William Lawrence and the Organ of Mind

William Lawrence and the Organ of Mind explores the historical origins and ideological valence of the conceptualisation of thought and mind as functions of the brain in early nineteenth-century Britain.

Taking as its starting point the controversy provoked by Lawrence’s Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man, the book draws on archival and published texts, as well as images, to reveal overlooked parallels and connections with the concurrent rise of phrenology and the longstanding Christian mortalist tradition. It shows how the sentient brain served as a radical icon, marking a break with ancient Galenic medical models and Athanasian religious dogma, and charts how – in part through Lawrence’s contributions – it was united with a biological vision that identified human exceptionality more directly with the structure and function of our brains.

Elfed Huw Price’s work indicates that, although Lawrence was silenced, his Lectures lived on, a contributor to the rising tide of Victorian naturalism, and part of a wider transformation of beliefs and values that swept aside the ancient politico-religious structures of the Confessional State, leaving the cerebral organ standing alongside the soul as the source of human reason and a distinguishing feature of humanity.

Praise for William Lawrence and the Organ of Mind

‘[Elfed Huw Price’s] very readable, lively and well-researched book… is [a] richly historical… valuable and attractive contribution to understanding how the brain could have become “an icon, a unit marker, signifying and representing humanity”… at the expense of the soul.’
Metascience