The history of neuroscience

“If I have seen further than other men, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” wrote Sir Isaac Newton, modestly. Not well known for his modesty, his admission points to a profound truth particularly applying to science, namely that each advance builds on the observations and ideas developed by previous researchers. Scientific theories are almost never born in a vacuum; even Darwin was responding to the mid-19th-century intellectual ferment wrought particularly by the new sciences of geology and paleontology, when he produced “On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection.” So it is fitting that this reference module should have a section on the history of neuroscience and in particular of the giants who laid its foundations. These articles are not laid out in a chronological format because the history of neuroscience did not proceed in a logical temporal sequence, but as is often the way with human endeavors, by a series of fits and starts which followed individuals’ curiosity, the exigencies of disease or war trauma, or mere accident.