History of neuroscience
During the second half of the first millennium BC, the Ancient Greeks developed differing views on the function of the brain. However, due to the fact that Hippocratic doctors did not practice dissection, because the human body was considered sacred, Greek views of brain function were generally uninformed by anatomical study. It is said that it was the Pythagorean Alcmaeon of Croton (6th and 5th centuries BC) who first considered the brain to be the place where the mind was located. According to ancient authorities, "he believed the seat of sensations is in the brain. This contains the governing faculty. All the senses are connected in some way with the brain; consequently they are incapable of action if the brain is disturbed...the power of the brain to synthesize sensations makes it also the seat of thought: The storing up of perceptions gives memory and belief and when these are stabilized you get knowledge." In the 4th century BC Hippocrates, believed the brain to be the seat of intelligence (based, among others before him, on Alcmaeon's work). During the 4th century BC Aristotle thought that, while the heart was the seat of intelligence, the brain was a cooling mechanism for the blood. He reasoned that humans are more rational than the beasts because, among other reasons, they have a larger brain to cool their hot-bloodedness.
Gottlieb Burckhardt
In 1876 he became a Privatdozent at the University of Bern where he lectured on nervous and mental diseases. This marks a highly productive period in his career as he became a regular contributor to several medical publications including the Swiss periodical "Korrespondenzblatt für Schweizer Ärtze" and produced articles on a variety of psychiatric and neurological topics. In 1877 he published a historical treatment of psychiatric and psychological theories of the functional regions of the brain. In this article he proposed that there were "cortical dispersion centres" which were "rooted in physiology and anatomy in the brain" and that these played a crucial role in the development of mental illness. Burckhardt drew inspiration for his hypothesis from recent advances which had shown the localisation of language faculties in the brain and he believed that mental diseases were also traceable to specific cortical centres. In the application of internal medicine to psychiatry, his research activities extended to an exploration of the relationship between mental illness and bodily temperature, blood pressure and pulse. In 1881 he published on the relationship between cerebral blood flow and oxygen consumption and posited a connection between cerebral oxygen deprivation, pathological brain circulation and mental illness. While at Bern he also successfully submitted articles on the histological preparation of brain cells, sensory aphasia ("word deafness"), the anatomy of the brain and cerebral localisation and forensic psychiatry. From 1881 until his departure from the Waldau Clinic in 1882, Eugen Bleuler, who coined the term schizophrenia in 1908, served as his medical intern.