The Body has a Head

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THE BODY HAS A HEAD by Gustav Eckstein "The intent of this book," Dr. Eckstein says in his Introduction, "is to make the humán body more familiar to anyone who owns one." If we enlarge the word "familiar" to include not only "better known and understood" but alsó "more miraculous and mysterious," the statement describes-roughly-somé measure of what his book achieves. A little further on, he adds, "The humán mind is the body's master and the book's destination." We are launched then on the experience of moving, exhilarated and amazed, along the road that led to our present-day understanding of the body, our experimenting with it, our resolve to wrench from it its secrets. The adventure begins with fireworks, sixteen bursts of spectacular creativity lighting up the night sky: among them, Homer, Thales, Democritus ... Hippocrates, Luké, Galen . . . Leonardo, Harvey, Descartes. What each one thought, asked, discovered about the nature and destiny of man, how man is constituted, provides... Tovább

Fülszöveg

THE BODY HAS A HEAD by Gustav Eckstein "The intent of this book," Dr. Eckstein says in his Introduction, "is to make the humán body more familiar to anyone who owns one." If we enlarge the word "familiar" to include not only "better known and understood" but alsó "more miraculous and mysterious," the statement describes-roughly-somé measure of what his book achieves. A little further on, he adds, "The humán mind is the body's master and the book's destination." We are launched then on the experience of moving, exhilarated and amazed, along the road that led to our present-day understanding of the body, our experimenting with it, our resolve to wrench from it its secrets. The adventure begins with fireworks, sixteen bursts of spectacular creativity lighting up the night sky: among them, Homer, Thales, Democritus ... Hippocrates, Luké, Galen . . . Leonardo, Harvey, Descartes. What each one thought, asked, discovered about the nature and destiny of man, how man is constituted, provides the angle of vision. After this overture, the full symphony: Life ("the sum of the forces that resist death") as astronomer, physicist, chemist and the speciálist in cell biology regard it; Growth, from conception to old age; the Environment inside us, and the mechanisms keeping it in balance. Then the body's organs and systems-muscle, heart, blood, lung, digestion, metabolism, kidney, endocrine-how each works and how they work together; the network for defense; the path through the nerves, from signal to reflex; the parts of the brain, and the functions associated with each; the senses, bringing messages from the world; the voluntary nervous-system, with which we thread a needle or feli an oak; the involuntary, with its intricate gauges and con-
(continued from front flap) trols for regülating blood-pressure, heart rate, scores of vitai processes. And we have gained our destination: The Head ... the final third of this journe7 into ourselves: "the rest exists for this." Mind's birth and its first steps; the attempts to pinpoint the precise site of mind: what Sherrington learned, what Pavlov learned, what epilepsy reveals; memory . . . how it is registered, where it is filéd, how it is evoked; emotions, neuroses, suffering and pain; theories of the what and why of sleep; dreams as Freud understood them, as technicians monitor them, as creative acts; the bored mind, toying with drugs; the lonely mind, wanting to communicate; the hand, that reveals the mind's cunning; each single humán personality; the word. What is man, that thou art mindful of him? The answer is not here unless we find it in the search for an answer, as it has continued for three thousand years, accelerated in the past three hundred, speeded up most in our own time to narrow, perhaps, the space between us and that always receding point of light. Dr. Eckstein draws us with him into that pursuit, through those stupendous questions conceived and tackled by so many very diíferent men excellent in intellect, gifted with intuition, dogged as saints, ardent to probe "the awesome intimacy of brain and mind, body and head." Each of the remarkable humán beings whose creativity surges through these pages joins in the orchestration of the great theme. Dr. Eckstein has made the body more familiar to all of us who own one: how it should work and does work when all is weli; what goes wrong when something does go wrong; the how of most of it and the why of a great deal. Beyond that, he has roused us, among thoughts of universe or universes and of our smallness in the majestic vague, to the awareness of "our priváté immensity in the presence of those particles of which there are always more and more, and of which we are finally constructed." Vissza