Subjects
Medicine and Modernism:
A Biography of Sir Henry Head
L S Jacyna
Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century
978 1 85196 907 4: 234x156mm: £60.00/$99.00
978 1 85196 581 6
This is the first in-depth study of the English neurologist and polymath Sir Henry Head (1861–1940). Head bridged the gap between science and the arts. He was a published poet who had close links with such figures as Thomas Hardy and Siegfried Sassoon. His research into the nervous system and the relationship between language and the brain broke new ground. Jacyna argues that these advances must be contextualised within wider Modernist debates about perception and language.
In his time, Head was best known for his research into the human nervous system. He did a series of experiments in collaboration with W H R Rivers in which cutaneous nerves were surgically severed in Head’s arm and the stages by which sensation returned were charted over several years. Head’s friend, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, drew out the epistemological implications of how, in this new conception, the nervous system evolved knowledge of the world.
Another important strand of his research concerned the localization of the language function within the brain. In his monumental work, Aphasia and Kindred Disorders (1926), Head radically revised current ideas about the physiological basis of language. As well as its impact on medicine and biology, this work was seen to have implications for other disciplines including linguistics and social anthropology.
This important new study draws upon a wide range of previously unpublished resources.
Sample pages
Readership
History of Medicine, History of Science, Literary Studies
Contents
Introduction
1 The Making of a Neurologist
2 The Poles of Practice
3 ‘The Great Hard Road of Natural Science’
4 Ruth and Henry
5 The Cultivation of Feeling
6 The Two Solitaries
Reviews
'Stephen Jacyna is a highly regarded historian of medicine who ... has written an eloquent and subtle biography of an individual and his milieu. It will be of interest to anyone seeking a window on to the world of medicine and the arts at the outset of the twentieth century'
– Marjorie Lorch, Aphasiology
'Jacyna has given us an accomplished, scholarly, and insightful account of an era.'
– BRAIN
'Medicine and Modernism is as impressively polymathic as its subject ... Jacyna is a consummate historian, faithful to the detail of Head's life that emerges from a rich archive of material, both published and unpublished.'
– Laura Salisbury, Modernism-Modernity
'This is a thoughtful, critical –and oftentimes compassionate– view of an overlooked figure of the modernist period.'
– Amanda Mordavsky Caleb, The British Society for Literature and Science
(read the full review here)
'Jacyna's seminal portrait of physiologist-turned-clinical-neurologist Henry Head reinvents medical biography and positions it at the cutting edge of several rejuvenated historiographies.'
– Andrew Hull, British Journal for the History of Science
'This is a most interesting and meticulously told biography ... [it] will captivate doctors, medical historians and anyone interested in the shift from Victorian to twentieth-century British intellectual culture.'
– Roger Smith, Medical History
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