It is some time before we again see real progress in medicine and physiology. In 1316, Mondino de Luzzi came out with the first European textbook on anatomy, appropriately called Anatomia. Early in the 1500's, Da Vinci, naturally, plays a part with numerous drawings of skulls and brains, and even a wax casting of the ventricles. In 1561, Gabriele Fallopio published Observationes Anatomicae, wherein he describes, among many other things, the cranial nerves and, of course, the fallopian tubes

Real progress had to wait for the invention of the microscope by Zacharias Jansen of Middleburg, Holland, in 1595 (or by his father, Hans). It would be refined by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in Holland, Galileo in Italy and Robert Hooke in England.

(Soon afterwards, in 1608, a colleague of Zacharias Jansen in Middleburg, a German by the name of Hans Lippersberg, invented the telescope.)

Another major event was William Harvey’s (1578-1657) explanation of the circulation of the blood in 1628. Most physicians, still using Galen’s text, believed that the blood ebbed and flowed like a tide through the whole body!

Centers of medical education developed in the universities at Padua, Italy and Leyden, Holland. Here, students studied anatomy, did post-mortems, and even dabbled in what we would now call pathology. They performed careful case-studies, with detailed measurements.

Neurophysiology developed in parallel to all the other medical and physiological developments. We could point to Thomas Willis’s anatomical description of the brain in 1664 as the first major step. His book was illustrated by Christopher Wren, the famous English artist and architect. Willis coined the term neurology in 1681.

A very significant contributor to the development of our understanding of the brain was none other than our old friend Rene Descartes. He postulated a dualistic system, with a mind/soul interacting with the brain/body by means of animal spirits (pneuma). The will (an aspect of our souls) enters the brain as animal spirits via the pineal gland, interacts with the organization of nerves that represent established habits, courses through the nerves (viewed as tiny tubes) to the muscles, causing them to contract and so produce a behavior!

Likewise, actions upon the sensory neurons cause increases in pressure on the animal spirits, which course through the nerves to the brain, influencing the structure of the brain by repetition, as well as passing on to the soul as perceptions.

Sometimes, the actions of the senses led to rather immediate responses by the muscles. These would be called reflexes by Descartes' countryman, Jean Astruc, and were defined as cycles of action that do not require the intervention of the mind or soul. Descartes did include far more complex behavior as reflexes than we would today.

Passions (roughly, emotions) also come from outside the body, essentially as sensations. They lead to a variety of physiological changes as well as reflex actions: We see a bear, we run! In animals, these passions are just sensations and reflexes. We, however, experience them with our mind/soul as wonder, love, hate, desire, joy, and sadness, as well as hundreds of combinations.

Descartes' ideas, minus the soul, would be promoted by Julien Offay de la Mettrie (1709-1751) in a landmark book called Man a Machine (1748). Robert Whytt (1714-1766) would later lay down the neurological basics of the reflex, and introduce the terms stimulus and response. In 1791, Luigi Galvani cllinched these concepts with his famous experiments involving the electrical stimulation of frogs' nerves.

About 1721, Lady Mary Montegu introduced a strange medical practice she had seen while visiting in Turkey: Inoculation. Instead of letting a full-blown case of smallpox damage their lovely skin, young women had pus from someone with a mild case of smallpox injected just under the skin. (Don't laugh: Today, people have themselves injected with the poison botox to erase wrinkles!) Edward Jenner later began inoculating people against the smallpox by vaccinating them with cowpox material. The antibodies produced made one immune to smallpox as well as further cases of cowpox.