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In this chronological table of the ‘long’ eighteenth century I have sought to place scientific publications in the context of their cultural milieu. I have purposefully omitted birth and death dates of the great figures of the eighteenth century in preference for the dates when their most significant publications and/or other contributions appeared.

How should the ‘long’ eighteenth century be defined? January 1, 1700 and December 31, 1799 are quite arbitrary dates. Why should they be chosen to segment our history rather than more significant periods of time, periods which have a coherent content, or are marked, perhaps, by the working out of a theme? Students of English literature sometimes take the long eighteenth century to extend from John Milton (, 1667) to the passing of the first generation of Romantics (Keats (d. 1821), Shelley (d. 1822), Byron (d. 1824), Coleridge (d. 1834)). Students of British political history often take it to start with the accession of Charles II (the Restoration) in 1660 or, alternatively, the so-called of 1688 and to end with the great Reform Act of 1832. Others might choose different book ends. In the history of science and philosophy the is sometimes taken as the publication of Descartes’ scientific philosophy or, in more Anglophone zones, the 1687 publication of Newton’s with its vision of a ‘clockwork universe’. ‘Nature and Nature’s laws’ as Alexander Pope enthused, ‘lay hid in Night: God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light!’.

Little has ever been written on the history of microscopical neurology. The topic is ordinarily ignored – indeed the terms ‘microscope’ (and microscopy), ‘neuron’ (or neurone), ‘cell’ and ‘histology’ are missing altogether from the index to the overview of the history of neurology by Riese (1959).

Microscopy was born in the years prior to the eighteenth century and nerve specimens were among the first to be examined. The late sixteenth century saw the first descriptions of a recognisable microscope and questions of priority persist, since the study of magnification and of refraction – which preceded the practical application of lenses in scientific instruments – was already a matter of some antiquity (Disney, Hill, & Watson Baker, 1928). The first microscope to be pictured was a compound instrument in 1631, and during the first few years these microscopes were utilised in the quest to unravel the structure of familiar objects – the sting of a nettle or a bee, the wings of a butterfly or bird. We must bear in mind that these were truly macroscopic, rather than microscopic, investigations. Observers were exploring everyday specimens, searching for details the eye could almost discern. Only when the high-power microscope emerged could investigators progress to the most far-reaching development in natural science – the recognition that there were forms of life, and marvellous structures, the existence of which nobody had previously recognised.

The centrality of hospitals to medical education is a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of medicine. Like many subjects in the history of medicine, connections can be traced to the eighteenth century, if not earlier. In order to understand significant changes in medical education, and especially in the field of anatomical instruction, one must look back even further, at least to the sixteenth century. The history of hospitals also has many turning points, including the fifteenth century, when such institutions began to proliferate, many more becoming principally dedicated to the sick. However, when these two subjects are considered jointly, the eighteenth century is not just significant, but central to the development of both institutions, especially in Western Europe. According to existing historiography, it was in this period that medical education and voluntary hospitals, at least in the United Kingdom, literally came together. The hospital was not only rapidly becoming the principal site for healing, but also one of learning about the sick and training prospective practitioners.

As historians have been quick to note, however, every history has its pre-history. For that reason, this chapter commences by considering some of the numerous false starts and birth pangs of hospitalbased, or clinical, education in early modern Europe. It then considers eighteenth-century developments through the work of Hermann Boerhaave, among other less familiar staff at the University of Leiden medical school, who both embraced and popularised the clinical method of medical instruction, especially in the eighteenth century. Though not entirely an eighteenth-century figure, Boerhaave’s academic career is especially appropriate to the chronological parameters of this volume, having been appointed a lecturer in 1701.

From Leiden, many medical men took the lessons of Boerhaave and his colleagues to Paris, Vienna and across the channel and into the charitably funded, voluntary hospitals, the proliferation of which has repeatedly been identified as an eighteenth-century phenomenon, at least in England and Scotland (Porter, 1989, pp. 149–152). Rather than trace Leiden’s influence on the development of medical education throughout Europe, the final section of this chapter will examine its impact on Britain. In particular it examines the way in which clinical training quickly developed in Edinburgh and, in successive decades, inspired London practitioners to attach schools to the hospitals to which they were affiliated. Though a new generation of provincial medical schools sought to retain local boys who might otherwise have travelled to hospital schools in Edinburgh and London, or even further afield, few instructors desired to change the way in which pupils were being educated. In less than a century, hospital-based instruction had become the tried and tested method of educating physicians.

Many contributed to the advances in science and the arts during the latter part of the eighteenth century and prepared the way for thoughts and apparatus that would change the lifestyle of those who followed. Among those thinkers and practical persons was the apothecary James Parkinson (1755–1824). He was an accomplished doctor, well liked in his area of east London, and he contributed in several fields of medicine.

Parkinson is best known now for his (Parkinson, 1817) published in 1817. Essentially his contribution to neuroscience was just this one publication, one of the most famous in the whole of medicine. The description was clinical, based upon his observation of six persons, three being patients of his and the other three passers-by in the street. His classical description has stood the test of time – . This description of the shaking illness that was to be named after him by Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893), the famous Parisian neurologist, is his best-known medical contribution although he did publish on rabies, the prevention of head injury in children and other topics.

