Pablo F. Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), pp. xxii+314, $85.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-1-4696-3086-1.

Abraham’s biography achieves success in still further ways. She opens, for example, substantive new ground on the varieties of intellectual dualism that existed in the twentieth century. Study of McCulloch’s life makes clear the eclectic natures of idealism, psycho-physical parallelism, psychosomatic medicine and psychoanalysis in America mid-century. It also makes clear that these forms of dualism exerted something of a structuring effect on figures like McCulloch, who sought (unsuccessfully it seems) to overcome them in mathematical formulation, model or physiological theory. Similarly, Abraham’s volume also engages with the broader question of how ideological commitments and scientific theory are knit together. McCulloch’s neurophysiology drew upon an assemblage of scientific ideas – multiple generations in the making – that cast the nervous system’s function in terms of integrative action. The languages of integration, she describes, permitted substantial rhetorical artifice, allowing figures like McCulloch to translate their languages of the nervous system into, for instance, theories in the human sciences. In turn, that rhetoric of integration may have easily transposed onto the ideologies seeking unity in science, which became commonplace in the post-war period and with which McCulloch actively engaged. Indeed, McCulloch’s life perhaps makes visible a cultural chronology of the mind and brain sciences. The Victorian naturalism of his youth gave way to a similarly styled desire for integration in his middle years, which in turn gave way to an analogous pursuit of scientific unity in the closing decades of his career. In its own way, each cultural style was transdisciplinary. Each also aimed for transcendence. Accordingly, they reveal their own internal contradictions and limitations. They were necessarily predicated on trust, expertise and language. They were held together by social convention, performances of cosmopolitanism and paternalistic understandings of merit and democracy. Of course, as Abraham’s biography shows so clearly such adhesive is poor at glueing scientific communities and theories together. In part, the reason why appears foregrounded in the title of her study: a genius is hard to understand. A rebel has no interest in being understood.