An account of early neuroscience and of the peculiar literary forms it produced. Challenging the divide between science and literature, philosophy and fiction ,the author draws attention to a distinctive mode of writing evident in a host of late seventeenth and eighteenth-century texts: in poetry (Barker, Blackmore, Thomson), narrative (Sterne and Smollett), philosophy (Hobbes, Cavendish, Locke), satire (Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot), and medicine (Mandeville, Boswell. 'Nervous fictions' dissect the brain through metaphor, personification, and other figurative language, and stage a central Enlightenment problematic: the clash between mind and body, between our introspective sense of self as beings endowed with thinking, sensing, believing, willing minds and the scientific study of our brains as simply complex physical systems. The book is in excellent condition, with no markings.