UC Medical Humanities Consortium

This paper concerns debates that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s about the effect of technological and scientific development on the “dehumanization” of medicine. It draws on perspectives from neuroscience and neurosurgery to reexamine philosophical positions about the relations between the brain and the mind, the seat of the soul, the divide between the arts and sciences in Western culture, and scientific investigation of “human nature.” Framing the discussion with debates in the 1960s about the gap between science and humanism, it explores the ideas of Caltech psychobiologist Roger Sperry to illuminate a reaction against the molecularization of life and challenges to the intellectual nature of medical inquiry. It draws connections between neurological concepts of the divided brain and the idea that the fields of neurology and neurosurgery might unify what C.P. Snow characterized as the “two cultures” by redefining humanity and creating what Sperry called a “science of human values.”