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Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869) is best known for his Thesaurus, a project completed late in his long life. He trained as a physician, practiced medicine, and was interested in many branches of science. Much of his life was dedicated to the systematization of knowledge and identifying relationships. Although not an experimentalist in the modern sense of the word, he contributed to "neuroscience" in journal and encyclopaedia articles, as well as in books and lectures. He wrote extensively on comparative physiology, sensory systems, phrenology, optics, and various disorders affecting the nervous system. He viewed his two-volume Bridgewater Treatise of 1834 as his most significant achievement, turning to physiology and comparative anatomy to argue that God's existence can be seen in how living forms and their components are designed. Roget was active in many scholarly organizations, most notably the Royal Society of London, where he served for more than two decades as its secretary before "retiring" to pursue his Thesaurus., (© 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

John William Polidori (1795-1821) was the Edinburgh-trained physician hired by Lord Byron to accompany him to Switzerland, where he participated in the story-telling event proposed by Byron that led, with Polidori's help, to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Although those interested in English literature might also remember Polidori as the author of The Vampyre, one of the first extended works of fiction about vampires, his earlier interest in somnambulism and trance states is only beginning to be appreciated. Even more than students of Romantic literature, historians of science and medicine seem little aware of what Polidori had written about oneirodynia, a synonym for somnambulism, and how his thoughts from 1815 about such activities reflected the changing medical zeitgeist at this time. This chapter examines Polidori's medical thesis in a neuroscience context and compares what he wrote to the writings of several other physicians who were fascinated by nocturnal wanderings, their causes, their manifestations, and their possible treatments., (© 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

The early history of neurophysiology has two important roots. The earlier of the two involves various ideas about invisible animal spirits traversing the nerves. The other, which emerged during the eighteenth century, is based on the idea that the elusive spirits are electrical-that animal electricity really does exist. The latter idea stemmed in part from what was being discovered about three types of electric fishes and their shocks prior to Galvani's broader claim in 1791 for animal electricity. This contribution focuses on how the shocks of each of these fishes had been described by three writers outside the fields of physiology and medicine: Plato, the well-known Greek philosopher, who actually provided the first good description of the powers of torpedo rays; Aphra Behn, a leading English Restoration playwright and novelist, who introduced many English speakers to the creature that would become best known as the "electric eel"; and Michel Adanson, a French botanist, who seemed to be the first to compare albeit the electric catfish's shocks to those from a known source of electricity, a Leyden jar. All three authors were famous in their day, and all played important roles in the history of biological electricity by making others aware of one of Nature's wonders, fishes that could "torpify," even without direct contact., (© 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)