Overview

Since the second half of the eighteenth century, generations of scientists persisted in studying the relationships between the volume, weight or shape of the human brain and the degree of ‘intelligence’. In Pogliano’s book, the thread of time drives the narrative up to the mid-twentieth century. It investigates the duration and changes of a game that was intrinsically political, although having to do with bones and nervous matter. Races made its main object, during a long period when Western culture believed the human species to be naturally partitioned into a number of discrete types, with their innate and hereditary traits. Never leading to irrefutable achievements, the polycentric (as well as visual) enterprise herein described is full of growing tensions, doubts, and disillusionment.

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Reviews

""What Brain and Race offers that is new is tracking the evolution of ideas and approaches to examining the brain and race that were exchanged between different scientists and scientific texts, and the nuances and intricacies of this intellectual exchange."" – Kathryn Woods, Goldsmiths, University of London, in: Journal of British Studies, July 2021, Vol. 60, No. 3: pp. 755-57. ""Pogliano’s book constitutes the most extensive, important and profound effort in the historical analysis of the brain-race relationship, a contribution that will be impossible to ignore in considering the history of anthropology, neuroscience and, above all, the ideas that lie at the biological roots of racism."" – Paolo Mazzarello, University of Pavia, in: Nuncius. Journal of the Material and Visual History of Science, 37 (2022)

Author Information

Claudio Pogliano is Professor of History of science at the University of Pisa. He has published numerous monographs and articles, especially in his main area of interest: the modern and contemporary history of biomedical and anthropological sciences, with a particular regard to their visual aspects.

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