By the mid-1980s I had been working on the nerves for two decades, concentrating primarily on the increasing discourse surrounding them in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What would a broader approach entail with a larger time span for comparison and more focused on the brain? The brain had come into its own in the 1980s in ways unseen in the more confident 1960s, as the bibliography of this book makes evident. The neuroanatomical optimism of the 1960s was overthrown in the localization of the 1980s, suggesting that identification of particular anatomical domains would be a longer —and more arduous — process than had been imagined earlier. Contemporary neurosicence had been exploring cortical localization for a long time; new was the invigorated plasticity and emphasis on the synapse that suddenly made the Enlightenment discourses I had been immersed in spring back to life.