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.
Costanzo Varolio
He is best remembered for his work on the cranial nerves. He was the first to examine the brain from its base upwards, in contrast with previous dissections which had been performed from the top downwards. In 1573 he published this new method of dissecting the brain whereby he separated the brain from the skull and began the dissection from the base. Varolio described many of the brain's structures for the first time including the pons or "pons Varolii" which is a reflex center of respiration and a communication bridge between spinal cord and brain, the "crura cerebri" and the ileocecal valve.
Another area of interest to him was the mechanism of erectile function. Although the “Musculi erectores penis” (i.e. Mm. bulbospongiosi and ischicavernosi) had already been described by Galen in the 2nd century A.D., this knowledge was lost by the time of Varolio, who re-discovered them and gave a surprisingly accurate description of the mechanism of erection although his inaccurate attribution of erection to "erector muscles" continued to be believed by most anatomists for three centuries.