O laboratório da Doutrina dos Nervos : autoria e autoridade em Thomas Willis

Abstract

The object of this inquiry is to analyze the adequacy with which the foundation of the medical specialty of neurology has been ascribed to the English doctor and scientist Thomas Willis (1621-1675). Most studies on the beginnings of this specialty favor an historical, and particularly an historical positivistic perspective of the matter, looking for a stationary point in time, which coincided with the studies performed by Thomas Willis. My purpose in this inquiry is to deconstruct this approach. I support the view that in history of the science the historicity, rather than something fixed, keeps a continuing expansion and is permanently transforming itself; for unlike what is proposed by the positivistic ideal, the establisher of what Foucault called scientificity should not be considered the person who uncovered an object which ever lay there; because, dealing the history of science with a cultural subject, it would be misleading to approach the initial studies on neurology with the perspective proper to natural history. In this work, I am propounding a new meaning for the foundation by Willis of what he called The Doctrine of the Nerves . As I see it, Willis set up something like a new audiovisual archive , that is, a new articulation of the visible with the enunciable, in relation to the nerves. In the proposed new meaning, the superposing in the same process in which Willis was consecrated as an auctor, a physician and a scientist of the nerves.