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Origin of Neurology


As I consider majoring in neurobiology (the study of the biological mechanisms that control the nervous system) in college, I thought it would be interesting to delve into the origins of neuroscience. For hundreds of years from the ancient Egyptians to the Greeks, humans believed that the seat of intellect was the heart (which is why the ancient Egyptians went to great lengths to preserve the heart after death but discarded the brain!)   

The birth of neurology began 2500 years ago with Hippocrates who pondered over the purpose and functioning of the brain, reasoning that the brain must be the organ controlling sensation simply because most sensory organs - eyes, ears, and tongue -- are located close to the brain. This was starkly different from other opinions of the time which held that the heart was the main organ that controlled everything in humans. The brain was simply thought to be a "radiator" for pumping the heart and keeping it cool. 

Later, Hippocrates expanded the brain's control to "pleasures, joys, laughter, and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs, and tears." Thus was born the field of neurology to study the most important functioning organ of the human body. An organ that controlled sensation, emotions, intellect, consciousness, analytical thinking, and memory certainly deserves a subject devoted to its study.


As big a leap as Hippocrates' theory was, the understanding of the brain, unfortunately, stalled with his successors like Galen who propagated an erroneous view about the functioning of the brain. Galen, even though he was a staunch follower of Hippocrates, believed, and authoritatively proclaimed, that the brain's main function was to pump fluids through the nerves to different organs (somewhat like the radiator theory). Galen's theory that the brain had three ventricles, each of which was responsible for a different mental faculty: imagination, reason, and memory, continued to dominate the medical field for the next 1400 years until  Andreas Vesalius and other European researchers began studying the anatomy of the brain in more detail and neurology, and specifically neurobiology, took shape. 

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