Eric R. Kandel - Principles of Neural Science

Columns II (left) and IV (right) of the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus

This papyrus, transcribed in the Seventeenth Century B.C., is a medical treatise that contains the earliest reference to the brain anywhere in human records. According to James Breasted, who translated and published the document in 1930, the word brain occurs only 8 times in ancient Egyptian, 6 of them on these pages. The papyrus describes here the symptoms, diagnosis, and prognosis of two patients with compound fractures of the skull, and compares the surface of the brain to those ripples that happen in copper through smelting, with a thing in it that throbs and flutters under your fingers like the weak spot of the crown of a boy before it becomes whole for him. The red ink highlights the patients ailments and their prognoses. (Reproduced, with permission, from the New York Academy of Medicine Library.)

Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. Through it, in particular, we think, see, hear, and distinguish the ugly from the beautiful, the bad from the good, the pleasant from the unpleasant. It is the same thing which makes us mad or delirious, inspires us with dread and fear, whether by night or by day, brings sleeplessness, inopportune mistakes, aimless anxieties, absent-mindedness, and acts that are contrary to habit. These things that we suffer all come from the brain, when it is not healthy, but becomes abnormally hot, cold, moist, or dry, or suffers any other unnatural affection to which it was not accustomed. Madness comes from its moistness. When the brain is abnormally moist, of necessity it moves, and when it moves neither sight nor hearing are still, but we see or hear now one thing and now another, and the tongue speaks in accordance with the things seen and heard on any occasion. But when the brain is still, a man can think properly.

attributed to Hippocrates
Fifth Century, B.C.

Reproduced, with permission, from The Sacred Disease, in Hippocrates, Vol. 2, page 175, translated by W.H.S. Jones, London and New York: William Heinemann and Harvard University Press. 1923.

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Cover image: This image is a lithograph by F. Schima from a drawing by Sigmund Freud of the spinal ganglion of the lamprey Petromyzon. Before he discovered the unconscious, Freud had a promising career as a neural scientist. The cover thus recognizes that, a century after Freuds discovery, progress in the study of cognition has reemphasized the importance of unconscious mental processes for perception and action. (Reproduced, with permission, from Sigmund Freud, ber Spinalganglien und Rckenmark der Petromyzon, Sitzungsberichte der Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftlichen Classe der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, LXXVIII. Band I. Abtheilung, 1878, copyright New York Academy of Medicine.)

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James H. Schwartz
1933 2006

WE WISH TO DEDICATE THIS FIFTH EDITION of Principles of Neural Science to our friend and colleague, James H. Schwartz, one of the founding editors who died on March 13, 2006. Jimmy was an outstanding neuroscientist and scholar. His talent for science and his extraordinary erudition were evident from his days as a medical student at New York University. While at NYU he worked with Werner Maas in the microbiology department and carried out an important set of studies on feedback inhibition in bacterial metabolism. This work was so impressive that upon completing medical school, Jimmy was nominated for the highly selective graduate program in biology that had just been established at The Rockefeller University by Detlev Bronk. By the time Jimmy obtained his Ph.D. in Fritz Lippmans laboratory and graduated from Rockefeller in 1964, he had established himself as an outstanding biochemist. He was therefore eagerly recruited back to NYU in 1965 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Microbiology.