Having a phrenological 'head reading' was one of the most significant fads of the nineteenth century – a means for better knowing oneself and a guide for self-improvement. Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) had a lifelong yet long overlooked interest in phrenology, the pseudoscience claiming to correlate skull features with specialized brain areas and higher mental traits. Twain's books are laced with phrenological terms and concepts, and he lampooned the head readers in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberr...

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic TitleAmong his many accomplishments, Benjamin Franklin was instrumental in founding the first major civilian hospital and medical school and in the American colonies. He studied the efficacy of smallpox inoculation and investigated the causes of the common cold. His inventions—including bifocal lenses and a "long arm" that extended the user's reach—made life easier for the aged and afflicted. In Doctor Franklin's M...

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic TitleAmong his many accomplishments, Benjamin Franklin was instrumental in founding the first major civilian hospital and medical school and in the American colonies. He studied the efficacy of smallpox inoculation and investigated the causes of the common cold. His inventions—including bifocal lenses and a "long arm" that extended the user's reach—made life easier for the aged and afflicted. In Doctor Franklin's M...

Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) was always a controversial figure, as was his doctrine, later called phrenology. Although often portrayed as a discredited buffoon, who believed he could assess a person's strengths and weaknesses by measuring cranial bumps, he was, in fact, a serious physician-scientist, who strove to answer timely questions about the mind, brain, and behavior. In many ways a remarkable visionary, his seminal ideas would become tenets of modern behavioral neuroscience. Among ...

Poker-faced Nellie Conway, the nurses bed-ridden Elizabeth Bain, brings trouble when she calls on Perry Mason with a glass phial containing four pills which she suspects are poison. Her employer, Nathan Bain, she says, had promised her money to give them to his wife. But when Mason has one of the pills analyzed it is found to consist of acetylsalicylic—in other words good old-fashioned aspirin. Is Perry Mason’s client a hoaxer, a psychopath, or something trickier? Nathan Bain’s next move i...

Stylish, trend-setting, and bold, Vine Talk's host Stanley Tucci invites a panel of celebrity friends to join him for engaging conversation and blind taste-tests from different selections of world famous wineries each week. Regardless of personal expertise, all can enjoy the intriguing dialogue from each diverse panel.

It has long been recognized that damage to the mammalian central nervous system may be followed by behavioral recovery, but only re cently has close attention been directed to specific factors which may enhance or retard restitution. This is evident in the rapidly growing number of journal articles and scientific paper sessions dealing with "recovery of function," as well as in the publicity given by the popular press to some of the findings in this field. The present text seeks to examine...

Long ago, in the cold lands of the North, there lived a troll named Ulf who had a very bad habit he liked to eat fingers! Many, many men, women and children had found their hands a finger short thanks to the razor-sharp teeth of the Finger-eater. And who knows how many more might have suffered the same fate if it hadn't been for the actions of a resolute girl called Gudrun!

During the 1790s in Vienna, German physician Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) came forth with a new doctrine dealing with mind, brain and behavior—one that could account for individual differences. He maintained that there are many independent faculties of mind, each associated with a separate part of the brain. He fine-tuned his ideas and published two sets of books presenting them after he and his assistant, Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, settled in Paris in 1807.Gall's ideas had many sup...

The idea for the present volume grew from discussions that the four of us had among ourselves and with our colleagues at recent scientific meetings. All of us were impressed by the wealth of empirical data that was being generated by investigators interested in brain damage and recovery from both behavioral and biological orientations. Nevertheless, we were concerned about the relative paucity of attempts to evaluate the data provided by new technologies in more than a narrow context or to...

This volume will look at the history of trepanation, the identification of skulls, the tools used to make the cranial openings, and theories as to why trepanation might have been performed many thousands of years ago.