HISTNEUR-L: The History of Neuroscience Internet Forum

[Previous Posting] [Next Posting]

Re: Ventricular Doctrine 

On Sun, 22 Feb 1998, Solidarity Foundation wrote:

> I don't think it requires hubris to challenege Clarke and Dewhurst's
> statement. The dynamic causal analysis of cognition given by Nememsius
> had been known since Aristotle, if not earlier, but was discussed
> either independtly of any particular organic embodiment, or in a
> general way with reference to EITHER the heart (Aristotle, earlier
> Stoics) or the brain (Platonists, Hippocratics, Galenists). 

This claim puzzles me. Where, precisely, does Aristotle advance a
*psychological* ventricular theory with respect to the heart? He
occasionally wrote that anger is a heating of blood aroud the heart, but I
don't recall the claim that different chambers of the heart are 
responsible for different functions, and exchange their results among each
other (which is what I suppose a dynamic cardiac-ventricular theory would
have to claim. 

As well, I'd be interested to know which Platonists, exactly, endorsed a
cerebral ventricular theory. Certainly not Plato himself. If it is
middle and neo-platonists you have in mind, they almost certainly adopted
this from non-Platonic influences (medicine? middle stoics?). 

I'm also interested in exactly where in the Hippocratic writings a
cerebral ventricular is posited. Although the Hippocratic corpus is rife
with contradictions, in the more famous works the Hippocratics advocate
the humoral theory (although "the sacred disease" was famously attributed
to the brain).

> I don't
> believe there ever was an "original static model." Nemesius's source
> is certainly Galen, who lived in the 2nd century A.D. His discussion
> of brain localization of the faculties of imagining, reasoning, and remembering,
> can be found in _De Locis Affectis_ iii.9 (Kuehn edition vol.8, 174ff.)

I don't have a copy of this here at home, but my recollection is that
although Galen described the anatomy of the ventricles, he believed the
actual processes of cognition to take place in the *matter* of the brain,
not in the ventricles. The psychological entricular theory was a later
innovation that seems to date from just before the time of Augustine and
Nemesius, as I recall.

> I would strongly recommend that you read a paper by Nicholas H. Steneck,
> "Albert the Great on the Classification and Localization of the Internal
> Senses," _Isis_ 65.193-211.

I will, but I'd be interested in your response to my questions above as
well.

Many thanks,

Christopher D. Green		office:	(416) 736-2100 ext. 66164
Department of Psychology	FAX:	(416) 736-5814
York University
Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3	e-mail: christo@yorku.ca
CANADA

      http://www.yorku.ca/faculty/academic/christo
<HISTNEUR-L@library.ucla.edu>