The Bactra Review The First
Moderns
Here is a representative nit: on p. 115, we read that ``It was in the year 1906
that Cajal's disciple Sherrington coined the word `synapse' to describe the
junction between one nerve cell and another.'' Sherrington was a ``disciple''
of Cajal's only in the sense of being an admirer of the latter's work, and
while he did coin the word ``synapse,'' it was in an 1897 physiology textbook,
not his 1906 classic on The Integrative Action of the Nervous
System. (Is the idea of the nervous system being an organ of integration
a typically 19th century notion about wholeness, or a typically Modernist idea
in recognizing that even organic unity has to be worked for?)