However, his medical work is far from his only claim to fame. Like others before and after him, Parkinson contributed in many fields – in his case his interests lay in science, politics, the church and geology. This was not so unusual at the time and many enquiring minds roamed the fields of natural philosophy, expanding into various fields of science – physics, chemistry, biology, geology and more – as the decades passed. He was a polymath among other contemporaries.

John Hunter was a giant in the natural sciences and medicine (Fig. 1). His overall contributions to the basic and clinical neurosciences were substantial but are little known. One reason is because as a “naturalist” Hunter’s underlying emphasis was upon the greater understanding of life itself, including paleontology and geology. His main interests were in the philosophy of life and nature, and he was one of the few in England at that time who took a really comprehensive view of these phenomena. Essentially a novel thinker rather than a studious scholar, he extensively utilized both inductive and deductive methods.

The long eighteenth century witnessed the full flowering of the Scottish Enlightenment, graced by figures such as Robert and James Adam, the architects; the chemist and physician Joseph Black, the discoverer of carbon dioxide (‘fixed air’); Adam Ferguson, founder of the discipline of sociology; James Hutton, founder of modern geology; the philosopher David Hume and the political economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith. (Clayson, 1993). Their achievements amply demonstrated the characteristic pragmatic drive of the Scottish Enlightenment with its emphasis on the acquisition and promulgation of practical knowledge.

The beginnings of an experimental approach to brain function derived from the study of brain lesions can be traced to antiquity, but the emergence of a reasoned systematic methodology was surprisingly slow to mature in the early period of empiricism. The Oxford “virtuosi” associated with Willis (Lower, Wren, & others) in the late seventeenth century responded to the thrust of William Harvey’s brilliant experiments, devised to explain the nature of the action of the heart and circulation of blood, by injecting various substances into the vasculature of dogs and observing their effects. Yet there was surprisingly little effort to add new empirical gains concerning brain function before the remarkable contributions of François Pourfour du Petit (1664–1741) in the early eighteenth century. His earliest and most important work, , was published in 1710 and contains an account of brain lesions as well as some experiments describing vascular infusion of acids and alkalis derived from the reports of Willis (1664). The treatise by Petit (as he was generally known) survives in but few copies and details of its contents remain astonishingly obscure to collectors, libraries, and historical accounts.

Animal motion has been one of the longest-lived great themes in neurophysiology. For the most part of that development the soul (), in any of its various versions – aerial, atomistic, or purely spiritual – was taken as the actual agent causing animation. Then, as it is well known, in the midseventeenth century this view was formally challenged by René Descartes (see Des Chene, 2001). The iatrophysical school he contributed to create maintained that the animal body is an automatic machine fully capable of executing and controlling all its operations, independently of any incorporeal assistance. Perhaps nowhere these two confronted positions – animist and mechanicist – clashed more loudly over a single specific topic than in the long dispute sustained, in the 1750s and early 1760s, between Albrecht von Haller and Robert Whytt about the persistence of irritability in isolated muscles.

The colorful Haller–Whytt debate, which was concerned also with the parallel physiological faculty of sensibility, has been thoroughly reviewed in stepwise detail (French, 1969; Miller, 1939). These excellent accounts of the subject, though, concentrate on the discussions about the relative irritability or sensibility of specific organs, the presence or absence of nerves in particular anatomical locations, or the spatial distribution of the soul in the animal body. Comparatively little attention has been focused on the radically opposed views of the two great authors regarding the basic mechanism of muscle contraction.

The present chapter examines this important aspect of the debate, starting from a brief background sketch of the theory of fibers as taught by Herman Boerhaave, under whom both Haller and Whytt studied. Then, following a summarized review of the main arguments on each side of the controversy, a few possible reasons are discussed of why and how was muscle the first province of the animal body to become permanently liberated from the sovereignty of the soul. A preliminary version of this paper has been published in abstract form (Frixione, 2004b).

The period spanning from the second half of the seventeenth century up to the end of the eighteenth century is marked by a truly paradigmatic episode of the transition between the classic science, still imbued with the themes of the wonderful and fantastic, and modern science based on experimentalism and objectivity. This episode concerns the study of strange fish capable of producing, at the simple contact of their body surface, a numbness or rather a violent shock. Two of these fishes were already known to the classical world since very ancient times (the torpedo and the Nile catfish). A third species, a singular eel of the rivers of tropical America, came to the attention of naturalists only in the second half of the seventeenth century, within the climate of the scientific revolution and of the interest for exotic countries. In addition to representing a fundamental transition in the knowledge of the phenomena of the animated nature, the episode of these fish (which would be called electric) was important also because it opened the path to two of the most revolutionary episodes of the Enlightenment science: the demonstration of the electric nature of nervous conduction by Luigi Galvani and the invention of the battery by Alessandro Volta (see Piccolino & Bresadola, 2003).