Foundations of the neuron doctrine

social conditions. Indeed, growing nationalist activities in the twentieth century led the government of India to operate its medical policies with and through this plural structure up to independence. Others might wish to paint a different picture in which Western medicine and the European model was both more dominant and more contested, yet Bala offers considerable food for thought and new ideas to test in the future. The constraint on size means that this study is not as empirically strong as it might have been. Also, at several points it relies on a dated, if not inaccurate, picture of the professional, cognitive and practical development of medicine in Britain. For example, the impact of the public health movement within medicine is overstated, and the important recent work on the ideological rather than practical roles of science in medicine has not been taken on board. That said, Bala does provide further comparative support for those historians who have stressed the importance of the wider social, economic and political context in shaping the social organization of medical practice. In addition, her study takes the history of professionalization into the twentieth century and discusses the influence of the growing industrialization of medicine on education, organization and practice. The brain and spinal cord are made up of nerve cells, supporting tissue, and blood vessels. The essential component of the nervous system is the neuron or nerve cell. Vision and movement, thought and feelings are ultimately based on the action of nerve cells. Nerve cells communicate with one another by fibre-like processes; axons and dendrites, which take their origin from nerve cells. The idea that the nervous system is composed of individual elements whose processes touch, but do not fuse is called the neuron doctrine. The neuron doctrine was put forward in its final form at the end of the nineteenth century, but the evidence for it was accumulated in over half a century of anatomical, histological, and physiological research. The neuron doctorine has been the basis for all further study of the structure and function of the nervous system, and the nature of neurological disease. Despite its fundamental importance, the history of the neuron doctrine has received relatively little attention. The most important volume prior to the present one was that of Edwin Clarke and C. D. O'Malley, The human brain and spinal cord. Clarke and O'Malley's book contains excerpts from the literature translated …