With its attention chiefly on Great Britain, The Neurologists describes how Victorian physicians located in a medical culture that privileged general knowledge over narrow specialism came to be transformed into the specialised physicians we now call neurologists. Relying entirely upon hitherto unseen primary sources drawn from archives across Britain, Europe and North America, this book analyses the emergence of neurology in the context of the development of modern medicine in Britain.
The Neurologists thus surveys the patterns of change and modernisation that influenced British medical culture throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century. In so doing, it ultimately seeks an account of how neurological knowledge acquired such an expansive view of human nature as to become concerned in the last decades of the twentieth century with the human sciences, philosophy, art and literature. In short, The Neurologists explains how and why neurology achieved its contemporary cultural status.