Medicate a smashed skull with grease and bind a head wound with fresh meat. These are just two of the treatments laid out in the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, unearthed in the 19th century. Drawing on texts from 3000BC, the Ancient Egyptian document represents one of our earliest attempts to understand the brain.
By the 2nd century AD, Claudius Galen, a Roman physician, was experimenting on gladiators and primates. About 800 years later, Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi, a Moor, documented surgical procedures in al-Tasrif. Their work dominated medical teaching for centuries.
A lull came during the Middle Ages, when the Church prohibited dissection. But the Renaissance brought the brain to the attention of Leonardo da Vinci. He produced detailed studies of the organ and pioneered theories about its ventricular structure by injecting hot wax into an ox brain. Next came influential textbooks. In 1543 Andreas Vesalius, an anatomist who worked with artists to ensure accurate illustrations, wrote On the Fabric of the Human Body. The hands behind some of the finest sketches of the time remain unknown, but some trace them back to the pupils of Titian.
But not all portrayals advanced knowledge. In 1810 Francis Gall, the father of phrenology, thought that he had mapped the bumps of the skull that predict personality. A movement that encouraged voting for MPs based on their head shape has since abated.
As the Victorian era approached, knowledge about the brain accelerated. When Sir Charles Bell wasn’t operating at the Battle of Waterloo or giving his name to Bell’s palsy, he studied the role of nerves. His illustrations still speak to the beauty of our brains.
Images shifted from the artistic to the photographic in the 1900s. Pumping air into the brain sounds terrifying, but when Walter Dandy introduced ventriculography in 1918 it enabled surgeons to pinpoint a tumour using X-rays.
In 1927, scientists were able to visualise blood vessels in the brain for the first time when Egas Moniz pioneered cerebral angiography. This important discovery would be overshadowed by his more enduring legacy: the lobotomy.
CAT scans replaced more invasive neuroimagery techniques in the 1970s. By taking multiple X-rays and blending them into one, they can create a detailed picture of the brain. The decade also saw the development of PET scans, which trace the passage of radioactive isotopes injected into the body.
Today the MRI is often the scan of choice. The machines, which magnetise the body and then send powerful radio waves through it to create images, enable surgeons to make greater distinction between different types of tissue.
Our understanding of the brain is still superficial. Scientists now hope to map the wiring that connects our billions of neurons. A huge task, but these images would be fit to hang beside those of Bell and Leonardo.
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