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Neuroscience And Galen: Body, Selfhood And The Materiality Of Emotions On The Early Modern Stage, Devon Wallace

Dissertations

From antiquity until the turn of the nineteenth century, temperament, mood and personality were believed to exist within, be managed by, and interact with material substance. Before the medical revolution of the late seventeenth century, early modern theories of anatomy and medicine were primarily based on the writings of Galen, who lived in the second century but was him influenced by a much older medical and philosophical tradition. In this period, the playwrights raise the same central question that now appears in so many reactions to the increasingly accepted "neurocentric" world view: "to what extent do I have an emotional …