Thomas Willis

English physician, anatomist, physiologist, and chemist

• Born: January 27, 1621
• Birthplace: Great Bedwyn, Wiltshire, England
• Died: November 11, 1675
• Place of death: London, England

Willis discovered several important anatomical and physiological features of the human body, coined the term “neurology,” and improved the understanding of brain function, the circulatory system, diabetes, bubonic plague, and stroke. He is best known for discovering the physiological purpose of the cerebral arterial circle (circulus arteriosus cerebri), commonly called the “circle of Willis.”

Early Life

Thomas Willis was born on his father’s farm, the eldest child in the large family of Thomas Willis, Sr., and Rachel Howell. When he was about ten, his family moved to North Hinksey, a village about a mile and a half from Oxford. After attending Edward Sylvester’s private school in Oxford and becoming, in 1636, a servant to the Reverend Dr. Thomas Iles, canon of the local Anglican community, Willis entered Christ Church College, Oxford University, in 1637 as Iles’s “batteler,” or indebted student. He received a B.A. in 1639, an M.A. in 1642, and a B.Med. in December, 1646. In the 1640’s, Willis became the leader of the “Oxford physiologists,” an informal group of biomedical researchers working in the tradition of William Harvey. Willis’s students at Oxford included Richard Lower and Robert Hooke.

Willis was a fervent Royalist and a conservative Anglican. Oxford was a Royalist town. Thus, for most of the English Civil War and throughout the era of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth and Protectorship, he had to be careful to avoid arrest, especially after the Parliamentary army of the third Baron Fairfax occupied Oxford on June 24, 1646. Yet Willis remained true to his faith, hiding Royalist fugitives, providing secret places for outlawed Anglican services to be held, and generally putting himself in political danger despite the threat to his career and liberty. In 1657, he married Mary Fell, daughter of Samuel Fell (dean of Christ Church College), and sister of John Fell, bishop of Oxford. His close connections to prominent Anglican clergy extended also to his patient Gilbert Sheldon, who was imprisoned during the Commonwealth but elevated to archbishop of Canterbury after the Restoration of Charles II . Sheldon’s influence proved important in gaining key appointments for Willis in Oxford and London after 1660.

Life’s Work

Willis was an iatrochemist, that is, a follower of the medical theories of Paracelsus, Jan Baptista van Helmont, and Franz Deleboe, which asserted that either chemistry or alchemy was the key to medical mysteries. The terms iatrochemistry, iatrochemism, or chemiatry, by which this group of theories was variously known, derive from the Greek words iatros, meaning “physician,” and chymeia, whose meaning is obscure but refers to flowing juices and the transmutation of metals. The agenda of the iatrochemists was at odds with that of iatromechanists, such as René Descartes and Giovanni Alfonso Borelli , who claimed that physiology is best understood through physics and mathematics. Both approaches advanced physiology, but iatrochemistry was more flexible and more empirical and thus probably more useful than iatromechanics.

A prolific writer, Willis published many scientific papers and seven books. He achieved instant fame with his first book, Diatribae duae medico-philosophicae (1659; Of Fermentation and Of Feavours , 1681), which concerned fermentation, urine, fevers, and other physiological phenomena. Turning then toward anatomy and enlisting the help of Lower as dissector, Sir Christopher Wren as illustrator, and Thomas Millington as general collaborator, Willis created his masterpiece, Cerebri anatome (1664; The Anatomy of the Brain , 1681), which added physiological explanations to accurate and detailed anatomical descriptions. Among the discoveries included in this book is the function of the cerebral arterial circle to protect the brain from interruption of blood flow. This insight of Willis into brain function was so important that, since the mid-eighteenth century, the cerebral arterial circle has commonly been called the “circle of Willis.”

Willis reported further research into the physiology, anatomy, and pathology of the nervous system in Pathologiae cerebri et nervosi generis specimen (1667; An Essay of the Pathology of the Brain and Nervous Stock , 1681). His Affectionum quae dicuntur hystericae et hypochondriacae (1670; of the affections called hysteria and hypochrondia) defended his theories of psychosis and neurosis against the recent attacks of Nathaniel Highmore, challenged the prevailing view that hysteria was caused by uterine rather than nervous disorders, and argued that hypochrondria was a form of epilepsy.

