The essays in this volume visit episodes in the history of the mind and brain sciences through the historical looking glass of the broader concepts of technique, technology, and therapy. In the last three decades, technique and technology in particular have commanded increasing attention from scholars working on the history of science and medicine, but they have been less explored by historians of neuroscience. Even therapy, which at first glance seems to have been widely discussed by scholars, has been explored only selectively; more marginal neurological therapies, for instance, have only recently captured historians’ attention. In putting together this volume, our first goal was to draw together more closely a community of scholars who study diverse topics pertaining to the history of the mind and brain sciences but who are also concerned about broader historiographical directions and who rely on similar conceptual styles. This volume was conceived as a meditation on the role that technique, technology, and therapy—as conceptual and rhetorical categories, as well as practical embodiments—have played in the constitution of the mind and brain sciences over the past one and a half centuries. Our second goal was to collect a series of papers able to provide a sophisticated and versatile teaching tool for graduate and senior undergraduate seminars.

Collectively, the papers contribute to and challenge some aspects of the current historiography of the neurosciences, which has broadly developed in a way that encourages constructing and thinking within grand narratives about progress in the studies of the mind and brain, and which tends to overemphasize the centrality of the human self within this history. In contrast, this volume makes a collective case for exploring the field through the lens of seemingly marginal stories—stories that appear, from a contemporary perspective—to be situated at the edges of history. By foregrounding these marginal stories, we hope to disrupt the standard narrative and to offer a competing view of the history of the mind and brain sciences. In place of a grand narrative, our volume offers a series of unconventional stories. In lieu of a linear history of progress, we suggest a congregation of fractured histories.

Introduction

Thus wrote physiologist J. Z. Young in a script solicited by the Committee for Science and Technology for the 1951 Festival of Britain and for which Young proposed a novel exhibit focused on memory in the octopus. Describing the natural history and behavior of this marine animal, Young explained to his readers those reasons that rendered the invertebrate a model organism for the science of physiology. Noting that octopuses proved to be particularly clever creatures, Young claimed they were highly amenable to training. “The experiment consisted,” he wrote, “in training the Octopus not to attack a crab if a white square was also present” in their aquarium. When the square was not present the octopus could feed on the crab. By presenting the crab and the white square together to the octopus, the animal could be trained to associate the white square and the crab with painful experiences. “This was done by dangling the crab on a thread in front of the square to which a pair of electric wires were attached. When the Octopus came out and attacked the crab, it received an electric shock, dropped the crab and retreated home.”