Discoveries in the Human Brain: Neuroscience Prehistory, Brain Structure, and Function

  • Louise H. Marshall &
  • Horace W. Magoun
Humana Press, $59.50

The corpus callosum of the human brain, from the atlas of Louis Achille Foville's Traite complet (1844).

For centuries, so little was known about the true structure of this band of white fibres connecting the cerebral hemispheres that Steno, in 1669, confessed that “a man of a tolerable Genius may say about it whatever he pleases”; indeed, five years earlier, Willis had proposed that it housed the imagination. The plate is one of 300 archival illustrations in Discoveries in the Human Brain: Neuroscience Prehistory, Brain Structure, and Function by Louise H. Marshall and Horace W Magoun (Humana Press, $59.50).