Physiology and the medicalized body played a crucial role in the
development of literary and cultural sensibility. G. S.
Rousseau, in his essay, "Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres," describes
the development of sentiment and sensibility in terms of a
series of Kuhnian paradigm shifts beginning in the seventeenth
century. After William Harvery's discovery of the blood's
circulation in the 1620's, it became more and more possible to
imagine not only the blood, but other spirits moving and
carrying information throughout the body. Nervous theories of
all sorts were suggested: some said nerves were hollow tubes
that could transport "animal spirits" from one part of the body
to another. Newton suggested a musical metaphor, linkng the
nervous sytem to a vibrating stringed instrument. Others, like
Thomas Willis, complicated this idea, suggesting, in his case,
that the nerves were conductors rather than hollow tubes and
that the animal spirits moved about the body more mysteriously
than water in plumbing. Willis also sugge