Bat bombs, a photograph of Che Guevara’s corpse and Rembrandt’s art are likely not among the topics readers of a history of neuroscience expect to see discussed. The papers that make up Charles Gross’s latest book, however, touch upon a broad array of diverting anecdotal details as Gross, a neuroscientist, explores various aspects of his field’s history. This work is a second collection of historical papers published by Gross. The title of the book refers to one paper in Gross’s collection on Trephaning, or the practice of removing a piece of bone from the skull, often to relieve cerebral pressure or otherwise drain fluids. Although the motivations for performing the procedure are uncertain, as Gross shows, evidence for its operation exists among the artifacts of numerous cultures and is likely to have also occurred during the Paleolithic era.

Not only would students of the brain sciences have much to gain from Gross’s book, but so would those with an interest in either the philosophy or sociology of science. Many of the papers in the book have appeared in journals, or are derived from journal articles, while Gross adds postscripts at the end of many chapters to bring the information up to date. The book is divided into three sections, one on early neuroscience, the second on neuroscience and art and finally the third section on a handful of scientists who were ahead of their time. Various diagrams are reproduced to illustrate certain facets of neuroscientific work, and the photos and artwork that appear lend vividness to Gross’s discussions of various historical periods. A reader can expect to gain a deeper understanding of the human brain and it’s functioning, but what Gross does in this book is to mainly tell stories. Such stories, moreover, are rife with dramatic details about scientific rivalries, accidental discoveries, grim-sounding animal experiments and animal rights activism.

As such, the neuroscientist’s work meanders through life of Galen of Pergamon, a physician to Roman gladiators whose prolific writings shaped Western medicine well into medieval times. Gross then moves into early theories of vision that held that vision involves the emission of light from the eyes and he delves into topics such as the discovery of the cerebral cortex. The second section of the book includes the interesting tidbit about the striking similarity between a photo of Guevara shortly after he was shot, and Rembrandt’s painting the Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Joan Deijman, which features a human dissection. One paper in the third section is something of a eulogy for Donald R. Griffin, who, apart from being a pioneer in echolocation in bats and studies in animal consciousness, taught Gross as an undergraduate. Griffin, also worked for a short time on a WWII project studying the possibility of strapping incendiary devices onto bats and leaving them to roost in Japanese “paper” homes.

While Gross’s subject matter is undeniably diverse, a common thread running through many of the papers is the sometimes slow uptake up of, or outright resistance to, new ideas in science. Much of his work, in fact, involves uncovering scientific breakthroughs that were largely ignored or dismissed by the majority scientists at the time. Gross provides a tantalizing glimpse into the social and political processes underlying shifts in scientific paradigms, but does not offer a sophisticated analysis of such factors. Typically, he explains the scientific community’s oversight of new ideas in terms of prevailing dogma at the time, or the stature of scientists with opposing views. As with Thomas Kuhn before him, Gross quotes Max Planck in noting that “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and eventually making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that it familiar with it” (181). Although echoes of Kuhn resonate through Gross’s book, in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn expressly took it upon himself to challenge the view of scientific progress as an orderly and rational endeavor. Gross, on the other hand, mainly aims to tell some interesting stories while bringing to life the history of his field. The end product, however, should challenge those who accept the view of science as the purely rational and objective pursuit of truth. It may also effectively whet the appetite of those who see science as the product of sometimes messy human interactions and something that cannot help but be shaped by the emotions, allegiances and aspirations of those doing the work.

© 2010 Marnina Norys

Marnina Norys is a PhD student in Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Her work is in philosophy of psychiatry and psychiatric ethics.