Brain Advance Access originally published online on October 17, 2008
Brain 2008 131(12):3453-3456; doi:10.1093/brain/awn258
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© The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Book Review |
Henry Head and the development of clinical neuroscience
Department of Neurology,
The Royal London Hospital, London, UK
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Much has been written about the development of neurological science in the 18th and 19th centuries and, indeed, before this period. The foundations of the related disciplines of clinical neurology and neuroscience were laid down in that era. Clarke and Jacyna (1987
) have described these achievements in an earlier monograph in which they suggest that ‘change was stimulated by the romantic philosophy of nature that exerted a major influence upon biological thought in the first half of the 19th century’. It is evident that subsequent developments required a combination of knowledge and understanding of the brain and its associated structures and, above all, the application of a method or process of thought to address brain function and structure. This process was the experimental method, a philosophy developed primarily in the great German schools of medicine in the last quarter of the 19th century, following the Franco-Prussian war of 1870—a