Mapping the cerebral globe

Abstract

It would have been better for Christopher Wren's reputation as "that rare and early prodigy of universal science", in the words of his friend the diarist John Evelyn, if he had not subsequently proved to be an architect of genius. The towering presence of his St Paul's cathedral and magnificently varied London churches, erected in the wake of the 1666 fire, overshadow his achievements in a wide range of sciences that include mathematics, astronomy, microscopy, instrument design, natural philosophy, natural history, anatomy and physiology.During his years at the University of Oxford, UK, the precocious Wren was part of the circle of thinkers, investigators and experimentalists who were to lay the foundations of the Royal Society. They intended that no part of the natural world or the cosmos should escape systematic analysis, with a precision that can broadly be called mathematical. It is obvious how astronomical studies should fit within this description, but less clear how the results of anatomical dissection could match that ideal. Wren's illustrations for Thomas Willis's 1664 book Cerebri Anatome (The Anatomy of the Brain) demonstrate how this could be accomplished (see example, pictured right).A good sense of how the seventeenthcentury concept of 'curiosity' fitted with the precise sciences is provided by Bishop John Wilkins, who chaired the founding meeting of the Royal Society. Evelyn, that most assiduous chronicler of his contemporaries, described how Wilkins had constructed "transparent apiaries, which he had built like castles and palaces, and so order' d them one Mapping the cerebral globeA detailed sketch by architect Christopher Wren reveals his surprising contribution to neuroscience, explain Martin Kemp and Nathan Flis.upon another so as to take the honey without destroying the bees".Wilkins also exhibited a "wide variety of shadows, dyals, perspectives, and many other artificial, mathematical, and magical curiosities". Most of the devices were contrived by Wilkins himself, but others were credited to "that prodigious young scholar Mr Christopher Wren, who presented me with a piece of white marble, which he had stain'd with a lively red very deepe, as beautiful as if it had been natural".One of Wren's mathematical inventions was a perspective machine, or perspectograph, an ingenious device that allows a draftsman, squinting through a sight, to trace the lineaments of any object or landscape. One result was his drawing entitled 'Prospect of Windsor Castle from the North' , engraved by Wenceslaus Hollar for Elias Ashmole's 1672 book Institution, Laws and Ceremonies of the Most Noble Order of the Garter.Wren's perspectograph was probably used to trace the topography of the brain, its nerves and blood vessels, just as he used a telescope coupled to a micrometer to map the heavens and create the first lunar globe. However, it would be wrong to think that Wren used his instruments and great skill as a draftsman to create the equivalent of a photograph of a dissection -his representations are a succinct sy...

Crafting the microworld: how Robert Hooke constructed knowledge about small things

“…123 As Martin Kemp and Nathan Flis have noted, Wren's method did not involve projecting or tracing an image of the brain directly, but rather synthesizing and depicting knowledge he had learned from several dissections of different specimens injected with dye. 124 Neither Wren's nor Hooke's microscopical illustrations faithfully represent one particular view of an object; both combine the results of many observations, deductions and research. Interestingly, Thomas Sprat called Wren the 'Inventor of drawing Pictures by Microscopical Glasses', as though he agreed that technical skills like these were the crucial part of the exercise, rather than reproducing one's experience, as earlier naturalists using flea glasses had done.…”