A body made of nerves2009

This dissertation is concerned with the history of sensory-motor, or reflex, physiology in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German neuroscience. The argument of my dissertation has three main parts: First, I study how the reflex was employed in medical practice, taking as a case study turn-of-the-century Breslau. Psychiatrist Carl Wernicke used sensory-motor physiology to diagnose mental illness; his student Otfrid Foerster drew on reflex physiology to treat ailments of the nervous system including pain and movement disorders. By studying the reflex in these clinical settings, I show that it was not an elementary and rigid principle, but a rich tool to make sense of neurological and mental illness, in both diagnosis and treatment. Second, this study brings to light the subtle...