Willis considered comparative anatomy in his De anima brutorum (1672; Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes Which Is That of the Vital and Sensitive of Man , 1683). His final work was a pharmacological casebook, Pharmaceutice rationalis (part 1, 1674, part 2, 1675; English translation, 1679). Posthumously and in the vernacular appeared Dr. Willis’s Practice of Physick (1681, expanded ed., 1684), Samuel Pordage’s translation of all his Latin books except the Affectionum, and A Plain and Easie Method of Preserving (by God’s Blessing) Those That Are Well from the Infection of the Plague, or Any Contagious Distemper in City, Camp, Fleet &c. (1691).

Although most famous for his research, Willis was equally adept as a clinician. In 1650, he revived Ann Green, who had been hanged for infanticide, was presumed dead, and had been delivered to Willis in her coffin for dissection. His positive outcomes with patients suffering from diabetes, stroke, and several diseases of the nervous system enhanced his understanding of these afflictions and spurred him toward further investigations of their therapeutics. He depended mostly on Lower for raw anatomical knowledge, but he was uniquely able to interpret Lower’s data to understand the physiology and function of the various body parts Lower cataloged, especially the cerebral cortex.

Willis was already the most prosperous physician in Oxford when the Stuart monarchy was restored in 1660, but immediately his fortunes got even better. That year, the university awarded him a D.Med. and named him Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy, a post that he held until his death, even though he relocated permanently to London in 1666. Also in 1660, in order to promote scientific investigation in general, Willis and several colleagues cofounded the Royal Society . As physician to the king, he was able to bequeath the most lucrative medical practice in England to his devoted assistant, Lower. He died on November 11, 1675, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Significance

As the leading physiologist of the seventeenth century, Willis made important progress in understanding the nervous and circulatory systems and the interaction between them. He essentially invented the concept of the nervous system as a unified structure and has been praised as standing to neurology and the nervous system as Harvey stands to cardiology and the circulatory system. Keenly aware of the relationship between anatomy and physiology and their joint clinical significance, he helped to pave the way for the study of pathological anatomy that would emerge in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through Giovanni Battista Morgagni, Matthew Baillie, Xavier Bichat, and Jean Cruveilhier.

In addition to the circle of Willis, many other eponyms arose from Willis’s research. These include “Willis’s centrum nervosum,” the solar or celiac ganglia, a system of nerve roots near the abdominal aorta that innervate most of the abdominal organs; “Willis’s cords,” fibrous bodies traversing the superior sagittal sinus, a venous duct of the dura mater inside the cranium; “Willis’s gland,” the corpus luteum, an endocrine structure in the ovary; “Willis’s nerve,” the ophthalmic branch of the fifth cranial nerve; “Willis’s pancreas,” the processus uncinatus pancreatis, a part of the head of the pancreas; “Willis’s paracusis,” an improvement in hearing either because of or despite a noisy environment; and “Willis’s pouch,” the omentum minus, a fold in the peritoneum near the stomach and liver.

Bibliography

Coulter, Harris L. The Origins of Modern Western Medicine: J. B. van Helmont to Claude Bernard. Vol. 2 in Divided Legacy: A History of the Schism in Medical Thought. Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 2000. The second chapter, “Seventeenth-Century Rationalism,” explores the rivalry between iatrochemistry and iatromechanics.

Debus, Allen G., ed. Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England: A Symposium Held at UCLA in Honor of C. D. O’Malley. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. Includes Lelland J. Rather’s “Pathology at Mid-Century: A Reassessment of Thomas Willis and Thomas Sydenham,” a well documented article, but biased in favor of Willis.

Eadie, M. J. “A Pathology of the Animal Spirits—The Clinical Neurology of Thomas Willis, 1621-1675, Part I: Background and Disorders of Intrinsically Normal Animal Spirits.” Journal of Clinical Neuroscience 10, no. 1 (January, 2003): 14-29. Analysis of Willis’s Pathologiae cerebri et nervosi generis specimen and De anima brutorum to show his influence on the contemporary understanding of nervous system diseases.

Hughes, J. Trevor. Thomas Willis, 1621-1675: His Life and Work. London: Royal Society of Medicine Services, 1991. A solid biography in the “Eponymists in Medicine” series.

Isler, Hansruedi. Thomas Willis, 1621-1675: Doctor and Scientist. New York: Hafner, 1968. The standard biography.

O’Connor, J. P. “Thomas Willis and the Background to Cerebri Anatome.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 96, no. 3 (March, 2003): 139-143. A philosophical interpretation of Cerebri anatome that discusses how Willis used his research on the brain to understand the soul and to bolster the design argument for the existence of God.

Williams, A. N. “Thomas Willis’s Practice of Paediatric Neurology and Neurodisability. Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 12, no. 4 (December, 2003): 350-367. An interesting sidelight on Willis’s career.