Aphra Behn (1640-1689) has been called the first professional British female writer. Behn probably visited Surinam in the 1660s, but it was not until 1688 that she wrote Oroonoko: or, The Royal ...Slave, the novel for which she is best remembered. Although overlooked by historians of science, Oroonoko provided a description of the "numb eel," effectively introducing many Europeans to the exotic and frightening creature that would become known as the "electric eel" during the second half of the 1700s, when it would play a central role in showing the reality of animal electricity, effectively putting neuromuscular physiology on its more modern course. This article examines Behn's early life, including why she might have gone to Surinam, the sources that might have helped her write her colorful description of the eel, and how what she had written circulated widely and continued to contribute to the changing scientific landscape after her death.
The traditional story maintains that Franz Joseph Gall's (1758-1828) scientific program began with his observations of schoolmates with bulging eyes and good verbal memories. But his search to ...understand human nature, in particular individual differences in capacities, passions, and tendencies, can also be traced to other important observations, one being of a young girl with an exceptional talent for music. Rejecting contemporary notions of cognition, Gall concluded that behavior results from the interaction of a limited set of basic faculties, each with its own processes for perception and memory, each with its own territory in both cerebral or cerebellar cortices. Gall identified 27 faculties, one being the sense of tone relations or music. The description of the latter is identical in both his Anatomie et Physiologie and Sur les Fonctions du Cerveau et sur Celles de Chacune de ses Parties, where he provided positive and negative evidences and discussed findings from humans and lower animals, for the faculty. The localization of the cortical faculty for talented musicians, he explained, is demonstrated by a "bump" on each side of the skull just above the angle of the eye; hence, the lower forehead of musicians is broader or squarer than in other individuals. Additionally, differences between singing and nonsinging birds also correlate with cranial features. Gall even brought age, racial, and national differences into the picture. What he wrote about music reveals much about his science and creative thinking.
Stephanus Bisius (1724-1790) was a physician of Italian descent and a graduate of the University of Pavia. He was invited to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the early 1760s and became head of ...the Faculty of Medicine at Vilnius University in 1781. In 1772, Bisius had authored the first original study on nervous and mental diseases in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In his 35-page booklet, written in Latin and Polish, Bisius characterized mania and melancholy as diseases of the brain, explaining that the organs that feed the human soul are affected, not the soul itself. He introduced the principles of humoralism and solidism to readers, and recognized that autopsies had failed to reveal reliable findings concerning mania or melancholy. Bisius also described the origins of the challenging disorder called plica polonica, a strange condition associated with tufts of matted hair. As a physician during the medical Enlightenment, Bisius criticized metaphysical speculations in medicine and stated that plica was only a result of superstitions. Even though he proposed antiphlogistic treatments for patients with mania and melancholy, he maintained that time and faith in God might help some patients overcome their infirmities.
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Alexander Garden (1730-1791) was born in Scotland, where he trained in medicine before settling in South Carolina in 1752. With a passion for collecting and a love of nature, he sent specimens to ...Linnaeus and his associates in Europe. In 1774, Garden observed and conducted electrical experiments on some "eels" that had survived the trip from Surinam to Charleston. His detailed observations and reasons for believing they emit electricity were read before the Royal Society of London and subsequently published. He also advised the sea captain who owned the eels on how to preserve them and where to deliver their bodies if they died en route to London. Although they did die en route, John Hunter of the Royal Society was able to provide excellent descriptions of their electric organs because they were so well preserved. The sequence of events that followed led to other live eels surviving the voyage to London, where they were observed to spark in darkness in 1776. This was a critical piece of evidence in favor of fish electricity and eventually for the more revolutionary idea that even human nerves and muscles might function electrically.
Redundancy and vicariation theories were employed by 19th-century practitioners and animal researchers to account for what seemed to be sparing and recovery of function after brain damage. Those ...individuals believing in redundancy maintained that there are duplicate or back-up areas that can mediate a function after brain damage, such as the homologous region on the opposite side of the brain. In contrast, vicariation theorists argued that brain areas with different functions could sometimes assume or "take over" the functions of injured areas. This chapter looks at the history and early evidence for these two different views, and how theorizing changed as more was learned about cortical localization of function. It reveals that there were subtle variations on these basic themes and that certain factors, such as age at the time of brain injury, were often brought into the equation. With limited knowledge and inadequate methodologies, the debates about recovery of function that flared up during the late-19th century would not be quickly or easily rectified.
The theory of cortical localization of function holds that different cerebral cortical territories serve different functions, such as vision and language. This theory began to be entertained in the ...mid-1700s, but it had no impact until Gall made it central to his thinking in the early 1800s. Gall's organology, with its emphasis on cranial bumps, soon fell into disrepute, but in the decades that followed Bouillaud, Aubertin, and Broca advanced the concept by turning to clinical cases of speech loss, and in 1870 Fritsch and Hitzig demonstrated its validity, studying motor functions with animals. The theory of cortical localization of function served as a guiding factor in changing the practice of neurology, and clinicians encountered new material supportive of the doctrine. Surgical neurology, anatomy, and physiology also supported the new way of thinking, contributing to a better understanding of the functional organization of the cerebral cortex and to clinical neurology.
Most of what was known about Franz Joseph Gall's (1758-1828) organology or Schädellehre prior to the 1820s came from secondary sources, including letters from correspondents, promotional materials, ...brief newspaper articles about his lecture-demonstrations, and editions and translations of some lengthier works of varying quality in German. Physician Ludwig Heinrich Bojanus (1776-1827) practiced in Vienna's General Hospital in 1797-1798; attended some of Gall's public lectures; and, in 1801-1802, became one of the first physicians to provide detailed reports on Gall's emerging organology in French and English, respectively. Although Bojanus considered the human mind to be indivisible and did not entirely agree with Gall's assumption that the brain consists of a number of independent organs responsible for various faculties, he provided valuable information and thoughtful commentary on Gall's views. Furthermore, he defended Gall against the charge that his sort of thinking would lead to materialism and cautiously predicted that the new system would be fruitful for developing and stimulating important new research about the brain and mind. Bojanus became a professor of zoology in 1806 and a professor of comparative anatomy in 1814 at Vilnius University, where, among other accomplishments, he established himself as a founder of modern veterinary medicine and a pioneer of pre-Darwinian and pre-Lamarckian evolutionism.
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