Man on His Nature

"Sherrington was a Nobel laureate who, more extensively than anyone else, mapped the amalgamation of the muscular and neurological systems. Sherrington discovered the synapse. Sherrington discovered the most basic unit of interaction between nerve and muscle, called the motor unit. Sherrington was also one of the last generations of great humanist scientists. I chose this to follow the sourcebook because it continues to develop this question of whether our bodies are the same as the bodies of our forebears. Man on His Nature begins with and is mainly oriented around the life and work of Jean Fernel, the author of the first physiology textbook, which was published in 1542—the year before Copernicus published his theory that the earth revolves around the sun. In the 16th century, Fernel developed a physiology that echoed ideas Aristotle first articulated in the 4th century BC. His elements—earth, air, fire, and water—are the same as Galen’s. Sherrington, in Man on His Nature , is travelling back and forth through time from Fernel in the Renaissance to the most up-to-date neurological research of the early 20th century, and then all the way back to ideas articulated by Aristotle in Ancient Greece. With precision and ambition, Sherrington situates the mind and the body in history and raises the deepest questions about how our experience of our minds and bodies connect us to each other or can separate us from each other. It’s absolutely exhilarating. Sherrington is the greatest writer about physiology I have come across. His prose is a complete joy to read. His description of, for instance, the development and function of the eyeball or of the many processes involved in the act of standing make you, as a reader, want to stand and cheer."