Title:
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The production of brain knowledge in neuroscience : the relationship between epilepsy, the brain and
the mind from the nineteenth century to the
contemporary period
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This thesis explores the relationship between epilepsy, the brain, and the mind from
the nineteenth century to contemporary neuroscience. I begin by exploring the
relationship between the experimental animal and the epileptic patient in the
nineteenth century through a focus on the work of the animal experimentalist David
Ferrier and the epileptician John Hughlings Jackson. I continue to explore this
relationship through an analysis of the work of animal experimentalist Charles
Sherrington and its influence upon the twentieth century epileptic ian and brain
experimentalist Wilder Penfield, who conducted experiments upon the brains of his
epileptic patients using electrical stimulation. I then explore the use of epileptic
patients in the split brain research conducted by Roger Woolcot Sperry, for which he
won the Nobel Prize in 1983. I develop the thesis by exploring the relationship
between the epileptic and the hysteric in the nineteenth century in both Sigmund
Freud's work and Jackson's work; and I relate this to the contemporary manifestation
and diagnosis of 'psychogenic seizures' in epilepsy medicine. Finally, I explore the
relationship between the brain and the mind and epilepsy as they are constituted
within the imaging technologies. I conclude by arguing that both contemporary
neuroscience and sociological engagement with neuroscience is one in which the brain
is occluded by the mind rather than is currently supposed that the mind is replaced by
the brain.
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