Recap - Cerebral Forms

Last night witnessed the second meeting of the Michaelmas 2014 Science and Literature Reading Group, as we gathered for a thorough dissection of Thomas Willis and his writings on the brain.

Lizzie Swann gave a marvellous introduction to Willis himself and his posthumous reputation, the selected passages (English translations of his renowned earlier Latin writings), as well as wider cultures of seventeenth-century religion, philosophy and medicine. In particular, she analysed the rhetoric and language deployed by Willis as he struggled to translate his experimental practice into verbal descriptions. Willis claimed at the outset that he would base his writing on 'Nature and ocular demonstrations', yet suffused his prose with classical and Biblical allusion, and with myriad metaphors, from honeycomb to helmet. Just as different bodily theories could be discerned in Willis's writing, including Aristotelian sensory 'species', Paracelsian iatrochemistry and Galenic humours, so too were both the practices and objects of dissection likened to a series of more familiar analogues. Both wit and knives could be sharp. Lizzie characterised these as falling into two broad categories, the more pastoral, fluvial, agricultural or arboreal 'exterior' metaphors, and the more architectural 'interior' metaphors. She asked us to consider how rigorously, then, Willis upheld his commitment to first-hand observation; whether his religious beliefs were apparent and represented in the text; and the relationship between practices of dissection and visual and artistic skills.

The discussion took up these themes, to discuss in particular the marked use of metaphor throughout the text, and its varied figuring as model or metanoia, to point up similarity or difference, or as part of a more general debate over the metaphorical language of 'handling' subjects. Was this something that was part of a contemporary commitment to empiricism and virtual witnessing, we wondered, or a common way to think with and about books, or even inherited from older, classical sources? The multisensory world and practices of the dissecting room was another strand of the discussion; as was the relationship between soul and 'animal spirits', where they were located, which creatures owned them, and how they moved around: was it via Willis's favoured hydraulic imagery? Other early modern attempts to poetise the body, as well as comparisons between the microcosm and macrocosm, body and body politic, were also commented upon in the varied discussion, and I for one certainly left with much food for thought.