Thomas, Willy

In the late 1600s, Thomas Willis coined the term neurology and suggested that hysteria was a disorder of the nerves and brain. Willis was an important figure in establishing the biological bases for psychological disturbances. 

The latter half of the seventeenth century is marked by the activity of a considerable number of able investigators and writers on chemistry, notable among whom are Nicolas Le Febre (or Le Febure), ( -1674) Christopher Glaser (died about 1670-1673) Eobert Boyle (1627-1691) Thomas Willis (1621-1675) Johann Kunkel (1630-1702) Johann J. Becher (1635-1682) John Mayow (1645-1679) Nicolas Lemery (1645-1715) and Wilhelm Homberg (1652-1715). All these men contributed to the increase of knowledge of the facts of chemistry by their researches and publications, which appeared from about 1660 to the close of the century. 

So also in 1671 Thomas Willis proposed a theory of combustion. When a flame arises and is maintained there is need of continuous supply of air, not merely to prevent the flame being suffocated by vaporous effluvia, but to supply the nitrous food (pabulum nitrosum) necessary to the burn-... 

Ginsberg M. D. (2003) Adventures in the pathophysiology of brain ischemia penumbra, gene expression, neuroprotection the 2002 Thomas Willis Lecture. Stroke 34, 214-223. 

Detected by anatomists who dissected the cerebral hemispheres, the main structure of the basal ganglia was defined as corpus striatum by Thomas Willis in the 17th century (Willis, 1664) because of the mixture of gray matter and fiber tracts. Such mixture was... 

Thomas Willis. Of the Anatomy of the Brain. Englished by Samual Pordage, Esquire, London. Printed for Dring, Harper. Leigh and Martyn, 1681. Facsimile Edition, McGill University Press, Montreal, 1965. p. 111. 

The first person to study the new or post-Aristotelian chemistry in Oxford, however, seems to have been Dr Thomas Willis of Christ Church, who had, with his friends Ralph Bathurst and John Lydall, studied Chymistry in Peckewater Inne chamber in the late 1640s.Yet more of Willis anon. And then came Dr (later Sir) William Petty. Following the radical reorganisation of Oxford after the capture of King Charles I and the end of the first cycle of civil wars in the late 1640s, many new faces were intruded into the University by Parliament, to replace Royalist dons who would not forswear their loyalty to His Majesty and were thus ejected from their posts in 1648. To put it plainly. 

Chemically and physiologically wrong, in exact scientific terms, as we now know Thomas Willis s ideas to have been, his wider significance in the history... 

Also Robert Mortensen, Thomas Willis , Oxford DNB. 

Entry from flyleaf of Thomas Willis s clinical notebook, Wellcome Library MS. 799A, cited in Dewhirst, Willis s Oxford Lectures (n. 16), 30 superscript ref. 33. 

Mortensen, Thomas Willis , Oxford DNB. Willis s chemistry is dealt with in some detail in Charles Morris, Thomas Willis and the Early Development of Chemistry in Oxford , unpublished Oxford University M.Chem. Part II thesis, 2003. Morris examines Willis s practical and medical chemistry, and his interests in nitre, respiration, and atomism. Copy in History Faculty Library. 

Thomas Willis, Diatribae duae medio-philosophicae. .. de Fermentatione. . . , London, 1659, 1 16. 

For Willis s chemico-mechanical ideas of explosive muscle action, see Frank, Oxford Physiologists (n. 16), 221. Also Hansreudi Isler, Thomas Willis 1621-1675, Doctor and Scientist, Hafner, New York, London, 1968, 114—22. 

J. A. Bennett, S. A. Johnston and A. V. Simcock, Solomon s House in Oxford New Einds from the Eirst Museum, Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, 2000, 31-48 for chemical, 48-58 for anatomical remains. Many of the perishable items in the original Tradescant Collection decayed away or else were lost or destroyed due to neglect. Some are now conserved in the Founder s Room of the Ashmolean Museum, Beaumont St, Oxford, while some anatomical pieces - such as the bony remains of the famous Dodo bird - are on display in the University Museum, Parks Road, Oxford. Anthony J. Turner, Robert Plot , Oxford DNB. William Wilder s apothecary s shop and laboratory stood on the south side of the High Street, around what is now No. 80, just east of Thomas Willis s private hospital at Bostar Hall and the Angel Inn, by Logic Lane. See Brookes, Experimental Chemistry in Oxford (n. 27), 30. Gunther, Early Science in Oxford vol. I (n. 28), 50. 

Thomas Willis (1621-1675) made several allusions to persons voiding, with a sUght cough, sputa Uke black ink, often in a day, and especially every... 

The structure and function of the human brain have preoccupied physicians and philosophers alike since the dawn of history. Prominent Greek physicians such as Alcmaeon of Groton, Hippocrates, and Galen correcdy considered the nervous system to be the source of sensations, emotions, and cognitive faculties. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the anatomy of the brain was described in detail by Flemish physician Andreas Vesalius and English physician Thomas Willis. The term neurology was first used by Willis to describe the study of the brain. 

Willis, Cerebri Anatome, Practice, pp. 72-73. Willis s physiology of the brain is discussed in A. Meyer and R. Hyerons, On Thomas Willis s Concepts of Neurophysiology Medical History, 9 (1965) pp. 1-15, 142-55. 

The authors would like to acknowledge many extremely helpfiil discussions with researchers fi om different countries diat have contributed so much to the development of die field Bryce L. Crawford, Jr., John C. Decius, W. J. Orville-Thomas, Willis B. Person, Lev A. Gribov, Ian M. Mills, John Overend, Giuseppe Zerbi, Mariangela Gussoni, Peter Pulay, Henry F. Schaefer m, Derek Steele, Donald C. McKean, Wmiam M. A. Smit, Salvador... 

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