1664

Publication of Thomas Willis’ Cerebri anatome (The Anatomy of the Brain), while Willis was Professor of Natural Philosophy at Oxford, where he used brain anatomy as a means of investigating the soul. More specifically, brain anatomy held the key to understanding the rational soul, which acted on the brain. It would reveal structural similarity between man and animals while showing a difference in high function, thus proving that man had an immortal soul in addition to the soul held in common with animals (O’Connor, 140). In the book, Willis coined the term “neurologia,” elsewhere the “doctrine of the nerves.” He gave the term in Greek and included in it the cranial, spinal, peripheral and autonomic nerves, as distinct from the brain and spinal cord (Arraez-Aybar, et al.). It was also in Cerebri anatome that Willis identified the “circle of Willis,” the arterial circular mass at the base of the brain. In this, his opus, “Willis did not work alone but in collaboration with a multidisciplinary team composed of Thomas Millington, Christopher Wren and Richard Lowers” (O’Connor, 141). “Willis deployed this neologism to indicate his intent to perform a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the brain and nerves in order to substantiate a new pathology and a new physiology. . . His next two works “suggest the progress of his research from anatomy to pathology, and eventually to physiology. . . . He dedicated each of his neurological works to Gilbert Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1663 – 1679, and he [Willis] intended his neurology to serve the ideological and political ends of Sheldon’s church,” i.e., the Church of England (Caron, 529).