"Restless Tides of Electrical Being": Epilepsy Research, Neuroscience, and Subjectivity in Post-War Britain (360G-Wellcome-203457_Z_16_Z)

My project will critically examine experimental epilepsy research in Britain in the two decades following the end of the Second World War. In particular, I will investigate how interactions between neuroscientific concepts of the brain and psychological concepts of the mind shaped the material practices, technologies, and procedures used to understand and treat epilepsy during this period. As well as examining the roles of experimenters and clinicians, I will explore how patients and human subjects interpreted and influenced the research programmes in which they participated. I will focus on three particular programmes within a comparative framework: the neurosurgical programme of Murray Falconer at the Maudsley Hospital, London, in which temporal lobectomies were used to treat 'intractable' cases of epilepsy; the electroencephalographic research of William Grey Walter at the Burden Neurological Institute, Bristol, where EEG technologies were used to reveal the electrical mechanisms behind seizures; and the pharmaceutical initiatives of the Epilepsy Society in Chalfont St. Peter, in which patients were enrolled in trials of cutting-edge anti-seizure medications. By comparing and contrasting these programmes, I will assess claims made in recent sociological literature regarding the 'colonisation' of ideas of consciousness, the emotions, and subjectivity by the neurosciences in the late twentieth-century.