Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought

This book is a detailed account of the development of neuroanatomy during the nineteenth century, particularly in France and Germany. Harrington delves into dust-covered scientific literature to discover the original speculations and discussions about why the brain is divided in two. Most medical or scientific history books trace how modern theories developed from one experiment or observation to another. They don't give much space to tracing wrong turns, unless the wrong turn eventually led to some worthwhile insight. In contrast, Harrington spends relatively little time in this book describing how various facets of our modern understanding of brain structures and functions were deduced. Instead, most of her focus is on the scientific process itself, with a great deal of material about the wrong turns and why they were taken. Early in the book, Harrington states explicitly that "one might begin to understand this wider phenomenon in neurology by looking at the way scientific and medical concepts can function in a society as metaphorical resources and by looking again at the specific social and cultural context that informed neurological research in different European countries at this time." She compares the political atmosphere in France and Germany at the time, and traces how this atmosphere may have affected interpretations of observations concerning hemispheric functions. Harrington describes how hypotheses about the purposes of the two hemispheres changed, and how this seemed to affect observations of symptoms. She points out that "one is struck by how theoretical expectations appear actually to change what people perceive." The book includes an appendix with diagrams of brain structures that can be useful for readers who are not familiar with standard brain terminology. Since so much of the focus of the book is on the philosophy of science rather than on the development of our understanding of how the brain works, the book may be of interest more to philosophers than to those interested in neuroanatomy.