Soul Made Flesh

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Bowl of Curds

Chapter One: Hearts and Minds, Livers and Stomachs

. Greeks explore the soul, puzzle over the brain, and embrace the heart

. Christians build a soul from ancient parts

. Natural philosophy is born and anatomy becomes a sacred art

. Vesalius discovers monkeys where men once stood

. The Greeks are transformed, the soul questioned

Chapter Two: World Without Soul

. Anatomy of the cosmos

. Galileo's new sky

. Marin Mersenne makes the world a machine

. Pierre Gassendi sanctifies the atom

. Descartes's anatomy of clear ideas

. The human body as earthen machine

. The soul climbs into its cockpit

. An arrest

. The perfect argument

. The ice queen makes Descartes an offer

. The captive leaves its prison

Chapter Three: Make Motion Cease

. Thomas Willis with the beasts of the field

. Protestants and Puritans

. The divine right of kings and the complaints of Parliament

. God and Aristotle at Oxford

. Servant and alchemist

. Mystical medicine comes to England

Chapter Four: The Broken Heart of the Republic

. Charles I stumbles toward war

. Fever swings its scythe

. Portrait of a physician as a young man

. Willis fights for his king

. Oxford dark and nasty

. William Harvey under siege

. Harvey at the school of Aristotle

. Harvey finds the soul in the blood and says little about the brain

. Harvey discovers the circle of blood

. Oliver Cromwell tightens the noose

. Surrender to madness

Chapter Five: Pisse-Prophets Among the Puritans

. Thomas Willis returns

. Medicine in the marketplace

. Ferments dissolve the four humors

. The Puritans demand an oath

. The Oxford Experimental Philosophy Club

. William Petty: From Thomas Hobbes's mouth to Thomas Willis's ear

. Charles becomes a martyr to the people

. England the republic

. The madness of defeat

. The Miraculous Case of Anne Greene, or A Clock Reset . William Petty measures the soul of a nation

. Willis hosts an illegal church

Chapter Six: The Circle of Willis

. William Harvey comes out of retirement

. Thomas Willis searches for the agents of fever

. The Experimental Philosophy Club fights for its life and for respectability

. Hobbes as politician and neurologist

. Robert Boyle gives shape to the New Science

Chapter Seven: Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Air

. Willis stirs up a ferment of atoms

. A crude dream of the brain

. Cromwell uprooted

. Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke pump away the soul

. Christopher Wren, surgeon and injector

. The return of the king

Chapter Eight: A Curious Quilted Ball

. The Church of England meets its less than divine leader

. Thomas Willis becomes hero of a nation

. "I addicted myself to the opening of heads"

. Willis discovers a doctrine of the nerves

. The Royal Society

Chapter Nine: Convulsions

. The lady with a migraine

. Convulsions in the year of plague and fire

Chapter Ten: The Science of Brutes

. From Oxford to London

. Richard Lower transfuses blood into a madman

. Lower and Hooke discover Willis's mistake in the lungs of dogs

. Willis constructs a doctrine of the soul

. Madness explained

. Thomas Willis avoids Hobbes's fate

Chapter Eleven: The Neurologist Vanishes

. A final book by Thomas Willis and a ridiculously sumptuous funeral

. How John Locke buried his teacher

. Robert Boyle sees the future before he dies and is not consoled

Chapter Twelve: The Soul's Microscope

. A long journey forward

. The soul as information

. Lightning in a nerve

. The wisdom of the reflex

. Neurologists read the brain

. MRI and the module

. The networked mind

. The able animal soul

. Emotion with reason, not versus

. Steel syrup and Prozac

. The self anatomized

. The social brain

. Morals and neurons

. Lady Conway and Dr. Willis meet again

Dramatis Personae

Notes

References

Acknowledgments

Index