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.
The Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic
On a routine visit to check on his investments in the Tuberculosis Clinic, philanthropist Henry Phipps asked Dr. William Welch if there were any other departments that needed assistance. A book called "A Mind That Found Itself" by Clifford Whittingham Beers inspired Welch to request an investment so Johns Hopkins could become a leader in psychiatry. Phipps agreed to donate $1.5 million to start the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. A man named Adolf Meyer, a prominent professor of psychiatry at Cornell University and the first ever psychobiologist, helped publish "A Mind That Found Itself" and was one of the best in the field of psychiatry, so Welch recruited Meyer to become the head of the new department. Meyer became the head of the department in 1909 and oversaw the development of both the department and the building that would house the clinic for the next few decades. After several years of construction, the clinic finally opened on April 16, 1913.