoplexy is readily interpreted in relation to modern
day knowledge of cerebral vascular disease.’21 Eadie concludes that ‘the deficiencies,
limitations and peculiarities of Willis’s writing on neurological disease, render them now
mainly of historical importance.’22 Yet, as Eadie’s remarks demonstrate, (highly selective)
readings of Willis are still often called upon as a means of informing our own current
positions. Eadie’s work is also notable for having presented Willis’s descriptions of
pathological disorders in a tabular format. The idea being visually represented here is that
the discipline imposed by the template might help to ‘recover’ the content of Willis’s
insights apart from the otherwise literary distractions in the text.23 It is difficult to see
what this tabular re-presentation of Willis’s work can possibly tell us about his concepts,
when they have been so removed from the ways in which he described and represented
them within the text.

Willis also features prominently within the growing body of popular publications on the
history of neurology, of which Stanley Finger’s Minds Behind the Brain, published in 2000,
is a characteristic example. Here, as in other similar examples, a particular emphasis is
placed upon Willis’s anatomical discoveries around the brain, over and above his
theoretical work concerning chemistry, physiology, and pathology. As Finger writes,
Willis ‘published one of the most important books in the history of the brain sciences’

20 Mary A. B Brazier, A History of Neurophysiology in the 17th and 18th centuries (New York: Raven Press, 1984),
p. 64.
21 Mervyn J. Eadie, ‘A Pathology of the Animal Spirits - the Clinical Neurology of Thomas Willis (1621-
1675) Part I – Background, and disorders of intrinsically normal animal spirits,’ Journal of Clinical
Neuroscience, 10.1 (2002), pp. 14-29 (p. 25).
22 M.J. Eadie, ‘A Pathology of the Animal Spirits - the Clinical Neurology of Thomas Willis (1621-1675)
Part II - Disorders of Intrinsically Abnormal Animal Spirits,’ Journal of Clinical Neuroscience, 10.2 (2003), pp.
146–157 (p. 156).
23 Eadie, Pathology of the Animal Spirits, Part I, p. 17.
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