Soul Made Flesh (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Carl Zimmer
- First Published: 2004
- Type of Work: History, medicine, and science
- Time of Work: 1543-1675
- Setting: England
- Principal Characters: Thomas Willis, Robert Boyle, William Harvey, Robert Hooke, Richard Lower, John Wallis, Christopher Wren
- Genres: Nonfiction, History, Health and medicine, Science and technology
- Subjects: Doctors, England or English people, Seventeenth century, Medicine, Enlightenment, Great Britain, Anatomy, Human anatomy, Brain
- Locales: England
Throughout most of recorded history, the relative status of the human heart and the human brain was clear and mostly unquestioned. An observer at an ancient Egyptian embalming ceremony, for instance, would have seen the priests use a hooklike tool to perfunctorily scrape out the cadaver's brain through the nose and then pack the resulting empty skull with clean cloth before burial. The heart, by contrast, was carefully preserved in the body. As the seat of the soul and all intelligence, the heart was considered crucial for entering the afterlife, where it was weighed by the gods to...
[The entire page is 2125 words long]
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