Soul Made Flesh by Carl Zimmer

Author:Carl Zimmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

Chapter Nine

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A DIAGRAM OF THE SYMPATHETIC NERVES, FROM THE ANATOMY OF THE BRAIN AND NERVES. I N PLACE OF MYSTICAL UNIONS BETWEEN THE HEART AND MIND, W ILLIS TRACED A NETWORK OF NERVES.

Convulsions

Like his book on fevers five years earlier, The Anatomy of the Brain and Nerves brought Willis more business. In 1665, a nobleman wrote to a friend that Willis was “one of the learnedest and most famed physicians in the world.” Along with another Oxford physician and a surgeon, Willis bought the Angel Inn on High Street. They turned the tavern into what amounted to a hospital in all but name, complete with a “fluxing chair” for sweating out syphilis. Wealthy invalids riding from London to Bath stopped off at the inn for treatment. Now in his mid-forties, Willis had become the richest man in the county of Oxfordshire. He went on treating poor patients, but out of charity rather than necessity. He no longer traveled to the markets in the surrounding towns as a pisse-prophet, nor did he ride for hours on a shared horse to visit a sick farmer who might or might not be able to pay him. When Willis left Oxford, it was to tend to nobility.

Not long after he published The Anatomy of the Brain, Willis set out on a journey north from Oxford to Warwickshire to see one of the noblest women in all England. He traveled down remote roads that led to a vast estate owned by Lord Conway, secretary of state to Charles II. His carriage pulled up before Ragley Hall, Conway’s majestic mansion.

Willis was guided down its long corridors to a darkened room. Lying in a bed before him was Lord Conway’s wife, Anne. She was a beautiful, dark-eyed woman in her early thirties, who lived in almost perpetual pain.

Willis had been summoned to cure Lady Conway of headaches so powerful that even a glimmer of light sent her into agony. He examined her and asked her about her life, listening carefully and compassionately. Out of these house calls came the first clinical descriptions of migraine in the history of medicine, but these meetings were also important for another reason: they were a historic encounter between two of the seventeenth century’s most radically different visions of the soul. Thomas Willis was in the process of installing the soul in the brain, which he saw as part machine, part alembic. He was about to take his neurology another great step forward, using it to illuminate what happened when the brain and nerves became diseased, as in the case of Lady Conway. Illnesses that had been put down to imbalances of the body’s humors or even demonic possession Willis now conceived as the wayward actions of mechanical particles. Lady Conway, meanwhile, was a brilliant philosopher in her own right who spent years probing the nature of the soul. For her, the headaches that plagued her were not just a matter of errant particles, but were a sign of her union with an entire universe of spirit.

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