Jules-Auguste Soury (1842-1915): A Centennial Call to Mind

Abstract

Jules-Auguste Soury (1842-1915), a Parisian theorist and historian of science, was the author of 'The Central Nervous System', one of the most comprehensive and original accounts, until 1900, of the history of brain research. A contemporary of Jules Déjerine (1849-1917), Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934), and other pioneers of neurology, with whom he maintained contact, Soury is a rare case of a French philosopher with solid foundations in neuroanatomy and neurophysiology. A quaint savant, Soury has been depicted as a strange hybrid produced by nature. His odd personality was coupled with an elegance, solidity and thoroughness in his neurological works. His prodigious facility for assimilating and discoursing the ideas of others has been somewhat clouded by his lamentable ideological tenets. Nevertheless, in his neurological writings, he bequeathed a unique anatomical and physiological history of intelligence, a natural history of the human mind or, as he conceived it, a neurophilosophical sketch of the universe considered a cerebral phenomenon.