Carl Zimmer, author of At the Water's Edge, is a frequent contributor to Discover, National Geographic, Natural History, Nature, and Science. He is a winner of the Everett Clark Award for science journalism and the American Institute of Biological Sciences Media Award. A John S. Guggenheim Fellow, he has also received the Pan-American Health Organization Award for Excellence in International Health Reporting and the American Institute of Biological Sciences Media Award. His previous books include Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, Parasite Rex, and At the Water's Edge. He lives in Guilford, Connecticut.

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