Headhunters: The Search for a Science of the Mind - Hardcover

"Arrestingly original and beautifully written" (John Gray Literary Review)

"Studious and fascinating... A smart, enjoyable book" (Doug Johnstone Big Issue)

"Fascinating and instructive... This is an excellent and subtle book – part biography, part intellectual history – that tells us about the difficulties of trying to understand ourselves" (Henry Marsh The Times)

"A rich and stimulating account of the first truly modern attempt to understand the mysteries of the mind" (Orlando Bird Financial Times)

"The book gives a powerful sense of human science being forged" (Charlotte Sleigh BBC History Magazine)

How did the human brain evolve? Why did it evolve as it did? What is man’s place in evolution? In the final decades of the nineteenth century, these questions began to occupy scientists. With Darwin’s theory of evolution now accepted, modern neuroscience began.

Headhunters traces the intellectual journey of four men who met at Cambridge in the 1890s and whose lives interlinked for the next three decades – William Rivers, Grafton Elliot Smith, Charles Myers and William McDougall. It follows their voyages of discovery, taking the reader from anthropological field studies in Melanesia and archaeological excavations in Egypt to the psychiatric wards of the First World War. Their work ranged across fields that today carry a variety of labels – neurology, psychology, psychiatry, zoology – but which for these men formed part of the same enquiry: the search for a science of the mind.

A narrative-driven work of intellectual history and a compelling biographical study, Headhunters explores the big ideas about the brain, the nervous system and man’s place in history. In the process the book reveals how science actually works – the passions, the irrational flashes, the moments of insight; the big ideas that work – and the big ideas that turn out to be wrong. Acclaimed historian Ben Shephard takes the reader on an extraordinary intellectual journey – and arrives at some very modern destinations.