Willis's Cerebri Anatome

Many of the plates in Thomas Willis's book on the brain were drawn by Christopher Wren, then a natural philosopher at Wadham College, Oxford. In his preface Willis thanked Wren for drawing figures of the skull and brain with his own hands. Cerebri anatome appeared in London in 1664, and the Royal College of Surgeons describes it as the most complete and accurate account of the nervous system published up to that time.

Willis was born in Wiltshire in 1621 and educated at Oxford. He took up medicine during the Civil War, began to practice after 1646 and had a thriving Oxford practice by the mid-1650s. His reputation grew after a woman hanged for murdering her illegitimate child was brought for dissection to a colleague's rooms: Willis and the colleague found she was still alive, revived her with a primitive form of cardiac massage, and she went on to seek a pardon.

Several men assisted him, among them Wren, the physician Richard Lower and the philosopher John Locke. To trace the blood supply, Willis injected colored dye into the vessels. The book gave the first descriptions of the arterial ring at the base of the brain that now bears his name and of the eleventh cranial nerve. It also introduced the word neurology; the Oxford English Dictionary records Willis as the first to use it in print.

The Royal Society calls Willis the first neurologist of the early modern period in British medicine. Cerebri anatome was reprinted in quarto, octavo and duodecimo editions, and its copper plates were reused and copied for later editions of his books. His account of the brain's anatomy and his discovery of saccharine diabetes were regarded as his finest work. He died in 1675.